HOW TO DO SEO KEYWORD RESEARCH
(AN EPISODE OF THE DIGITAL STRATEGIST PODCASTING)
[00:00]
Welcome to the Web Strategy Viking podcast, where we talk about creative ways to grow our businesses online. And in this podcast, we will be talking about keyword research; how to do it, how to do it for free, why you should care, how you can implement it, how it should follow through on growing your online business. Even if you have a service business, you still must do this. This is 2018 and 50% of local searches for local service businesses, probably after about 72 hours from searching, the searcher ends up going to that business. How do we know this? Well, Google and other advertising company track this data, digest it and report in in a way it works, so it is simple to say 70% of business is won through local search because if you have a problem, you can easily google it. And if you google it, (for example you are trying to find a local restaurant or trying to find address to a local company), or when you google it, you are going to hope you find detail, possibly address of the company. Not being able to find the address to a local business could be a bit frustrating, and it also affect branding too. It is important that everyone trust that Google know about your business, but if Google can’t even trust you to identify you, your prospective customer can see you as an unworthy brand. So, I want to correct that and at the end of this podcast, you are going to have a sure way to get this research, so you can grow your business with the right keywords. And the reason why I want to do this is because I have a post that I put up on the website, exclusive and free content on the webstrategyviking.com site that talk about why if I use the words “The local Minneapolis Digital strategist”, and that alone is properly worked on will just return 2000 in monthly search within Minneapolis. And I want to explain why.
[02:20]
If you able to go online and go through a tool on the website, you will be able to see all the keywords you can go to, and how much number of people type the keyword in, and how difficult to be in a search space. It is not like a “first-come-first-serve” kind of things but a matter of who is here and who is the most trust worthy. If you write something on your Facebook page or on your website that is relevant and new, that is good, but the question is, Does Google trust that individual page? It has no history, Google doesn’t know much about it except your domain name, what your website does, but aside that it does not know a single thing about the content you posted. I want you to go and type a popular SEO tool called ubersuggest.io, what this tool does is to possibly replace all the premium $100 per hour tools like ahrefs, moz tools and the rest of like that. If you type in a keyword, it is going to tell you how easy it is and what kind of returns you are going to get. For example, you type in “Minneapolis SEO”, you are going to see that about 7,000 people go to this page. It means on Google, about 7,000 people type “Minneapolis SEO”, also if you type in “Life Coach in mn”, you will see only 20 people per month type that in. But if you type in “Life Coach mn”, which in a reasonable way should be the same except that the latter is bringing in about 200+ searches. Which means if you can get about 1% of that traffic to turn into customer or from that 200 traffic, you get a customer, that is a $3000 profit just because they took their time to position their business. While other life coaches are not writers, not technician, not designers but very charismatic but they don’t have these tools for profit. Just as carpenter have nails, hammer etc., same is with SEO, they have this tool (ubersuggest, ahrefs or moz). Just like a carpenter, this tool tells you where to place the nails, what size of the nail is required and how hard to hit the nail.
If you look at your business, you can also look at your competitors keywords, you can also type in your competitor’s (not the one down the street but some business who generates more revenues than you do) websites and you will sure to see that they have invested in SEO in one or two times in their business. When you put that in, you will see the returns that they are getting, their backlinks they have, the number of search volumes, the number of total search traffic or volumes, the number of clicks, and the number of keywords that they show up for. Now keep in mind that it doesn’t matter if it shows up with a bunch of words, like if I show up for 55337 best SEO company in the world, and that was like 1 or 4 keywords, no one types that in, no one does that. But if I type in Boise SEO, even if I am on second or third rank, the question is, do people do that? The answer is No, probably less than 10 per month, maybe at the end of the year, maybe I might get 1 or 2 sales off it, just because I took my time to invest $100 or $200 on a single page. That is the theory, but a data backs it up, if you able to write for “Life Coach mn” and that brings in 200, but using this tools, you can find out what keywords your competitors are using, you can discover that word is bringing 3 or 4 time what yours is bring with about the same effort, I will use that too. So, what we find out is that instead of going for a local brand keyword like “Life Coach mn” where the number of searching is close to 10 or 20 per month, then we went for “Life Coaching” that is a national brand keyword that is still being searched locally but bring out 700+ searching in the month. Things change, when you will be reading this, things might be a bit different, but I will much like to gat 200 clicks to my website than 700, and I will love to obviously get local clients, but I will not mind getting a zoom call offline. I might take a little bit less volume, but not 3 times less value. Keep in mind that doing this research is critical because you have saved these words on your page for it to be pulled up; put that as your title, your meta-description, your H1, your H2 or in your first paragraph. Keep people on that page and over time, Google will start to look at that as a trustworthy brand because you give people what they want and in so doing, sending you more traffic.
[09:20]
As you do things, you start to get more. The companies that you see that have a lot of backlinks have their website prepare and optimized to grow their business, and as a local business owner, you need to keep that in mind. These are what business owner must do because it does not only tell Google that your business exists, your search engines, your font task, your YEO tells Google that you took your time to convince them that you are a real business. If you take your time to optimize that, in about 3 – 6 months, you are going to be dealing with too much business. A life coach makes about $2000 to $3000 with a client that changes their life after 10 clients, that is great for the client and for the coach because that 10 plus lives of people changed for the better. So, I have a moral obligation to help people do this.
Anyway, that is the end of this (we are trying to keep it short in 10, 15minutes). I will like to thank you for following and if you have feedbacks or tips, please reach out, comment, like, subscribe, do all that best you can to do and we hope we can be the best SEO podcast out there.
Thanks for listening. Bye.
[11:31]