How to Choose the Right Keywords for SEO [2020]

– If you're struggling to getyour head around keywords, what are they? How do I use them? How do I increase mysite's ranking for them? Then this video is designed to help.

In this video, we'regonna go through a process that you can use to choose the best and most profitable keywords for SEO.

(rhythmic beat) (click) Welcome people, my name's Tim, I'm head ninja at Exposure Ninja.

I bring order to the chaosof digital marketing.

Actually, that's not true at all.

In Exposure Ninja Ibring chaos to the order, but that's another story.

Keywords or search queries are basically the things that people search for, really, really important for SEO.

In fact, one of the mostimportant elements of SEO.

There's a bit of a myth going around that keywords don't really matter in 2019, 2020, 2021, whenever you see this, but I can assure you thatkeywords will matter forever.

So let's go through a processthat you can use to identify the most profitablekeywords for your business so that you can help your website's ranking improve for them.

In this video, we're gonna cover, understanding yourcustomers or buyer intent, we're gonna look at yourcustomer journey as well and you can identify keywordsat different stages of that, we're gonna also take a look at how to analyse your competitors, how to use some awesome toolsto find the best keywords and also how to map your target keywords to the best pages for you.

Lets go.

A keyword is just a search term, something that people search for.

A keyword can be competitive, it can be uncompetitive, it can be commercial, it can be informational, we're gonna look at all of these things.

So keyword can be broad so for example, the phrase, diamond rings, isactually fairly broad keyword.

There's lots of possibleintent behind that.

That might be someone who'slooking to buy a diamond ring, it might be someone who's looking for pictures of a diamond ring, it might be someone who'slooking to make diamond rings and they want instructions, right, there's loads of possibleintent behind it.

So that's what we call a broad keyword.

Now a more exact keyword will be something like platinum diamond engagement rings.

That is someone, usually, I mean, they still mightbe looking for a picture, but it's more precise definitionof what that keyword is.

Now platinum diamond engagement rings, two carat, next day delivery UK, that is someone who's gota holiday in two days, they want to propose to their girlfriend, they know exactly whatsort of ring she likes, and they know how much they can afford.

That is a really, reallyqualified commercial buyer.

This kind of broad andexact thing, obviously, the broader the keyword, thehigher the search volume right.

Hardly anybody is gonna besearching for that specific term but the people who do are likely to be very commercial buyers, so they could be quite profitable.

So we'll look at how to target all of these differentvariations as we go on.

But firstly, the questionyou're probably asking, “Keywords, really?” Well, let me tell you in 2019 keywords are as important as ever.

Now previously, in the olden days of SEO, (laughter) Google was really unsophisticated and just saw keywords asbasically blocks of text which needed to see exactmatches for in order to rank.

So if you wanted to rankfor platinum diamond engagement rings, two carat, next day delivery, UK, you would just use thatkeyword in its entirety, multiple times on your page.

You might even call your website platinum diamond engagementrings, two carat, next day delivery, UK, and guess what, you would rankfor that term very easily.

Google's more sophisticated than that.

Google understands morethe intent behind keywords and how variants ofdifferent keywords work and also the relationshipsbetween different keywords.

But I can assure you keywordsare as important today as they always have been.

Even if we take out everything, remove SEO completely from the equation, keywords are still important.

If your customer searchesfor platinum diamond engagement rings, two carat, next day delivery, UK, those are the phrases that you need to use on your website to triggerthat thing in their head, which says, “Ah, thisis what I'm here for.

” Let me tell you a little story.

We worked with a clientwho sold corporate massage.

So they go into people's offices, and they would massage them and that was the business, fantastic.

Right, great, send them over.

The trouble was that theirindustry term for this is onsite massage.

So everyone in that space, itwas all targeting the phrase, onsite massage, because that's what it is.

That's technically what it is.

It's a massage and it'sgiven on site rather than, you know, in the massage'soffice, whatever.

So everyone in the spacetargeted that term.

But when we did the research, we found that customers had no idea what onsite massage was at all.

It was a completely industry specific term with no meaning to the general public.

So what they'd done there is they'd made a mistakewith their keywords.

All of the copy on the page was all talking about onsite massage, rather than corporatemassage or office massage, which are things that actuallymean something to people.

So that just illustrates the importance of getting these keywords right.

Whatever Google's doingwith latent semantic intent and all these differentalgorithmic understandings of what keywords actually are, just talking your customer's language is good practise with marketing.

And that's really exactly what we're doing with keyword research.

So keywords will always be important.

So let's look at some quickkeyword misconceptions.

Keyword misconception number one is that you're lookingfor the definitive list with your keyword research.

I'm going to break it to you, there is no one right answer.

That's good news is bad news.

Good news is, hey, ifthere's no right answer, then you can't be wrong.

The bad news is, you're goingto be constantly iterating your keywords based on the data that you're getting backfrom Search Console, and from your conversion tracking.

So this thing that we're doing today, where we're analysing and identifying our top performing keywords, and our top target keywords, it's going to be aconstantly evolving process.

So when we're workingon a client campaign, this is something thatwe'd revisit typically every six months to one year, depending on traffic volumes.

The second misconceptionis that tools and data are your biggest assets.

You'll notice in this video that we spend very littletime talking about tools, and there's a very good reason for that.

Tools can give us data about the specific keywordsthat we're looking to target.

But what they don't do isprovide a common sense approach to the phrases that yourbusiness should be ranking for.

And actually this common sense, your brain is the biggestasset with keyword research.

So lots of what we're going to be doing is kind of brainstorming, havinga look at competitors, yes, but filtering everythingthrough common sense.

If it makes sense in the tools, but it doesn't make sense inyour brain, trust your brain.

Your brain always wins.

Misconception number three is that if you don't targeta particular keyword, you won't rank for it.

That maybe was the case in the olden days when Google looked at just oh, that specific block of words, is that specific block present? If yes, great, if no, not relevant.

Now Google is much moresophisticated than that.

So even if you're nottargeting a specific keyword, the fact that you've gotcontent about that topic or related topics on your site doesn't mean that you won't rank for it.

So don't panic.

So let's look at thedifferent types of keyword that you might be targetingin your keyword research that we're going to be doing.

So we're going to have a lookat broad and exact keyword.

So broad, obviously, the really kind of basic head terms and exact to the very specific, much narrower focus.

And then we've got this kind of spectrum between informational and commercial.

So an informational keyword is something where peopleare doing some research.

They're not really looking to buy.

Commercial is something where there's a veryclear purchase intent.

So what I'm going to do, we're going to have a look at some different keywordsand then talk about where they fit on this spectrum.

So first keyword thatwe're going to look at, Range Rover, what do we think? Well, it's a pretty broad term.

And it's also pretty informational.

Lots of potential intent behind that.

Yes, someone might belooking to buy a Range Rover, but they're probably, if they're going to belooking to buy a Range Rover, they're probably goingto be having something a bit more exact, andsomething a bit more specific.

So that is what we call abroad and informational term.

Range Rover for sale.

Now that moves into thecommercial terms, right? So that's a commercial term, but it's still fairly broad.

There's nothing specific about that that tells us that this is a really kind of long tail phrase.

Range Rover SVR fuel consumption, right? So this person is lookingfor a specific model and they're looking for a characteristic of that model, right? So that's what we call an exact term.

Now is this person looking to buy? Maybe, but it's prettyunlikely based on that term.

What they're probably lookingfor is information, right? They're just wanting anumber from that most likely, so that's an exact and informational term.

Range Rover Sport DynamicBlack Tan Leather Nottingham.

Well, that's a fairly exact term.

And it's also fairly commercial, because they've addedthe area there as well, which would indicate thatthey're in the market to buy that and they'relooking for that model in that specific area.

So that's an exact and commercial term.

So what you can do as you're running throughyour keyword research today, you can have this kind ofmental model in your head of is this a broad term? Is this an exact term? And then where does it fit on the informationalcommercial spectrum as well? Okay, what does the keywordresearch process look like? Well, we've got a few different stages.

First off, we startwith some brainstorming.

This is where we get all of the possible ideas down on paper.

The rule that we tend to use for this is that we'll just get as many keywords as we possibly can down, and then we can start filteringand digging through later.

Once we've brainstormed, then we'll expand these with tools.

So we'll look for related terms.

We'll look for terms thatcompetitors might be targeting by using tools.

Once we've done that, we thenstart adding some numbers.

So looking at how competitive they are, how much commercial intentthere is behind them.

And then from that, thatallows us to then begin prioritising them.

So we've got these four steps.

Then just to help you out, because we're super lovelyhere at Exposure Ninja, we've put together avery simple spreadsheet that you can use to startdoing this stuff yourself.

So if you go to bit.

ly keywurdz, then you can have a lookat this spreadsheet.

So just download a copy or whatever or copy it into your Google Drive.

I don't know how these things work, but you can use this togo through the process that we're going to be looking at today.

So first up, we're goingto be looking at keywords and the categorization of them.

So let's start with thisfirst step in the process, brainstorming possible keywords.

We're going to start in awhole bunch of different areas, but the first thingthat you can do is start looking at your competitors.

So you're going to go straight to Google and you're going to starttyping some keywords and you're going to be noticingwhat brings up the most ads.

Which are the keywords thatbring up the most Google ads? Because these are typically the ones that have the highest commercial intent and are likely to be the most competitive.

If people are spending moneyto advertise for these terms, then it usually means that there is somecommercial intent behind them if they're tracking conversions.

So therefore, they're goingto be profitable to rank for.

Now have a look at also when you're runningthrough your competitors and you're looking atthat Google search page, what are the keywordsthat your competitors are using in their page titles? So those blue links thatare showing up in search.

What are the specificphrases they're using, particularly at the startof those page titles? Because that can giveyou a good indication that they think that keyword is going to be reallyimportant for their business.

You can also have a lookat what your competitors are ranking for.

In a second I'm going to show you SEMrush and we use SEMrush a lot at Exposure Ninja to identify what keywords our competitors or our clients' competitorsmore accurately, are ranking for.

So what we'll do is we'llput the competitors site into SEMrush, and it'll show us all of the different keywords that competitor's ranking for.

So we're looking through this list, and we're taking out keywords, and then we're puttingit in our spreadsheet that we're going to crunchthe numbers on a bit later.

I also want you think aboutyour services and products, so what are the differentnames that your customers have for each of your products or services? And you can think here about the different stagesin the buyer journey.

So if we go back to theRange Rover example, and there's a guide thatwe'll put links somewhere down below about how all this works.

But you've basically gotfour stages of awareness.

You've got awareness, you've got interest, you've got the decision, andthen you've got action, AIDA.

Now the awareness phase is when people don't really know toomuch about what it is that you're selling.

So in the SUV or Range Rover example, this person might be lookingat best luxury SUVs, right? So they're in the awareness, they're thinking “Hmm, “I might want me oneof those Range Rovers, ” but they don't reallyknow what it's called, they might not know whichone is the best one for them.

So they're just kind of really top of funnel informational terms.

So something like best SUVs orsomething like Range Rovers, when they're just kind of beginning to “Yeah, maybe, yeah, thatmight be quite interesting.

” Then we have the interest stage.

This is where they start to become a bit more educated, and they have a bit more knowledge about what it is that you're offering.

So here they might be thinking, “Actually, do you know what? “I'm quite interestedin that Range Rover SVR, “that looks pretty funky, it makes a nice sound.

“I think I might go for one of them.

” So at that point they're starting to kind of qualify themselves.

They're starting to get abit more of an understanding.

Now they're going tohave different keywords for each of these differentstages, aren't they? When they're in the awareness, they're going to betargeting really broad, really informational terms.

As they start to movedown the funnel though, those terms are going to become more exact and more commercial.

So phase three is thedesire or the decision.

At that point that they'remaking the decision.

They're saying, “Do you know what? “Screw the environment, forget the world.

“Global warming, let's go.

“I'm going to get oneof them SVRs, ” right? So they've made a decision that they're going to purchase, or they've got the desire thatthey're going to purchase.

The final step is action, where they decide, “Right, okay, here'swhere I'm going to buy it, “this is what I'm going to do, ” and they actually do that thing.

So when you're brainstorming, and you're putting all yourdifferent keywords down, you want to think about the keywords that your audience is going to be using at different stages here.

And remember, focus on what your audience is going to be saying, not what your industry or what you might describeyour product or service as.

And if that feels like abig step, it is a big step.

There's a lot of work that goes in that.

The next thing to think aboutis differentiators and USP.

For example, a differentiator might be that you offer same daydelivery, or next day delivery, or free delivery.

These would all be things that people might be searching for.

So the platinum diamond engagementrings next day delivery, that might be a reallygood keyword for you.

And it's going to beeasier to rank for that than platinum diamond engagement rings.

Next day delivery means thatthere's commercial intent and it ties into a USP, that would be a great keyword for you.

So think about yourdifferentiators and USPS, and how you could addthem to your keywords, and put all of these in abig, bad, beautiful list.

And then you can also look at what you're ranking for already.

So stick your site in SEMrush.

If you don't have SEMrush, then go to thankyouninjas.

com and get a free trial, it's on us.

What are the terms that you're ranking? Like page two, or page three, that you could maybe push the page one? That you think wouldactually be really relevant and really profitable for your business? Add them to your list as well.

The next prompt for comingup with brainstormed keywords is your customers.

So are you a local business? If you're a local business, then you're going to wantto include your location and nearby locations.

Or if you go out to people, the locations that you serve.

The best exercise that youcan do with keyword research is to just talk to yourcustomers when they come in, or when you're talking tothem on the phone and say, “What would you search forif you were looking for us?” You'll get a whole bunch ofreally random stuff, right? And you're typically gonnawant to ignore the first answer and ask them “What elsewould you search for? “What else would you search for?” And get them to kind of dig through until you get to thosereally kind of basic, stupid Google searches that we all make.

I don't know if you're like me when sometimes you searchsomething on Google, and you're like “Oh my God, “I hope that no one'slooking at my searches, “because that's just really stupid.

” I wanted to find the nameof a song the other day.

So I was like, “What'sthe name of the song “fat synth, duh-duh-duh.

” I got it eventually, but thatsort of useless search term, you kind of want to diginto your customers' psyches and just say “Alright, ifyou had no idea about us, “what would you be searching for?” And you'll get a whole bunchof really random stuff.

Another good thing you can do is listen to sales recordingsfrom inbound leads.

What are the customersactually asking for? Are they asking for onsite massage? Or are they saying “Hey, can you come to my office “and do a massage, ” right? Because that's a very, very different term.

So your customers will often tell you their target keywords in sales recordings.

So, you gotta start brainstorming and sticking all of your keywords in the Bitly keywurdz spreadsheet.

So step two is to expandyour keywords with tools.

Now, we're going to use SEMrush because we always dohere at Exposure Ninja.

Absolutely love SEMrush as a tool.

Fantastic company as well.

So you can go to thankyouninjas.

com if you want a free trial of SEMrush.

Here we can see an example keyword research that we're doing for the broad term disability equipment.

Now disability equipment isa fairly commercial term.

It's a fairly broad term as well.

And what we're doing here is firstly, we're looking at the volume and the CPCs.

But really what we want todo is find related terms to this one that we can addin to our brainstorm list.

So for example, down here you can see the phrase match keyword, so these are other keywords which include the phrasedisability equipment.

So here we can see disabilityequipment for the home, so we'd want to add that to our list.

Second hand disabilityequipment if we offer that, then we want to add that to our list.

Disabled equipment shops, right? So we'd add that to our list.

So you can start to expand your list here.

You also see related keywords as well.

So these are other termswhich are maybe similar.

So disability aids.

Disability aids is an alternative way of saying disability equipment.

So we'd then have a whole bunch of disability aids phrases as well.

So again, you'd add all ofthese to your brainstorm list.

You can go even further.

You can then have a look into all of the organic search results.

And if you click on any of these URLs, it's going to show you all of the keywords that this particularwebsite is ranking for.

So you're brainstorming list by now is going to be like100 million pages long.

I'm only joking.

Only pick the stuffthat's relevant to you.

That'll keep it nice and snappy.

And you can also have a look at the ads that are running too.

So here we can see the different ads that people are running and we can see some of thekeywords that they're targeting or that they think areimportant in the ad headline.

So for example, disability equipments, we can see equipment for disabled so there's another kind of variation, keyword equipment for disabled, disabled equipment suppliers.

So these might also be keywords that you might want to add to your list.

So check out SEMrush, really useful tool.

Let's say that we clickon the related keywords and just have a bit more of a look at that and go a bit further in depth.

So here we can see a full list of all the different related keywords.

Again, we're going toadd them to our list.

And we're also going to add in the search volumes and CPCs.

That'll save us a bit of time later on.

You can click the little Export button in the top right handcorner to export that so you don't have to do it all manually.

Who does things manuallythese days, right? Who knows? Right? So we've got all of our keywords, we've brainstormed competitors, we've brainstormed differentstages of the buyer process, we've brainstormed the keywords that we're already ranking for.

We've brainstormed related keywords, phrase match keywords, the keywords being targeted in ads.

We've got a big old list.

Now it's time to crunch some numbers.

So the numbers that we'respecifically looking at are the keyword search volumes, and the keyword CPC.

Now CPC is a pay per click metric.

It means the cost per click, so how much people are willing to spend to advertise for that particular keyword.

Generally, the higher the CPC, the more profitable thatkeyword will be to rank, although not always the case, and I'll explain why in just a second.

Now, the trap that people fall into here is when they start putting in their data, they look immediately for the keywords that have the highest search volume.

Because you think, “Well, “if that keyword's got100, 000 searches a month, “I could get 100, 000 peopleon my website every month, “yes, that'd be amazing.

” And then they start doing the maths about what that would mean for sales.

Well the trouble is thehighest volume keywords are often the broadest, so they don't have asmuch commercial intent.

Size isn't everything people.

Often, going for a very specific keyword that has clear commercial intent, even if it's lower search volume, will be more profitable for you, because A, that person ismore likely to be a buyer, but B, because it's goingto be easier to rank for those more specific keywords.

Now the high cost per click generally means thatthere's commercial intent, although it can mean ifit's a very broad term, it can mean that there's justlots of dumb money piling in.

So it's all about therelevance as well as the CPC.

There's no definitiveformula that you can use that says “Yes, this is a great keyword.

” Because like I say, youhave to pass everything through the filter of your brain.

Is that a sensible phrasefor you to be targeting? Or is it very broad? So you're going to fill inthe volume and CPC channels in your keyword sheet.

And you can export it allfrom the SEMrush if you like using that super thing.

So what you can do is just download it, you can use the little export thing.

And then you can just get that in a CSV, copy and paste it allinto your keyword sheet so you don't have to or manually.

So by now you've got your keywords, you might have even categorised them.

You've got your search volume, and you've got your CPC.

So next we're going to look at how to prioritise them and are they in your very top priority, your priority 10 list? Here's how we generallyprioritise keywords.

The most commercialand most exact keywords tend to be the keywordsthat you'd be targeting in the short term.

So short term reallydepends on how much work you're putting in and howcompetitive your market is.

But for us at Exposure Ninja, short term keywords are usually the ones that we would expect to see some ranking improvement over maybe the first threeto four months, okay? So they're going to be themost commercial and most exact.

Obviously it depends onhow competitive they are as to what sort of improvementyou're going to see.

But that's a good kindof short term guide.

The ones that are slightly broader or slightly less commercialmay be more informational.

They will typically beyour medium term keywords.

And actually, as we gofrom exact too broad, the competition tends to go up, which is a big kind of defining factor on how long it will take you to improve ranking for these phrases.

And then the most broad, the most informational, they are your long term target.

So those are the ones thatyou're going to be targeting really over the long term.

So here are some quickkind of prioritisation things that you can use.

So your short term keywords are generally going to be the ones that you want to target immediately.

So you're expecting tosee some improvement over the next three to nine months if you're not doing much work or you're in a very competitive market.

They're going to have a healthy CPC.

So there's going to besome commercial intent.

They might not be the highestcommercial intent ones, they might take a littlebit longer to rank for.

But there is going to besome commercial intent there.

They're going to havea lower search volume or competition level, and they're going to be super relevant.

Now your medium term keywords are generally gonna havea higher search volume.

So short term ones are goingto have a lower search volume, but they're going tobe easier to rank for.

As you start getting intomedium and long term, they're going to havemuch higher search volume.

Medium term phrases mighthave a higher cost per clicks, there might be more competition for them.

They may or may not be more commercial, but there's always goingto be more competition for your medium term phrases, which generally meansthat they're going to have a higher CPC.

And they might be phrasesthat you'll be targeting over the next six to 18 months.

And then your long term phrases are the most competitive ones of all.

They're generally going to be the broader, shorter tail phrases.

Things like Range Roveror engagement rings.

These are really, reallylong term keywords if you're a brand new business, or if you're effectively abrand new website, right? You haven't done much SEO before, then they're just goingto be long term keywords because you're not going to rank for Range Rover very quickly.

And they also tend to be a lot of informational searches as well.

So you can target thingslike knowledge base content around those as you startbuilding out the content on your site.

Now the CPC might below or it might be high.

Really helpful there, right? CPC might be low because they're informationalresearch keywords, so your competitors might not be valuing these people as much as they should do.

On the other hand, your CPCs might be high because if you're targeting a phrase like divorce lawyer, London, for example, that's going to have a massive CPC because there are loads ofdivorce listers in London that want to target that phrase.

So it's broad, it'sinformational and commercial, and it's very high competition, which means that ittherefore has a high CPC.

And they're going to be the ones that you're lookingfor ranking improvement over the 12 months plus.

Typically at Exposure Ninja we won't necessarily betargeting long term keywords on a day to day basis.

We'll be targeting shorterand medium term variants, and that will bring usa ranking improvement for the long term phrases over time.

For example, if you're targeting a term like engagement rings, what you might do is put together aknowledge base on the site, which is all about differenttypes of engagement rings and buyers' guides and stuff like that.

So you're not specifically targeting engagement rings, becauseyou might be targeting platinum engagement ring, gold engagement ring, silver engagement rings, the perfect guide tochoosing an engagement ring, but you know that bydoing all of that work, you're going to pick up better ranking for your broader and longer term phrases.

So I hope you found this video useful.

Remember, if you have any questions about the keywordresearch, process outlined, stick them in the commentsand we will reply to them.

Don't forget also, if youwant some help with your SEO, if you want to improve theranking of your website, then check out the ExposureNinja free website review.

It is awesome.

Go to exposureninja.

com/review, and you'll be able to fill in a bit of infoabout your business.

Someone on the team will prepareyou a 15 to 20 minute video which shows you how to increaseyour website's ranking.

There's no charge, no obligation.

This review is killer, so I definitely recommend that you do it.

Until the next video, see you soon.

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