In Depth Keyword Research (Part 1) SEO Course Part 1

Introduction

Welcome to Part 1 of the Keyword Research module of Search Engine Optimization. Before we begin, I want to talk about the purpose of this module by sharing a story with you. A few years ago, my business partner and I decided to do SEO on an educational website. The purpose of the site was to drive qualified leads to universities that were willing to pay a premium price for the lead. We had successfully SEOed several websites that did the same thing, but for insurance companies. Due to our success in the insurance industry, we were confident that we knew the right keywords to have our educational sites be found in the search engines. Well, we were very, very wrong. We painfully learned that in the insurance industry, you could generate a lot of leads by ranking on broad keywords. But in the educational industry, our website needed to be found on very specific terms. Unfortunately, we wasted a lot of time and money before we learned this lesson. Due to this significant mistake, I learned that keyword research should be the very first step someone takes when starting any SEO campaign. Often people skip understanding this step, because like me, they think they know the keywords that they want to rank for in the search engines. I found that doing the right research first will always be a benefit in SEO. So I hope that once we are done, you will see the value of doing keyword research. I have set up this module in a way that, it will provide a clear plan on how to find the keywords that really make a difference and hopefully help you avoid making the same mistakes that I did.

Keywords

As I have taught people about SEO, I've learned that there can be some confusion on exactly how a keyword works with search engine optimization. Therefore, before we actually start the process of keyword research, it will help to first build a solid foundation of how keywords are essential to SEO. So let's dive in and look at exactly what a keyword is. A keyword can just be a word, yet it can also be a descriptive phrase used to describe what you are searching for. To help illustrate this, let's say we are in the Sharpie business and we have a website that sells an arrangement of Sharpie pens. We obviously want to rank on what people are going to type into the search box in order to find our product. Some words we might come up with are, Sharpie, marker, pen or a highlighter. These types of words represent the root of a keyword and are often called base keywords. Yet having a base keyword doesn't tell us much of what the search user is looking for. By adding more information to the keyword, we can quickly understand more of what is being searched for. The sort of words which provide additional insight are commonly called modifiers. Modifiers further develop and clarify the meaning of the keyword. Let's take, for example, the top modifier keyword Sharpie Mug Tutorial. This is a hot trend right now on Pintrest, where people are showcasing their permanent marker artwork on white mugs. If a user queried just for the keyword Sharpie in order to find more information on how to create these mugs, our Sharpie product site may not be the best fit for them. So understanding the intent of the search is actually quite valuable to anyone doing SEO, and modifiers play a big role in doing this. Adding additional action words, or adjectives, to a keyword base and modifier further enhance the keyword meaning and are often called keyword extenders. All three of these elements are used to help dig deeper into understanding the purpose of the keyword. It's important to note that search engines don't need the base modifier and extension to be in order. You can mix up the order without concern of mixing up the search engines. You can see this is the case with highlighter, black, no bleed, buy. The user could have easily used the keyword, buy black highlighter, no bleed, and the search engines would have understood the query in the same manner. Now that you understand base, modifier, and extender keywords, it's important to understand the difficulty of ranking these keywords in the search engines.

Keyword Difficulty

One easy way to do this is to consider the popularity of a keyword, or to put another way, how many search queries does the keyword receive on a monthly basis? Then, also taking into consideration the length of the keyword, or how many words are in a single keyword. When you look at these two factors, you see an interesting phenomenon called the keyword curve. The keyword curve basically shows a contrast of search volume between the short keywords, often referred to as head keywords. And the more detailed, but longer keywords, more commonly known as long tail keywords. What's interesting is that even though the head keywords receive a lot of search volume each month, there are not as a many of these keywords versus how many long tail keywords there are. So in short there is significantly more long tail keywords, but they don't receive anywhere close to the traffic that you see with head keywords. If you have been in SEO even for a short time, you will hear and read a lot about the long tail strategy, which is going after a lot of long tail keywords at one time in order to get the same amount of traffic that one or two head keywords would bring in. Many find this desirable since there usually isn't much competition with long tail keywords. And you can see results a lot quicker. This isn't a bad strategy to execute, but it's also not very balanced. And I will go more into how you really should have a focus on a good group of head keywords and then a strong list of long tail keywords.

In next part i will show you course case study and we will go through an excersice to help explain everything. Please don't forget to upvote and comment that will motivate me to bring more for you.