If you find a search term in the Search Console that you're ranking for, but you're on page five and the search volume, the number of times that search is carried out is is significant. Then that tells you right there that if you put some energy, time, effort, resource into improving your ranking for that search term, you know that there's people out there typing it in, and there's a good chance that you'll start to get additional traffic to your website. Okay, so we're back with digital marketing from the call. First, the podcast for odd ordinary people, normal people, non geeks, and to talk about different aspects that it talks about rather different aspects of digital marketing using a nice plain-english approach. And today I'm with Alex who's working remotely. Say hello, Alex.
Morning or afternoon now?
Yes. Yeah. We did plan on starting it this morning, didn't we? But it's now afternoon. Um, the subject we're going to talk about today are, are the subjects. The subject is keyword usage keyword research. What are keywords? Why does the word keywords keep cropping up or cropping up rather.
Than saying the word keyword? Yeah. Why do I keep.
Saying the word keywords? Why does it keep coming into, um, into the conversations we have, uh, when we're looking at digital marketing? So effectively what we're going to do today is explain what they are. Plain English, our usual plain English simple approach. Um, so that at the end of it, people will understand how to use keywords, what keywords are, etc.. Is that a fair coverage of what we're going to talk about? Alex. Yeah.
Yeah. No, no, I was preparing for a completely different podcast.
Oh, really? Okay. Well, this is going to be fun then. This is going to be a lot of fun. Okay, so I tell you what, Like in our usual style. I'll spring it on you. Just just give us a few paragraphs, a real simple explanation of what keywords are. And when you've done that, and I'll either disagree with you and say, no, I think it's this instead, or I'll agree with you and maybe add some color to it or or not. We'll see. But anyway, go on, off you go.
Um, so at the risk of tripping myself up, um, no. So keywords are, I guess a fundamental level. They're what people use when they're searching on Google for a product or a service or information. Right? It's what it's the language.
When you say use, what do you mean use?
I mean type into Google or that's.
That's what I thought you meant. Yeah.
Yeah.
Like I said, I want to keep it simple.
When you're, I don't know, looking for a new pair of shoes and you Google like, I don't know, size eleven black shoes. I mean, there's your keywords right? Size eleven black shoes. Okay. That's the term that you're using to look for something. And as marketers, our job then is to kind of understand what keywords people are using and kind of build content or optimise our websites to use those keywords too, so that we can rank in Google. Well, that's the idea.
Yeah. I think that's, um, as you said to me in a previous podcast quite recently, that's jumping ahead very slightly. You're absolutely right. I totally agree with what you're saying. I think just to just to get absolute clarity, when you open up Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or any other search engine and shaking your head, you're shaking your head, duck, duck.
Go just use Google.
Yeah, just use Google. Um, but when you open it up and you type something in, there's some things that you type in are broadly referred to as keywords. Yeah, just the things you type in. And I know that probably most people listening to this understand that. I just want to get absolute clarity on what they are. They're not this magical thing that you bury somewhere in your website. They are the words and phrases that people type into search engines. Quite often they are questions. Hence the constant reference in this podcast to, uh, they ask you answer. Great book by Marcus Sheridan.
Yeah, I think actually it's a really interesting thing to unpick, isn't it? Because you're right. I think as marketers, we often talk about keywords as something, you know, for us, something that we discover and decide to use. But it is, you're right, just what people are actually out there using. And I think another point to make, just because I was doing some kind of reading a while back about, um, obviously kind of the growth of voice search, like people using things like Siri or Alexa to ask Google questions. Um, and I think just picking up on something you were saying there about the fact that they're just questions that people ask. One of the things that we often find when we're doing keyword research is that, you know, a lot of the kind of common phrases, the things that people say when they're just kind of asking their phone a question kind of come through to, you know, it's just like, what, you know, where can I find some black shoes? I mean, that whole search isn't all keywords, is it? We're kind of going in there and saying, which of these words are useful and tell us something. Yeah, but there's a whole lot of kind of normal, commonplace, everyday language in there that you have to kind of understand that you have to kind of lift out and ignore, I guess.
Yeah. That's right. Um, I guess what you're really referring to there is the difference between a keyword or a search term, because we talk about keywords and it's usually search terms, keyword terms. It's usually several words strung together. And hopefully at some point we'll cover this idea of long tail keywords as well, which I think again is much misunderstood. And we'll maybe just remind me if we don't, we'll try and we'll try and explain what that means as well. Um, so The. The search terms that people type into Google are. There are different there are different reasons. There are search terms that. Are people researching something, trying to get better informed about something. There are search terms that people that people type in that are commercial in nature. There is absolute commercial intent behind them, like by BMW three one six. I, you know, there's somebody who's looking to buy a car. They've probably done all the research. They've decided that's the car they want, and now they're actually wanting to buy one. They're looking around for a deal or they're looking around for somebody who might have one. Well, certainly at the moment, post Covid, they might struggle to actually find a particular car model because cars are in short supply. But, um, I think is it broadly speaking, we've got this, this research keywords and then the commercial intent keywords, which I guess by definition are also somewhat researched because you're actually researching people that might be able to sell you what you want to buy.
Just to point out that we managed to go five minutes there before a reference to cars cropped up in this podcast. Yeah.
You think we were obsessed with cars, wouldn't you?
Yeah. Um, no, I mean, yeah, so I guess what you what you're talking about here with intent is something really important. And I guess it's something we'll probably cover again once we start talking about how to actually analyse the keywords you found. But yeah, I think it's a really good point, isn't it? It's what, what people search for tells you a lot about kind of what part of the process they're in and what their intentions are and what they're trying to do. And again, you know, if you're kind of sat there with a website and you're thinking, okay, I want to do some keyword research because I want to go out and create some content that is going to kind of rank on Google for, for search terms that are relevant to what my audience are searching for. And I'm going to use that to kind of get people onto my website. One of the things you really do need to understand is what people are intending when they're using a keyword. Because if somebody is like you say, just in the research phase and they're just like, which BMW should I get? And you're there trying to kind of get their attention with a bit of content that's like, oh, buy a BMW three series. You know, you're jumping the gun and people are going to look at that and think, oh, I don't want to be sold to. I'm just just trying to do my research. And that's how you put people off, right? So I think that whole kind of process of understanding what people are looking for when they're using certain keywords is really kind of key to the whole thing, I guess.
Yeah, yeah. So I think we've covered, um, what keywords are and why people type keyword search terms into Google. They're trying to solve a problem, get an answer to a question or buy some product or service. So it should be pretty obvious, I think, why they're important when it comes to digital marketing.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So obviously, yeah, as I was saying, your job is to try and attract people to your website. One of the best possible ways you can do that is by producing content that ranks for keywords in Google. Um, but to do that, you have to understand what people are searching for and then be able to go away and, and optimise your content.
Okay, so let's just explore a little bit. Um, some of the ways that we can find out what our ideal customers are typing in to Google and other search engines.
So I mean, my favorite way to do it, and I guess maybe I've got like a slightly different take on this to you because most of my keyword research I do for PPC campaigns, that's pay per click before I get smacked.
Google.
Ads. So yeah, Google ads. Um, so whenever I'm doing keyword research, I normally use Google ads keyword tool, which is built into Google ads. It's completely free though. Like you can, you know, you can sign up for it.
Is it.
Still.
Is it still possible for anybody to access that? Or can you only access it through a Google Ads account? No, I can't remember.
So you can only access it through a Google Ads account. You can set up a Google Ads account for free without putting your credit card information in. But if you do, then Google Ads keyword tool will only give you kind of, um, very vague numbers. It'll say like between one and one hundred people search this or between ten thousand and sixty thousand. It won't tell you exactly.
So Google looks after the people who are paying money to Google for the ads.
Yeah.
I see what you.
Did.
There.
Yeah. But I mean, it's still useful for benchmarks. And, you know, if you are already running a Google ads campaign of any description, then you have access to a wealth of keyword information there. Because the great thing about keyword Planner in built into AdWords is that when you go in, you kind of suggest a keyword to it. So like you'll say something like, I don't know, uh, BMW and it will kind of go away and it will find you the search volumes for every phrase that it thinks is related to that keyword. So you end up with a big list.
Of stop, stop. A couple of things. I'm not berating, I'm not berating. But, you know, in the spirit of what we're all about. So first of all, you refer to Google Ads and AdWords. Now we know what we mean. But AdWords is the old name for Google ads. Google ads renamed AdWords, Google ads. So if you hear us say AdWords, we mean Google ads. It's the same thing to us, but we recognise anybody listening might go, oh, wait a minute, what's this AdWords? Is that different to Google ads? It's the same thing. It's just what it used to be called. And the second thing is you said search volume. Whoa, what's that about? Alex?
You're right. And the funny thing is, I didn't even notice I was doing. I didn't even notice that one. Um, yeah. So it's literally like, how many times is this this keyword searched for a month, right?
So is it used is the key word used in a search? Yeah.
Yeah. So yeah.
Why is that information useful?
Well, I mean, a really base level. It tells you about the popularity of a term, right. So you want to know that a lot of people are searching for something before you go away and decide to kind of structure your website around it or build content around it. Um, but I guess the other thing, the other point that you make there is a really good one because sometimes a search term can be used in a way that you're not necessarily expecting. So the example I just gave with BMW, uh, probably one hundred thousand people search BMW every month on Google. The important thing is what are they searching around it, right? It's not just about how many times they search BMW. It's like, are they saying a BMW is bad cars? Or where can I buy a BMW? And that's what really matters.
Okay, so when you use the keyword planner, just so people are crystal clear, you're looking using the tool to first of all, establish what people who might buy, what you're trying to sell type into the search engines, what phrases do they actually type in and the popularity, how often are those phrases typed in? So for example, um, you know, by BMW, you know, by a BMW might be typed into Google a lot. Now, I'm not saying it's a good search term to rank for. Um, it might well be, but I'm not. That isn't what I'm trying to drive home. What I'm trying to talk about and drive home is that, you know, first of all, this is a term that Google is telling you in the keyword planner tool that people actually type in. And they're also saying, and this is how often they type it in, and they'll even give you, does that data get broken down into regions? Like it'll get broken down into countries? Does it get broken down into regions as well?
So you can, yeah, you can say like only only show me search volumes for London or Scotland or. Yeah, Oxford or whatever you want. Yeah. You can get really specific with it. So you can see exactly how many people in Lincolnshire searched for red shoes last month or something like that. Um, and yeah, that's another really kind of important and fundamental thing. The other thing that AdWords keyword planner does, and one of the reasons I really like it is because it gives you a rough kind of competitiveness benchmark as well for a keyword. So it'll tell you kind of roughly how difficult it would be to kind of rank a piece of content or whatever for that keyword, which is sometimes really helpful.
So give me another example of a place or a tool that we can use to find search terms, keyword phrases that people who would be interested in what we're selling type into the search engines.
So all the big kind of, um, we've talked about them before, like Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, all of those big kind of SEO platforms all have a keyword research tool built in. Um, the only thing I'd say about them is that I think they kind of the interesting thing is there's three main platforms there, Moz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. They'll all give you different keyword data for keywords. Um, so that's something that you kind of have to understand, I guess, and take with maybe a little bit of a pinch of salt if you're going to use one of those platforms.
Yeah, I think when we, when we, when we've talked about some of these platforms, we'll also talk about some of the places where you get fantastic data that that are not immediately obvious. And we'll refer back to those just after we've finished talking about some of the platforms. So for, for example, with SEMrush, you can type in a search term that you think people might use. And that in the industry is often referred to as a seed keyword. It's like, well, if people are going to buy this particular service, I think they will type this into the search engine. You put it into a tool like SEMrush, and SEMrush will either confirm or show you that it's not the case that that that search term is used, but importantly, it will the tool will say, well, effectively people are not typing that in, but they are typing this in, which looks like it's a very close relative, you know, very close has a close relationship with what you typed in. And through this process, we can start to build up. Something I often refer to it as a basket of keywords, a collection, a group, a list of keywords that we might want to try and, um, rank for.
Yeah, it's interesting you allude to something there that I like always surprises me. Like I've been in digital for what, like ten, eleven years now. It's never quite the keywords you expect, is it? When you start keyword research, go into it and you're like, I'm sure this is how people search for this thing. And then you start typing things into SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner or whatever you want. And what it spits back at you is actually kind of, you know, you were way off the mark and this is actually how people search instead. I think that's a, I think especially for people who are kind of running their own business or who are kind of just just getting their feet wet with digital marketing, it's something to be really aware of is that people's behavior online is rarely what you expect. And you really do have to be kind of very open minded, I guess, about for sure what people are doing.
Yeah. I mean, the obvious one is when you use a certain type of language within your business, but actually your, let's just call them uneducated in a, in the sense that they're not educated about what you do. They might call it something completely different. I mean, if I, if I, if I tried, probably not even too hard, I could think of an example of something that, you know, we would call it one thing and a potential customer would call it something else.
The example I have for that, that is very specific. It's a letter different. But yeah, I used, I worked with a gardening supply company and they were, um, they listed all of their strimmers as trimmers. They were like, this is what they're called in the industry. They're called grass trimmers. Um, and nobody ever used that phrase. Everybody searched for grass trimmers on the internet, and they didn't realise that just by adding that one s, you know, they could suddenly be ranking for keywords that were way more popular. Okay. Um, I think that's like a, yeah, yeah.
I'll tell you what I tell you what as well. While we're on the subject of these tools. One of the one of the things that surprises people who are not in this industry when say, for example, we're talking to a potential customer is using tools like SEMrush, SEMrush, whichever. Uh, and some of the other tools you mentioned, like Ahrefs and Moz, you can actually put in your or a competitor's domain, a competitor's website domain. So if your competitors call, you know, Acme shells dot com, then you can put Acme shells dot com into rush and it'll tell you what they rank for. And that's often a fantastic way of building a picture. You know, if you're new into a market and you find one of the very well established players in a market, then analysing the data around their website can help you get some great information about what you should be potentially ranking for very quickly.
Yeah, absolutely. And another thing I will say is that, you know, even if you don't have access to any of these tools, or you're kind of not sure you want to commit and pay for them or anything like that. One of the things you can do when it comes to, to this kind of thing is just go to your competitor's website and, you know, right click on one of the web pages, view source and look at things like, what have they optimised their title element for? What keywords are they targeting in the header tags, that kind of thing. And you can even just by looking sometimes at somebody's website, you can see, okay, this is what they've kind of decided to target and okay, you know, they're not one hundred percent guaranteed to be right. But a lot of the time, they've kind of done some of the hard work for you, right?
Yeah. I think that's, that's probably, you know, beyond the Ken of some of the people listening to this, there'll be suddenly like, oh, wait a minute, right click, look at source, look at title tags. That's a bit confusing. But yeah, you're right. I mean, certainly with a, with a semi-skilled eye, it's not difficult to look at a web page and figure out what it's, what search terms. It's trying to, trying to rank for assuming that it's been optimised. But certainly an easy way of doing it is to get a free account at one at one of the places like SEMrush or one of those, and stick a stick of competitor's domain name in there. And you'd be surprised at the data that you get back. It'll even I don't know how accurate it is, but it'll actually have a good guess at what they're bidding for in paid search in Google ads as well, which is, which is often a really good source of information.
Yeah. And again, the other thing that all of those tools do that I think is really useful to always be thinking about too, is, is things like they'll tell you how competitive those keywords are and what some of them. I think Ahrefs does it. I'm pretty sure SEMrush does it as well. They'll sign like a keyword difficulty score where they'll kind of tell you out of ten, you know, how much effort you'll have to put into trying to kind of optimise a page for that keyword.
Yeah, yeah, that is really useful. So, so what Alex is saying there is it's, you know, you might find a keyword, a search term that you think, wow, if people found my website, a page on my website, when they searched for that, then that would be fantastic. Because that's exactly the sort of thing that we do. And we could definitely sell something to those people. What this tool also does is say, well, that's fine, but if you want to rank on page one of Google, say for this search term, then this is how hard it's going to be to do it. And I've noticed recently, and it might not be recent, but it's actually telling you, you need to write this sort of content, this amount of content, and you need to get inbound links from other websites that are a of a high quality. In other words, they're saying that this ain't going to be easy. And I think another indicator of that, and just I think the keyword planner you talked about earlier gives you a rough estimate of, of the cost of a click. So, you know, costs of clicks is also another good indicator of how difficult it might be to rank for something. For example, debt management might have a cost per click of thirty or forty quid. So if that's the case, you've got a pretty good idea that getting to number one in Google organically for that is going to be bloody hard.
Yeah. Well that's exactly it, isn't it? I mean, at the end of the day, what we're talking about when we're talking about competitiveness or, or cost per click is how much time and effort have other people already put into trying to kind of, you know, take ownership of this keyword and ultimately you are going to be competing against those people in whatever you decide to do with these keywords. So it's just good to know, you know, how much time is spent.
Okay, so a little recap. Um, we've been, we've established that keywords are the words and phrases that people type into Google or other search engines when they're looking for a service, trying to solve a problem, looking for an answer to a question. There are tools like SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs and Moz that help you build up a picture of the keywords, the search terms that are likely to send lots of traffic. Some traffic to your website, clicks to your website from a search result. Um, let's have a little chat around some of the less obvious, but actually, in my opinion anyway, really valuable sources of keyword data. And let's start with going back to Google ads. If you're running a Google Ads campaign, then you've got the keywords that you're bidding on, i.e. you're saying to Google, if somebody types this in, show my advert, okay? And then Google then builds up a database of the actual search terms that are triggering your adverts. Can you talk a little bit about those? Alex.
Yeah, absolutely. So basically, yeah, exactly. Like Dave says, really, once people actually start kind of triggering your ads by typing in things that are kind of related to the keywords you've decided to bid on, Google will actually kind of break down for you exactly what they typed in to trigger your ad. And you can then pick through that report of their called search terms, and you can pick through that report and literally see exactly what people are typing and what people are looking for. And sometimes, you know, again, what's really interesting is that those really specific Search terms that people are using to trigger your ads are not quite what you expect, and they give you kind of new avenues to go down and think, okay, so people actually really want to know this about my products or, you know, people are actually searching for this. And, you know, sometimes it's things like, you know, I don't know, maybe you're selling wood and somebody's typing in like cheap wood and triggering your ads and you realise that actually, you know, there's something to the idea that people are looking for stuff on a budget, or maybe it's that you're kind of selling shoes and people are triggering your ads by searching for something, you know, that you just didn't expect people to be shopping around like a material or a shape or something like that. And it's just kind of really good to know these are what people this is what people care about. This is what they're actually looking for.
Yeah, I always, I always think about a, a Google ads campaign, um, as a, as a potential source of leads, a potential source of sales. And it should be because you're paying for the clicks. But I also think it's a great market research exercise to try and better understand your market and get some solid data around what people are actually typing in. Um, okay. So so so Google keyword planner is one aspect of Google ads, but the data that you start to build up within your own account, if you're running a campaign is also, in my opinion, and I think you agree is a really, really valuable source of keyword data.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
And moving on from that, uh, another free resource, which I, I don't think you can, um, I don't think you can overstate how valuable the data is in Google search Console. And we've certainly talked about the Search console a lot. And one of the aspects of the Search Console, which we find the most useful and powerful, is the fact that it provides keyword data around your organic search. So what people are typing into Google that's firing a page on your website to appear in a search result with. With the caveat that you might be appearing at position fifty, i.e. on page five and nobody's seeing it, but at least it's being triggered. And the reason that that data is. Sorry, do you want to come in? Go on.
I was just going to say, now I'll let you say what you're about to say because I think I'm going to be jumping the gun.
No it's fine. I mean, all I was going to say was that the reason that we think that that stuff is valuable is if you find a search term in the search console that you're ranking for, but you're on page five and the search volume, the number of times that search is carried out is, is significant. Then that tells you right there that if you put some energy, time, effort, resource into improving your ranking for that search term, you know that there's people out there typing it in, and there's a good chance that you'll start to get additional traffic to your website, which isn't always easy. It's not as straightforward as great. I'll just use that keyword on my website and I'll start to get traffic. It's way more complicated than that, depending on how competitive the search term is. But it's fantastic data.
Yeah, this is exactly it, isn't it? It's like, um, you find in there sometimes things that you haven't thought to optimise a page for that your page has started kind of accidentally ranking for, but like you say on page six, on page seven or whatever, because you've mentioned a key phrase somewhere in there, you know, that you didn't necessarily think was important. And suddenly you look and you see that that has you've had thousands of impressions for that keyword that you weren't even trying to optimise for. And you're like, okay, so if I go and build a page around that keyword, suddenly I could kind of be scraping all of that traffic in. And it just, it's a really good way of spotting kind of missed opportunities or places where you're just on the threshold of doing something kind of really clever. And you can think, okay, I can use that information to go away and kind of improve my strategy.
Yeah. And the search console will also allow you to interrogate the data and find out what specific pages on your website rank for. So you pick a page or rather, you can see a keyword term that's got good volumes here. You can then find out which page on my website is appearing when people search for that. And then it might just be as straightforward as Re-optimising that page around the keyword data that you now have to improve its rankings. We've certainly used that technique very effectively.
Yeah, we use it for clients a lot. You know, we use it for ourselves too, I think, don't we? You know, we'll say, oh, you know, look, we've kind of we've popped up a few times for this search term. Why don't we go away and build a page around it? And that is enough to kind of kick off a whole new kind of, you know, section of content for the website or whatever.
Yeah. So what it's, what it's particularly good for, I think is, um, long search terms, long, you know, phrases that have got five, six, seven, eight, nine keywords or words in them go.
On the long tail.
Well, yeah, I mean, go on, tell me what you think of when you hear the term long tail.
I'll be perfectly honest with you. We talked earlier in this podcast about intent and about how you can kind of look at a keyword and tell what somebody is trying to do. I think that like in the old days before those ideas about intended really crystallised people really liked to break keywords down into two categories, long tail and short tail. And the idea was that short tail keywords would be short, like ladder or shoes or big cars or whatever, and it wouldn't really tell you very much. It'd be really top level. Thousands of people would search it, but you'd probably never sell anything if you targeted it. And longtail was supposed to be the kind of like long and specific search terms that only ten people a month searched for. But if you optimise your content for it, you're more likely to make a sale. And that was the whole idea, wasn't it, that they were more specific and that they told you more about what people were searching for? Nowadays, I think with the way that people use things like Google, it's all kind of a bit redundant really, isn't it? Like you can tell just by looking at what someone searched, what they're trying to do. And yeah, I think it's a bit arbitrary really to say long tail, short tail.
Yeah. So my understanding, um, is, is different. Uh, my interpretation rather is different. So if you plot a graph with an x and y axis at the, at, right, at the, um, at the y axis, you've got a lot of search volume numbers of searches for a search term, like for example, ladders. So like ladders get searched a lot. Okay, so it's at the head of the search around the subject of ladders. The long tail is talks about the fact that there are an infinite number of searches that people could carry out that contain the word ladders. So that might mean that the word say for example, um, roof ladder or say large roof ladder. So now we've got three words in that rather than just the word ladder. And the, the number of people that search for large roof ladder is a lot fewer. It's a lot less than the number of people that type in the word ladder. However, just because a search term has got lots of words in it doesn't automatically make it a long tail search term. Long tail, by definition, talks about search terms that aren't used very much, but you could very you could conceivably have a search term that's got five, six, seven words in it that's actually used a lot, which means it's at the head of the search. So, you know, the idea of long tail search is it's into this infinite number of variations that people will type in that don't actually appear, that don't get used rather very much. And the debate was always around. I remember somebody used to talk about this. He wrote a great blog post, Jill somebody, I can't remember her name, but she was a big, big noise, might still be in SEO. And she talked about the fact that you can't optimise for long tail search because by definition, a search term to be long tail might only get used once or twice a month. Say, you know, anywhere might hard. So if you optimise, you know, you'd have to optimise and you'd have to build and optimise millions of pages to optimise for long tail. And that's why you'll often find a page on your website will rank for a search term. And that term doesn't appear anywhere on the page, but Google and other search engines are going to go, well, this person has typed this long phrase into Google, and this page is definitely talking about that subject, even though that phrase doesn't exist. Now, where it gets interesting, I think, is when you find search terms that have a lot of words in them, and the search volume is not tiny, but it's not huge. It's somewhere in between. It's probably worth optimising for those because there are enough people typing that in. So that's neither it's not at the head of search, but neither is it in the long tail of search. So the long tail refers to this tapering off of the graph, which never ever gets to zero, because there's always something else that somebody could have typed in. Keyword combination, a word combination that uses a particular keyword. What do you think of that?
You learn something new every day.
Does it make sense though?
It does make a lot of sense. Yeah. And actually, to be fair, it's a really good way of looking at keywords because I think that's kind of the the crux, isn't it really? It's like you can't I mean, you said you can't optimise for the long tail. And I think that's the thing, isn't it? There are unknown billions of permutations, every keyword that somebody could type in. And that's not really where you want to get stuck. You don't want to get stuck in this place where you're like, well, should I use the word large roof ladders or big roof ladders or whatever? You don't want to be kind of in those weeds. You want to be thinking, what do people actually search for? You know, where can I kind of stand out from the crowd? What should I spend my time doing? Yeah, I get that you're kind of looking for something in the middle, I guess.
Yeah, yeah. And I think going back to what we were talking about, the Search Console, the Google Search Console is a fabulous place for finding some of these search terms, which are longer, not necessarily long tail, but are longer that are maybe worth creating content around. Um, you know, because it's very easy to get one of these search terms. So say, for example, you find a search term that's got five or six words in it. You think, okay, that might, might, you know, but the volume is quite good. Quite a lot of people seem to be typing it in. It's very easy to, to quickly establish if anybody else on the entire internet has optimised a page around that exact search term. You know, so we've got some, some little, uh, you know, tricks and things that we do. And they're not even tricks. It's just clever use of Google to actually establish whether or not anybody else has got a page optimised for that search term. And if they don't, it's it's often a really good opportunity. And some people would look at that and think, oh, well, you're optimising your page for the long tail. No, no, we're optimising a page for a long keyword phrase, but actually it's not long tail because quite a lot of people are using it.
I guess that's the thing, isn't it? I mean, it just goes back to that whole intent thing. It's like people, especially when they're in that kind of research stage at the very beginning of their kind of purchase journey or whatever. They will, by definition, be kind of making long searches. And it is really worthwhile to go and optimise content for those. So yeah, I guess don't get too tied down in this whole idea of like short tail, long tail, like you say, just kind of, well.
one of the reasons, one of the reasons that that keyword phrases perhaps are getting longer is, is voice search. So whereas like, you get your phone out and you start typing like something, you're going to make it as pithy as you can, you're going to make it quite short and sweet. Whereas if you're talking to your device, you're going to say, hey Google, show me shops that sell black shoes that are somewhere near me. And by the way, I'm in Oxford as a search term.
Everyone loves the sound of their own voice, don't they? Either that or we think that, like, our phones are our friends. I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah. You don't just. Yeah. You're right. You don't pick up your phone and say black shoes, you know.
No, no that's right. Yeah. So okay, let's just again, let's just just recap. And I'm not sure if we're maybe getting to towards the end of this one, I don't know. So we've talked about what keywords are. Hopefully people are now clearer about what they are. We've talked about some of the commercially available tools where you can find these valuable search terms that your customers are typing into Google and other search engines. We can we've also discussed some some free resources such as the Google Google Search Console and the keyword Planner, where we can actually find data. We've looked at the the data that's automatically gathered by a Google Ads campaign. And we've talked about different types of keywords. I don't think we'll. Today, I don't think in this podcast we should go into how we use keywords in pages. Let's not let's not go down that route just today.
Well, I think that's a podcast all of its own, isn't it? Maybe a follow up, one that we can do next week, you know, is kind of like how to use your, what was it you called it earlier, a basket of keywords? Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things you've forgotten to do maybe is plug our own keyword research tool that we developed.
But yeah, I mean, we've got a tool called seed keywords. I did mention the term seed keywords earlier. So seed keywords dot com, totally free tool. Some people get confused by it and other people really like it and use it. I mean, I know that it's been mentioned on one of Neil Patel who's like an SEO ninja based over in America. He's talked about it, and I think even Brian Deines, who's another of these SEO, you know, highlight headline people spoke about it as well, so it's been liked and commented on by some some of these people. Keywords dot com is a really simple concept. We designed it and developed it so that people can tap into their own networks to try and figure out what people, what people might type into a search engine. So you basically create a scenario like I'm thinking of going away for a weekend. What would you know? Or you're thinking of going away for the weekend. What would you type into Google? And then you send us a unique link out to your network in LinkedIn or email or whatever, and they click on it and they go and answer the question that you've asked. And I guess there's like commercial tools like answer the public and, um, yeah.
Something's out there.
Or is it what's keyword? No, what's it called? The I can't remember the name of it, but there's, there are other tools that specialise in, in providing, you know, this mass massive amounts of data around what people are typing in. But that was our keyword keywords, seed keywords dot com tool was more about, um, you know, just kind of tapping into your own network of people.
Well, I think it's the whole idea of human intelligence again, isn't it? Because ultimately, I think one of the, one of the great risks in marketing in general is that, you know, you kind of these things become very abstracted very quickly and keyword research becomes about numbers and algorithms and predictions and what Google or some other keyword provider thinks that other people are searching for. But ultimately, what you want in all of this is actual kind of human intelligence. You want to know what people are actually searching for online so that you can build content that's actually optimised for how people talk and how people think. And I think that's like a, if you only take one thing away from listening to this podcast, I hope it is that, you know, all keywords are really about is about understanding how people interact with Google and other search engines. It's not, there's no kind of magic to it.
It's not no, there isn't. I tell you where there is magic though, where keywords are concerned is if you get a good ranking, you know, a top three ranking or better still, a number one ranking for a search term that lots of people type in, you can get a shedload of traffic to your website. Now, whether that traffic converts into business really depends on the keyword that you got the ranking for. I mean, we used to be very highly ranked for the search term. What is SEO, for example, less so these days. And but most of the traffic that came was people just carrying out research. It didn't result in an enquiry. It didn't result in generating any business. I mean, it probably did generate some business, but it wasn't a commercial keyword, but it certainly made our numbers look pretty impressive.
So I think that's actually, like you said earlier, that you didn't specifically want this podcast to be about how to use your keywords in your bucket. I think one thing we definitely should talk about, though, before it is before you decide to whether or not to, to kind of use a keyword to optimise your website is how to sit down and kind of analyse everything you've put in your bucket for exactly that purpose. Right? Because we've talked a couple of times about intent, but I think spending some time, once you've got a list of keywords that you've decided, sound reasonable or have a good search volume or sound attractive to you, is to sit down and actually say, is this going to win me business? Because a lot of people get really caught up in this idea of like, I don't know, you're selling BMW car seats and you realise that ten thousand people a year search for, you know, new car seats and you think that's a really good keyword that must be like integral to my strategy going forward. I'm going to spend lots of time and lots of money kind of optimising for this keyword. And it's, it never really had the potential because it was just about car seats in general and not car seats for BMW, which is all you're selling to actually make you that much business. And I think people get really caught up sometimes in the fact that a keyword is popular or, you know, not very competitive or whatever, and they don't sit down and do that. That last step, which is saying, you know, does this actually make sense for me? Is this actually about what I offer?
Well, you know, one of the tricks that you can employ, it's not really a trick, but one of the techniques you can employ is once you have your keywords that you believe have good commercial intent behind them and will generate business for you, is to test them using Google ads and, you know, pay for people who search for those search terms to click on your advert to come through to your website and see if they're converting to business. And that way, instead of spending twelve months working on content, chasing a particularly difficult search term, only to find out that it doesn't generate business, find out quickly by using Google Ads.
That's a really good idea, actually. Yeah, I guess I guess I use AdWords too much to ever think of it as a kind of business research tool, but I think that's a really interesting use case for it, isn't it? It's like, yeah, just test the water before you build content.
Yeah. It's a lot cheaper to build a landing page for a specific search term, you know, a specific product or service. Find the, you know, the keywords that everybody's typing in when they're looking for that service and nab some of that traffic, pay for some of that traffic and see, see how it converts. And, you know, you can also, you know, to your, um, one of your passions is conversion rate optimisation. You can also use that so that you, by the end of it, understand whether the keyword converts into business and you by, by the end of it also messed around, played with, experimented with the page to the point that you can now feed all of that into the page that you're working on to try and get an organic ranking.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, I would just say that, you know, if you're going to do what Dave suggested and set up a PPC campaign to target a keyword to see if it works for you commercially, please at least do a little bit of conversion rate optimisation, because the first landing page you put out there probably won't convert anybody. They rarely do. It's always a process of refinement, isn't it? Yeah, one hundred percent.
Yeah.
But yeah, in general, I think yeah. It's a fantastic idea, isn't it? It's just like sit down, find out whether something's actually going to work for you because half the time you really can't tell until you're testing these ideas, can you? Whether or not there's actually kind of commercial intent behind something, or even if you know, the commercial intent is ever going to convert because a lot of the time people in the research phase of something, you know, they are kind of flighty and unpredictable, aren't they?
Mhm. Agreed. That's right. Okay. Um, is there any other aspect we're not going to talk necessarily just now. We're not going to talk about how we use these search terms on a web.
We'll just keep you hanging. Yeah.
Not because it's a black art. I mean, it really isn't a black art. You know, go to mos dot com and click on the learn SEO and figure it all out. I mean, it's all there. We're not trying. We're not trying to disguise or, you know, we're not trying to confuse people. It's just we need to think about that because that's probably one that we need to do as, as a screen share video podcast so that people get the most value from that one by actually watching it on YouTube, on our YouTube channel, which is YouTube dot com slash evolution. That might be a better.
It is going to be a long one too, isn't it? Potentially.
Yeah, potentially. Um, okay. So we've talked about what they are. We talked about how you find them, the importance of them. I think, I think anybody listening to this who's still with us, Um, will probably by now, if they weren't previously, recognise that understanding, you know, the right search terms to try and get rankings for is so important. And you can, you know, vanity rankings and you did allude to it earlier vanity rankings. Hey, you know, we're number one in Google when people type this in. Well great. Does it generate any business. No. Well it's just a vanity ranking. You know, it's a pointless ranking. It doesn't actually add any value to the business. Um, I think people listening to this by, you know, by now will understand the importance of getting this stuff right. It really is at the heart of so much of, of the, uh, digital marketing activity that we carry out, isn't it?
Yeah. I mean, well, I don't think any of the other digital marketing work that we do works without it. I think, you know, you get the keyword research wrong and you'll never get good results. Um, I think it's fair to say it's probably the most important part of it really.
Agreed. Okay. You've been listening to the Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast with Dave Robinson and Alex Bussey from Red evolution. Um, if you've got any questions, go to where should they go? Alex?
They should go to somebody. They should go to our website.
One of them, yeah, they could go to our main website, Red evolution dot com. Or they could go to redevolution.com, click on the contacts tab and, and ping us an email, fill a form in whatever you want to do and ask a question if you want to come on the show. We had, uh, was it Bruce Skinner from Aalto was with us again a couple of couple of episodes ago. That's his second appearance, which was great fun. And we love having guests on the show, guests who might disagree with us, guests who might agree with us, guests who've got stuff to add. And it doesn't have to be just about digital marketing. Um, I know my pal Graham McWilliams going to come on the show. He's a great guy, sales guy. He's going to come on and share some of his wisdom, hopefully quite soon. Graham, if you're listening to this, it's about time you you got that booked in. Please. Um. Who else? I mean, there's a few other people that we are talking to. Um, you know, we love having guests on and I think that, you know, we, we have kind of broadened it out. I mean, some of the podcasts we've done have been way broader than just digital marketing because we're all about business growth, business development, not just the digital marketing aspect of it. Alex, you wanted to say something.
Well, I was just gonna say, I think the line is blurred, hasn't it? In recent years, especially between digital marketing, sales, business growth, all of those things are kind of, you know, you need information from one to do the other properly nowadays. That's right.
Okay. All right. Well, that's, uh, winding this one up. Uh, hope you've enjoyed it. Do get in touch, um, if you want to come on, etc.. And it's from me.
And goodbye from me as well.