VP of Search at Distilled, Paddy Moogan
Teaches You How to Do Keyword Research

This video is brought to you by Distilled Search & PPC Agency (UK)

NOTE: Thanks to the ever-changing world of SEO and Google Adwords,
some parts of this video may not be fully updated.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hi guys. Welcome to today’s lesson. I’m Paddy, I work at Distilled. I’m going to talk today about how to do keyword research.

Now, keyword research is ultimately about finding out what your customers are searching for, and then making sure that your website covers those kind of keywords to make sure you can connect to your website, and your business with your customers. We’re going to talk about how to find out what your customers are searching for, and how to actually use that information on your website.

Now, the two main takeaways I want you to take from this video are to make sure you’re catering for two types of customers. You’ve got customers who are looking to buy your product, who are obviously the most important. Then you’ve also got customers who are looking for information around your product. Now, you don’t want to ignore the informational searches; I want you to target both. I’m going to show you how to identify the different types of customers, how to do keyword research to find those given types of customers, and how to apply that onto your website. That’s the main thing I want you to take away from this video.

In terms of finding out what your customers are searching for, the best tool at the moment is probably the Google Keyword Planner, which isn’t actually perfect, but it’s about as good as we can get at the moment. The idea of the Keyword Planner from Google is you can use to find out what your customers are searching for and roughly how many times a month they search for those keywords.

Now, the numbers that Google will give you aren’t exact. They’re kind of inflated a little bit, but again, they’re good for just an indicator of which keywords are more popular than others. I’m going to show you in a little screencast later on how to use the Google Keyword Planner, so don’t worry too much about it right now.

Once we’ve actually done the keyword research, used the planner to find what keywords our customers are searching for, we need to use those keywords on our website. We want to identify which keywords we’ve found which look like they might be product-related searches. Let’s say that we were selling cookies online. If someone searches for “cookie delivery,” they’re probably looking for cookies to be delivered to someone, so you want to make sure you’ve got a product page with products on it that targets that keyword.

You may also find people searching for keyword such as chocolate cookie recipe. Now, someone that searches for that keyword probably isn’t looking to buy straight away. They’re looking for a recipe so they could probably make their own. That customer probably isn’t quite as valuable to you, but you shouldn’t ignore them either. You should try and create some content that tries to rank the exact keyword, and then when they come to your website, they’ve become aware of your website, aware of your brand, and they may come back to actually try and buy cookies from you.

Try not to ignore that side of search, but don’t ignore the people looking for information. Then try and make sure your creating pages that satisfies what they’re searching for, but also create pages that target your exact product range as well. That’s the minor thing that you want to worry about.

There are other ways you can use keywords, so you want to make sure those keywords are included in the on-site SEO elements of the page. Things like the title of the page, the header of the page, the content itself, internal links, alt text, all those kind of things you want to make sure you’re including the keywords in. Also, you want to make sure that if you’re creating a brand new website, that the structure of the website, the navigation, how your customers find your products, that they actually incorporate your keyword research. If you find that “chocolate chip cookies” is a really popular keyword and you sell those, you may want to make that into a category page on your website and list all the different types that you sell.

Once you’ve taken care of the on-page SEO elements of keyword research, you also want to make sure that you’re not creating pages for each and every topic keyword that you find because some keywords are actually really similar to each other, so you may find that people search for cookie recipe as a singular keyword, and cookie recipes. Now, it doesn’t really make sense to create a separate page for each one, because they’re fundamentally the same thing. Someone who searches for those keywords, I probably want looking for the same kind of page. You probably want to create a single page that targets a small group of keywords together and then incorporate those keywords onto the page itself. You don’t want to find a thousand keywords from Google and create a thousand pages. You want to be a bit smarter than that and group sets of keywords together, and target those sets to the same pages.

We’re going to move onto the screencast now. I’m going to show you exactly how to find keywords using the Google Keyword Planner, and how to split them out into different intentions, then how to split them out into different categories as well.

This is the Google Keyword Planner, and I’m just going to walk you through exactly how to use it. When it comes to this screen, click on “Search for keyword and ad group ideas.” Now, here’s where you can input your keywords, which would be your products or your services. You want to start off quite broad, so let’s continue with our cookie example. I just want to start up a search in for cookies for now. Don’t worry too much about these other options right now apart from targeting. If you’re based in another country, you’ll want to make sure you’re targeting the right area. If you’re in the US, just select “United States.” If you want a different language, you can select that here as well.

Click on “Get Ideas,” and click on “Keyword Ideas” tab. Now here we’ve got on the left-hand side all the keywords that Google is showing us. Then here we’ve got average monthly searches. These are the numbers I was talking about earlier. They aren’t quite exact. You aren’t exactly going to get 33,100 visitors if you rank number one for cookie recipe, but it’s a good indicator of how popular a keyword is.

The first thing that we want to do is actually start to make sure that all these are relevant, so if you just start scrolling through them, you can see all these look pretty good. Although, there’s one here for “enable cookies” and “personalize cookies.” Now, enable cookies sounds more like it could be to do with computer cookies on your browser, so we’re going to go back up, on the left-hand side here, click on “Negative Keywords.” Now,, what this does is it filters out keywords that aren’t relevant. If I put enable in here, then click back onto this screen, it will then reload the screen and get rid of any that aren’t relevant and don’t include the negative keywords.

Now, the first thing we want to do is download this list, so I click on download. Then we’re going to put this into a CSV. Let’s open that up, and just make this look a bit nicer. Okay, so the main kinds you want to worry about are keywords and monthly searches. Whoops, let’s get rid of that. Keywords and monthly searches. What you want to do is insert another column.

Remember what I was talking about earlier in the video where we wanted to define the intention of the user? For something like cookie recipe, that’s information, so let’s just put “info” there. That one is also the same, whereas “giant cookie delivery” could be a customer who actually wants to buy a cookie, so we’re going to put “Product” there instead. The same with “cookies delivered.” That could be a product. We’re just going to go through and segment all these keywords. “Birthday cookies,” again, could be a product, and you get the idea as you go through, you can sort these into different intentions.

Afterwards, we can sort by these and say, okay, we want to create a product page that targets the words “giant cookie delivery,” “cookies delivered.” Now, again, these are quite similar to each other, so we want to make sure we’re just creating one page that targets several keywords at once. With cookie recipes and cookie recipe, we probably want to create one page that targets both of these. Because, as you can see here, cookie recipe is a singular, it’s got more searches. That’s part of the keyword that you’ll want to focus on the most. Once you’ve gone through all of these keywords and segmented them, you’ll then want to take these keywords and create product pages or create your informational pages.

That’s really as simple as it gets for keyword research. You take a bit of time to do, but after a while, you’ve got all your product pages ready to go and then you’ve got any informational pages as well. If you’re creating the informational page on cookie recipes, just make sure you’re linking across to your product pages as well so people can actually access your product pages as well as reading information that you’ve got.

If you enjoyed this video and you want to learn more about keyword research and SEO, check out Distilled U, which is Distilled online SEO university. You can learn more about SEO for different modules that we publish, including keyword research, technical SEO, on-site SEO. We also just launched new ones on mobile SEO and Link Beyond in Outreach. We’ve also got a bunch of conference videos from our conferences around the world where leading speakers talk about various different parts of online marketing, so check that and distilled.net/u, and thanks a lot for watching.