- My personal approach for deciding on keywords to target.
Would you believe that I rank on the first page of Google
for a term as generic as "best blogs"?
It's not a term I ever targeted and it's not something
I really care about ranking for,
yet I get around 400 people a month landing on Detailed
because of it.
In this video I'm going to explain
my keyword targeting philosophy
to help explain how that happened
and how you can apply my approach to your own ventures.
Now keyword research is a topic that can be looked at
from countless different angles.
You probably aren't just looking to come up
with title ideas for blog posts,
but headlines for service pages, location pages,
YouTube videos and you probably want some
under-the-radar angles that other people aren't using.
In this module we have a number of angles
for finding keyphrases to target
I've never seen shared elsewhere.
Because there's a big internet out there
you are going to have to adapt each of them
to your own situation but I've done my best
to make them really easy to follow step by step
with some really cool insights.
So keeping in mind that not every keyword angle
will be relevant for every situation,
I wanted to share my basic philosophy
about keyword research.
So just for 30 seconds let's go back to the real basics.
This is kind of how keyphrases and keywords are defined.
We have head terms, really broad terms such as marketing,
we have body terms which tend to be bit more specific,
such as viral marketing,
and then we have the long tail
which tends to be very specific,
i.e, viral marketing case study,
but also gets fewer searches per month.
I actually made this graphic almost a decade ago,
I just want to put it in here to show I've been doing this
way too long.
Anyways what's more important than my nostalgia
is really defining what long tail keywords are.
Long tail keywords are generally more specific,
they generally consist of more than three words,
but their true definition is that they are simply lower
in search volume.
So my personal approach is quite simple,
I have body terms in mind but go after the long tail
for the most part.
For instance, it would be incredible
for a content marketing agency to rank for the phrase,
content marketing agency.
Now I know someone is shouting at the screen right now,
telling me it's a bit too generic
but the volume, the fact that it gets more searches
can make up for it.
And if anyone knows the potential here,
it is Stephen Kenwright who used to rank very well
for SEO agency, he doesn't anymore,
but when he did that was generating him six figures per year
in revenue.
So it would be great to rank for content marketing agency
but it would be much smarter to try to rank
for content marketing agency location,
at least initially, because not only are you going
to reach the right people,
but you aren't going to sit around forever
targeting a term that you might never rank well for,
especially if the likes of Wikipedia still exist
which dominate these head and broad terms
and especially for phrases like content marketing agency,
if Google preferred to rank curations rather
than individual companies.
So whatever term I would love to rank for,
I tend to add a modifier to that phrase
as a nice fallback so my content efforts
weren't for nothing.
As a really simple example, back in 2018,
I wrote an article on expired domains for SEO,
I really wanted to rank for the broad variations of that,
anything to do with expired domains,
anything to do with expired domains SEO.
I currently rank first for that in Google
as I'm writing this, but when I put the article together,
I included a few other terms in there
as a fall back such as best and reviews.
So maybe I could've ranked for best expired domains
or expired domains for reviews or affiliate websites.
So this approach of mine that I have,
I'm going to be honest, it probably comes from a pain point
where I spent years trying to rank for the phrase
"search engine optimization."
When I first started out in SEO, I was 16 years old,
I put together a SEO agency, I just fell in love with SEO
and it was obvious to me, I sell SEO,
I should rank for "search engine optimization,"
and yes I do use an S, I am British,
if you didn't know that, I know I do not have the accent
but I am from England and that is how we write it.
So even though this was back in 2006, 2007,
SEO companies were making a lot of money
I had a lot of very financially successful competition.
The company, if I recall correctly,
the company that went number one in Google
for SEO back then in the UK were Bigmouthmedia,
and in that year, 2006, they were actually sold
for more than 40 million pounds and it didn't even hurt,
and it didn't even help me that a few months earlier,
they were actually banned by Google,
I believe they were hiding text in their website,
having white text and hiding it with CSS,
but I just had a ton of competition.
It was just impossible,
I was just never going to make that happen,
16 years old, trying to do it on my own,
it just wasn't going to happen.
So these days I try to save myself from that pain
and I have a worst care scenario keyword
to go for as well.
And the side effect is that you're not ignoring
the main term that you actually want to rank for,
you can still rank for it,
you're just not super relying on just ranking
for that one thing.
So let's look at a real world example
that sends me hundreds of visitors every day.
Keep in mind that at Detailed,
our focus really is on helping clients,
we love the challenge, we love getting stuck in difficult,
technical problems, link building problems,
keyword research problems,
we're really focused and loving that
rather than really promoting our own website.
I think as I'm recording this we have about 30 pages
in total in our entire website actually targeting
any terms to rank for.
So back at the end of 2017, I was doing research
into an industry I didn't know much about,
I was looking at the best bloggers
to see who was really dominating that space
and I realized that I just really wasn't happy
with the lists that were out there.
They were typically outdated and they based
on the author's preferences,
normally who their friends were,
rather than what the most authoritative
or influential or popular blogs actually were.
So I had the idea,
why don't I actually create my own version of these pages,
actually make them based on popularity?
I can pull in how many links these websites are getting,
how many people are Tweeting about them
and I can rank them and update that every day.
So I started doing some keyword research,
I picked one industry, let's just say I wanted
to rank for food blogs,
the obvious term that I'd want to rank for,
that I'd want to target is food blogs,
it gets more than double the search volume
as the next most popular variation.
So based on my angle here, based on the approach
I'm trying to teach you,
I wouldn't really target food blogs,
it's a little bit too generic
and the competition is probably much higher
due to how much volume it has.
So I might step back a bit and target best food blogs
or I might step back ever further
and target best food blogs 2018, 2019, 2020,
whatever your aim may be.
I'm not stopping myself from ranking
for the broad food blogs term,
but I am giving myself a chance to rank for something else
on the journey to potentially ranking for that as well.
So at the start of 2018 I shared with the world,
I came out with these lists,
I believe that they are the best blog lists on the planet,
because they are based on actual popularity
rather than my own bias,
they update every 24 hours and it's pretty cool.
But the title tag for the page is changing all the time
but it's generally going to be something
like the Best Food and Cooking Blogs
You Should Read in 2020 or again,
whatever the year is.
So a few weeks and a few months after I launched this
I started ranking pretty well for best food blogs year
and the best cooking blogs year.
A few months later the page started ranking well
for best food blogs, which sends much more traffic
than the year based variation
and then a few months after that
I started ranking very well for the broad term
of food blogs, which sends even more traffic again.
In fact, that specific phrase,
not even any variations of that phrase,
you can see there,
I generally rank third or fourth in Google
I got 400 clicks almost in the last seven days alone
from that query.
I have another page that ranks blogs
based on all of the niches combined,
so I actually rank on the first page of Google
for the generic term of best blogs
even though I never actually really targeted that term.
And in a lot of different categories
I rank really well for the broad variations,
such as cryptocurrency blogs,
doesn't send a ton of traffic,
but I am number one, and keep in mind
that's just one phrase, I rank for all of the variations
as well.
So I rank for the really broad variations
of that query even though I put best and 2019
in my title tags.
So what I'm trying to teach you
is that maybe instead of trying to rank
for things to do in Barcelona,
you might want to target things to do in Barcelona
on a budget, or instead of trying to rank
for best social media scheduler,
you might try to rank for best media scheduler tools
of 2020.
You still want to rank for that,
you still wanna rank for things to do in Barcelona
and best social media scheduler
because they get more searches,
there's more potential traffic,
but as that might take more time,
you probably want to have another phrase to go for
on the way there, on the journey to that bigger,
more popular term.
Now we're not done just yet,
there is something very important I have to tell you
that a lot of SEOs might neglect
or might just forget to let you know about.
You need to make sure that Google is actually
rewarding websites that target the specific variation
you're looking to go for.
So in this program, Inside Detailed Blueprint,
we have a video on how the SERPS,
the Search Engine Results Pages
really can tell you everything.
It's a simple concept but perhaps
one of the most important videos in this entire program.
So the search results can tell you
how long your content should be,
how difficult it might be to rank for something
should you have a video on your page,
what kind of headline you might wanna write,
it's really useful not just to use tools at all times,
but to actually go to the search results
and see what you see.
So for example, if you decide to target a phrase
with the year in the query,
make sure Google is actually showing top results
with year in their title tag.
That might seem like a strange thing to comment on,
but Google will likely know what people are looking for
much better than we we think they are looking for.
So let me show a real world example of this
to drive the message home.
Let's say you have a website about video editing
and production tips and so on,
you go over your keyword research tool of choice
and you put in best video editor,
so if you were to put together an article
or a video on this, the obvious phrase
you want to target is best video editor,
it just gets so much more search traffic than anything else.
However, based on the philosophy
that I'm teaching you here,
that you should probably step back a little bit first,
especially if you have a younger, newer website,
you might first of all decide,
okay I'm going to try to rank for best video editor
for Windows first and then later on I'll go for
best video editor.
It is at this point you need to check the search results
to see what Google are rewarding.
So in this example, I've searched for
best video editor Windows,
but what we can see is that Google aren't really rewarding
that variation, so this one is pretty generic,
this title tag is pretty generic,
this is pretty generic, none of them are actually
mentioning Windows in their headlines,
and this one is actually focused on beginners.
Now you may be thinking,
"Well maybe no one's actually targeted that phrase,"
well that isn't the case, you can actually search for that.
So we have a pretty advanced query here,
intitle, best video editor
and somewhere in the intitle must have the word, Windows,
there are a lot of articles that target
that phrase specifically yet Google isn't really rewarding
people who target that variation.
They have focused on the broad term.
But if we search for something like
best video editor Android,
than Google clearly are rewarding the variation.
There are no generic articles ranking here,
they are all focused on video editing devices
or software apps for Android devices.
So in other words, you aren't going to get any benefit
from backing off the broad term of best video editor
to target best video editor Windows,
but a different example, if you had focused on Android,
you could still stand a chance of ranking well
because Google rewards that,
Google actually looks for that.
I know we've covered a lot on this video,
so let me try to break it down step by step.
Step number one, have a broad term in mind
that you would love your page to rank for.
Step number two,
come up with a a number of backup variations,
you might be able to target with your title tag
or your headline or both as well.
So even if you don't rank for your target term,
you still have a backup something else you can potentially
rank for and your content efforts weren't for nothing.
Step number three, check the SERPS,
the Search Engine Results Pages,
to see if Google actually reward variations.
Are the people focused on the specifics ranking well
or are broad articles still dominating the search results?
Step number four, decide on the modifier
or the variation that you're going to use
and you can add that to your headline,
to your title tag, your body copy,
you add it to just one of those or all three of those,
it depends what you see and what situation you're in.
And step number five, down the road,
you can improve your page, tweak headlines,
tweak titles and so on, to go for the bigger phrase,
if you think that's necessary, if you think you have to,
keeping in mind though that you might not have to
make changes, you might still rank
for that broad variation as well,
especially if you can pick up links
which I did for a few of my pages that definitely helps.
So that's pretty much my philosophy in a nut shell,
have a main phrase that you would love to rank for
but have a backup plan as well
so your content efforts weren't for nothing.
I'm really excited to introduce this module to you.
We have so many cool ideas especially ideas
I've never seen anyone else talk about.
So I really hope you get a lot out of this,
it is great to have you as part of the program.