So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on keyword research basics. We walk through the five kinds of keywords, doing thorough keyword research, and how to make your research actionable. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- how to conduct keyword research
- how to prioritize your analysis
- what to do once you have your list of keywords
Upcoming Episodes:
- SEO – Competitive analysis basics – 10/7/2021
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:24
Well hey there Happy Thursday. Welcome to so wet the marketing analytics and insights live show I am Katie joined by Chris and John. Today we are covering SEO keyword analysis basics. And so you know, we want to make sure that we’re finding that balance between covering the more advanced but also making sure that we’re refreshing on the basic things. You know, you may know SEO, you may have been doing it for a while. But maybe things have changed. And we have taken it upon ourselves to make sure we are sharing with you the latest and greatest. And so I don’t know Chris, where do you want to start with SEO today?
Christopher Penn 1:05
Let’s talk about keyword basics. And one of the things that we see people do wrong a lot is they just start in the SEO tool of their choice, just start typing in keywords right? typing in, you know this and that and this and that. And there’s really not any thought given to the strategy of what kind of keywords should you be searching for. So I think that’s a really good place to start. Broadly speaking, there’s five different kinds of keywords, right, there’s five different categories. And so let’s go ahead and just put this up. This is from a talk we just gave somewhere, I don’t know what conference it was. It’s all blur.
Katie Robbert 1:44
Well play, Chris will play. Thank you, you know,
Christopher Penn 1:47
the five categories are basically this, this branded keywords, these are people searching for you by name. So for us, that would be Trust Insights, right people searching for Trust Insights, or for Katie Robbert, or John Wall, and so on and so forth. These are the most valuable and high intent keywords because someone’s looking for you by name like they clearly you know, you don’t Google Katy werebear, for fun, you Google that because you want to find this person, you don’t Google Trust Insights for fun, you want to find this company. In parallel to that searches, competitive searches. So these are the searches that people type in for your direct competitors. So hopefully, you know, we’re we eventually get to be in a league where, you know, someone’s saying, you know, should I choose Accenture or TrustInsights.ai should choose Deloitte or TrustInsights.ai. Right? Now, obviously, we’re not peers, but they offer similar things to what we do. So somebody’s searching for those brands that’s valuable. That’s that’s valuable to understand. And you can can, in your organic search, you can sometimes rank for competitors names, if you’re optimizing pages for that. So for example, if we were to put out a services page, and that said, compare Trust Insights to Accenture consulting, and then you know, the old table with two columns, they’ll check boxes and x’s and stuff, you could get a little bit of traction on that kind of content. So that’s category two, those first two are really strong intent. The person who’s doing the searching knows what they’re looking for, right? They’ve got a solution in mind, that’s a company of some kind to solve it. Now, they may not be the right companies, but they at least have, you know, they’re pretty far down into that consideration phase right. The next category is unbranded. So this is the search for the problem that somebody has, but they are not searching for a company by name yet. So this could be someone looking for Google Analytics help Google Analytics, consulting, or management, consulting or change management have some kind of how to do change management they, they someone’s searching for the kind of problem they’re searching for. ways to solve that problem that aren’t necessarily tied to an individual company is still good intent, right? They still have a sense of, of what the solution is, they just need to learn more about it. To the right of that of the adjacent searches, these are people searching for the problem itself. So Katie, when if someone is searching for Change Management Agency, what’s the problem they’re trying to solve?
Katie Robbert 4:20
Generally, they’re trying to solve some sort of organizational behavior issue. Well, I would imagine that, like, how do I fix my organizational structure high too, I like what is organizational behavior, or you know, those kinds of questions, more of the research is what I think of as adjacent.
Christopher Penn 4:40
Exactly, exactly. And so these are the more details on the problems of trying to define the problem. And then the fifth category is one we’re not going to cover today. That’s novel that’s that’s where you’re creating a category that you own. So the textbook example there is Hubspot. Hubspot created inbound marketing, they spent 10 years in the 100 have millions of dollars to establish this new thing and they own it. For the most part, it’s very difficult to compete in that space against the but that is a fifth kind of category. So when you’re starting out with a keyword research, you got to figure out which of the first four categories you want to be researching before we just start typing stuff in willy nilly.
Katie Robbert 5:21
I think often and we’ve done this, you know, we usually start with, well, you know, what do we do? And so I feel like there’s a difference between what we do and what we want to be known for. Sometimes it’s the same, a lot of times there’s a lot of overlap, but that can be different kinds of things. So, you know, we, you know, if someone is searching, you know, how do I set up Google Analytics, we would want to show up for that. So those typically, that’s where I see people start is, I want to be known for Google Analytics, I want to be known for data, I want to be known for customer support, or whatever their core set of services are, right?
Christopher Penn 6:02
So let’s, let’s dig into some of this. Let’s start maybe in the unbranded section, because I think that’s a good place where a lot of people can, can get some traction and at least start to understand you, you know, what’s up? So what do we want to what do you want to use as a topic to dig into here?
Katie Robbert 6:19
I mean, let’s something that we need to do anyway. So you might as well do it here is change management.
Christopher Penn 6:26
Alright, let’s do change management. Now, you also mentioned things like whoops, change management, you mentioned organizational behavior. Are there any other things that off the top of the head, you know, are? are broad terms in that either in that unbranded category?
Katie Robbert 6:46
Yeah, um, you know, process development, um, you know, team building skills gap. Those are some of the ones such off the top my head,
Christopher Penn 7:03
right? In the SEO Software, your choice, and I’ll be honest, here, they’re all pretty much the same at this stage of analysis. So if you SEMrush h refs, Moz, SpyFu, whoever, for this level of analysis, they’re all pretty much the same thing. The first thing you do is just take a look at, you know, even the ones you’ve selected, intelligent, keywords, are not they are they good keywords? Generally speaking, generally speaking, we like to look at things that have a search volume that that is meaningful, which is usually more than 10 searches a month, and it got up to 10 searches a month, probably not going to be helpful, right? Because there’s like that one person is gonna be really happy and that, and that’s it. So the first step would be to start building out like, what would this list you know, well, this, these also do change management list here. Let’s just go add these words. Now. From here, most tools have a couple of different ways to expand this to grow this one that would be looking at phrases that contain our initial terms. So we have a team building activities that would fit in the category of team building, right? virtual team building activities, good pandemic, organizational citizenship behavior, what’s that? I honestly don’t know. Neither do I. So what’s it doesn’t sound like it’s it’s a good match. Let’s give that a miss right now. Measure consulting, change management process team building exercises, what is change management is a good one, virtual team building this a lot of virtual stuff.
Katie Robbert 8:45
Makes sense? Because I think a lot of companies relied on that in person. culture, and now they have to pivot to, you know, how do you build a culture when nobody ever meets each other?
Christopher Penn 8:58
Hmm. Change matter of certification change, master planning, management and organizational behavior? software development process? Five Minute team building activities, yes, because you can solve all of your problems in five minutes.
Katie Robbert 9:15
If I if I can crack that code, I’ll be a bazillionaire.
Christopher Penn 9:18
Yeah, I was gonna say your goodbyes all a private virtual escape room team building. That’s interesting.
Katie Robbert 9:29
You know, Chris, to your point about, you know, the low volume terms. I think sometimes what that highlights is that you’re using jargon, that is only meaningful to you. And so, you know, for all I know, I keep using the term change management. And it’s not what people think of the way I think of change management. So an exercise like this is helpful. And I’m like, Well, you know, I wasn’t thinking solely about team building, but it sounds like that’s a lot of what associated when you think of change management,
Christopher Penn 10:03
for sure, I mean, we’re talking hundreds, if not 1000s of searches a month here. And some of these are obviously, you know, specific brands, things that would fall in the competitive category. give those a miss for right now. But yeah, there’s a lot of things in here that indicate, you know, a real need for some of those those virtual team building just general team building stuff. A lot of team building. Yeah, let’s add those in. So these are the phrases that are directly semantically related to the first set of terms that’s important. The second thing that most software will do is give you a sort of sense of what are the things that for these terms, pages to also rank for, you know, a certain set of other terms, this set of searches tends to be a little less focused. For example, McKinsey would be an example consultant, be example, BCG, these are all the the include the competitive terms, it’s not bad to know that they exist. But some of them, some of them would be, I think, difficult in the beginning. So let’s go through here. Business definition, team building without a space, that’s interesting consulting firms. Let’s see what else we got here consulting for a company, change organizations, that’s actually interesting consultancy, is this management consultants, Business Management. So this is to your point case, might not be called change management, I called Maverick consulting. What is business?
Katie Robbert 11:37
Great question.
Christopher Penn 11:42
All right, so let’s see got a decent set there. Alright, so we’ve got about 60 odd change management terms in the general space. But the next step is to try and do some prioritization. In terms of the metrics that you get with, with these things, you get things like Keyword Difficulty, which is a zero to 100 scale of how difficult would be to for you to rank for that term, zero being publish a page that’s going to get found for it immediately. 100 being good luck, you’re probably never going to rank for this term in any meaningful sense, you know, who you’re trying to rank for, say the word Apple, it’s gonna be very, very difficult, you know, trying to rank for Google, very difficult to do on Google. And then the volume is the number of searches per month that occurs. So in this case, you know, 40,000, people search for consultant a month 1300 people search for organizational behavior a month. And these are some really good starting points for trying to prioritize lists. Now, the challenge is that this, that even with 67 terms, that’s a lot, we will probably want to do some prioritization. So the way to do this, is to try to narrow down and categorize these different terms, I’m going to go ahead and load this into this keyword list into Tableau software. You can use Excel, you can actually, personally do this in our, but nobody likes looking at our code.
John Wall 13:16
shocker.
Katie Robbert 13:18
Right? Chris? Before we get too far down this prioritization, I just want to ask a question that I know comes up quite a bit. And even sometimes I struggle with this a little bit. So you know, what is the difference, if anything between a keyword, a phrase, a longtail keyword, you know, like, so if I’m going through and trying to optimize, you know, the target term in my blog post, you know, you have that little box in WordPress that says, you know, what’s your target term? You know, is it supposed to be a full phrase? Like, what is change management? Is that what I’m optimizing for? Should it be, you know, what is or you know, whatever the phrase is, or should it just be a single word? Like, how does that factor in like, I think that there might be sometimes and especially on my part, that confusion of what that means, like a longtail keyword, a keyword a phrase, a full sentence.
Christopher Penn 14:12
Think of those things as almost like a little Russian dolls, using those Russian dolls, we open up the nesting doll side. Yeah, the nesting dolls are true. Yes. At the center is that core term, like change management, it’s gonna be a very, very difficult term, probably to rank for, because it’s gonna be very high volume, but very high competition, right? And then each layer on top of that, what is a change management firm near me? Or the answer things and how does change management work, the more the longer the phrase gets, the more it is likely to be further away from that central term. And so it’s going to be easier to rank for those things. One of the things that you want to think about when we’re doing these kinds of exercises is is there a way For you to build content around the core term, but maybe optimized for a portion of it, right, so you would write a post, like you Traders Point is, what is change management. So you’re checking the box on change management, the core term, but you know, pretty well, but you know, just on wall volume, and that’s gonna be very difficult to rank for. And so some of those other variants, like what is changed mentioned, probably be easy to rank for, but you may also, if you are authoritative enough and trustworthy enough and got a lot of inbound links, and you know, the quality of the content is good, you may start to rank for that core term as well, we’ve seen that happen with a number of clients where they’ve built a, a larger query as their, their, their focus, and they’ve benefited from getting some of the volume of the core term as well.
Katie Robbert 15:50
Okay, that makes sense.
Christopher Penn 15:52
That’s, that’s actually a very nice segue into, like, how do we prioritize these things well done. So what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna go put in volume and difficulty here. And I’m gonna just throw this up as a scatterplot. And let’s go ahead and put our keywords on here. Now initially, what you’re seeing here is on the y axis, the Keyword Difficulty zero, being easy, you know, 100, being difficult. And then the volume again, zero being none. And you know, 45,000 being the top. The challenge with this is that these are two very different scales. And so one of the things that we want to do is we wanted to rearrange this. So again, you this is something you can do in pretty much any software, I’m going to reverse the axis first on the difficulty, because zero, low difficulty is better. To me the high difficulty high difficulty, I don’t really want to compete. Does that make sense? It does, oh, yeah. And also, it’s going to make it logarithmic. So logarithmic change, the scale makes it a log function instead of a linear function. And so it basically allows smaller terms, smaller, lower numbers to be more easily seen, especially when you’ve got a lot of big numbers. So there’s that I’ve done that the y axis. Now, these terms are easier difficulty, these terms are harder difficulty down here, I go, do the logarithmic part on the x axis, here, I’m gonna just make that logarithmic. And again, very low volume here, very high volume this way, now I’ve got a bit more real estate to work with, we can see, just generally, if I were to, let’s put some reference lines on here. So reference line on volume.
Katie Robbert 17:41
Yeah, cuz you want to have those quadrants because basically, what you’re creating Chris, is that two by two matrix, you know, and so in business, the two by two is pretty traditional in terms of, you know, the, like, the ease and the big money. And so like, you go after the things that are easy, they’re gonna get you the most bang for your buck. And this is that same idea is that you want to go after things that are high volume, low difficulty.
Christopher Penn 18:10
Exactly right. So here we have this quadrant, and I’m using the medium, the middle of the data set for each axis as the central point. Down here, these things like this very high difficulty, relatively low volume, right, these are crappy terms, these are virtual team building ideas, these would be like my lowest priority because they’re, they’re difficult and there’s not a lot of volume over in this quadrant here. This is better difficulty like change management jobs or process development. relatively very low difficulty, not a ton of volume. But this would actually be a really good start like you want to talk about process development Katie, that would be a really good starting blog post, maybe this one here, management of organizational behavior would be a good topic to read some content around, change management strategy. Now we’re starting to get into those slightly more difficult stuff here. It’s, you know, around 28 or so. Management of change and so on and so forth. This quadrant down here, high difficulty high volume, it’d be nice, a lower priority again, high difficulty not not thrilling, this quadrant appears to be the golden quadrant, right? So things like price, product development process, lower difficulty, pretty good volume, organizational behavior itself it’s starting to get more difficult actually, you know, I’m going to change this axis back to linear Oh, I don’t think being logarithmic actually helps for for the zero to 100 Yeah, that makes it spread a lot more easily. So management consulting, you’re starting getting into pretty difficult territory, but all this stuff up here like new product development process, team building questions, these would be good topics because we can see these are the ones that like yeah, there there’s there’s a there there. There’s there’s not as much competition. This one here I think is really a big Winner management of organizational behavior, right? It’s, it’s a little on the lower of the volume side, but there’s almost no difficulty for it.
Katie Robbert 20:09
Interesting. And so, you know, I, in just doing general keyword research wouldn’t have necessarily come to that same conclusion, without having some way to prioritize the volume and the difficulty.
Christopher Penn 20:24
Yep. What I would suggest doing is maybe your take, here’s like a volume 100, this is, there’s not a super low volume here, I would in again, in any software package of your choice, take that set of initial keywords, there’s 24 of them there and say, Look at those is gonna be my starting lineup, right? Because the difficulty is lower. And there’s decent volume on all of it. That’s my starting lineup, how do I start creating content around those things?
Katie Robbert 20:53
Now, is this the kind of thing where you say, Okay, this is my set of keywords or given you do then take these and go back to your keyword research tool? And try to find more, you know, similar related terms to the slide? How many times do you go through that process? Or do you just start with this before moving on to try to get additional keywords?
Christopher Penn 21:15
It depends. It depends on like, what the data tells you, if we got, you know, a bunch of stuff that was and not a single thing was below difficult 70 I’d be like, we need to do some more digging, we need to maybe expand this looks for longer tail terms, because we’re not getting anywhere, we’ve got a whole bunch of stuff that you know, is anything above difficulty 50, in general, tend to shy away from because it’s gonna be a lot of work to build, stuff like that.
Katie Robbert 21:46
Right. But I guess my question is, so I have a set of keywords to start with, do I just go ahead and start with those? Or do I take that list, put it back into my keyword research tool and try to see what else comes up that’s related. So I’m not just writing six pieces of content that I’m trying to optimize for management of organizational behavior?
Christopher Penn 22:07
Yes, you could absolutely do that. So if we were to do that, let’s take take down about 35 or so let’s do a keep only on that. And then from here, let’s do an export our data.
Book, find where we just save that to
Katie Robbert 22:42
always helpful.
Christopher Penn 22:46
Okay, so there’s our, our winnings, I guess, starting point, we can take this and now go back into our keyword tool. And as you said, Now look at things like matching terms. And see if there’s anything new here or search suggestions is another another one of those options where it will say like you might also these are the things that might also be related. So change management plan template for examples is a decent, it’s just changed my thought process flow. Actually, a lot of these are pretty good.
Katie Robbert 23:26
Since you’re in there, can you add those to the list?
Christopher Penn 23:29
Well, good, we’re 62 anything above basic 100 and above, because, what, what that’s, it’s 20 additional keywords?
Katie Robbert 23:36
Pretty good.
Christopher Penn 23:40
And then let’s look at our related terms.
Katie Robbert 23:47
So John, when you’re talking with prospects, and you know, we obviously get a lot of questions about help with SEO? Um, do you feel like, like, this isn’t an overly complicated process, but do you feel like going through this kind of process walking them through? This is the Trust Insights way of how we do keyword research? are they thinking about it that way? Or are they doing a lot of what Chris had talked about of like, let me just plug in, like the two or three keywords that I think we want to be ranking for and just go from there.
John Wall 24:23
Yeah, usually it’s they understand the concepts, you know, they get the idea of some words are easier than others. And you know, some have more volume that others, but they usually never have any kind of procedure or ability to measure or do that, you know, it’s totally just kind of making things up as they go, you know, having a solid procedure here like we do, I mean, href says, I mean, only Google has more data than they do. So by going through this tool, you’re getting a more accurate picture than you’re ever going to get any other kind of, you know, just trolling around for a couple keywords. And yeah, this is definitely one of those marketing infrastructure and corporate memory. Things that we run into all the time that well, you know, my boss came up with this list or worse yet, like I got handed this list from the last person who did this job. And you know, that’s as far as it goes. So it’s, yeah, there’s a real dividing line unless they have somebody on staff that really knows SEO, and that’s a major part of their workflow, they just end up having this kind of over on a side project. And it’s just, you know, usually in a pitiful state.
Katie Robbert 25:25
Well, and you bring up a really good point, John, and so there’s a question then Chris, I would ask you is, you know, so let’s say you have that institutional knowledge that leaves with the person who was doing SEO? Or the person who’s doing SEO stays there, how often should you be revisiting your keyword list? How often should you refresh it? Is it a every time you create new content? Is it a once a month? Is it an annual thing? Or does it really depend?
Christopher Penn 25:54
As usual, it depends. There is benefit, I think, to looking at stuff, say maybe at a minimum quarterly think but anytime you got a big change. So for example, in April 120 20, everyone should have been looking at their, their keyword bio, everyone should be looking at their Google Trends, data and the Google Analytics, say, totally new world, what’s changed what’s different, and in May, what’s different this month, and so on, so forth, and even now, you know, we see from what’s happening in the world that behaviors continue to change. And so, as part of that, we need to to run these kinds of analyses, when we when we suspect or when we can prove that customer behavior has somehow materially changed. Real simple example if I was in the travel industry, I would be watching the TSA checkpoint foot traffic like a hawk and when I see a significant change in the number of people going through the checkpoints, I know there’s a difference happening and travel and I should probably rerun my keyword lists if I see Google’s mobility data for COVID-19 you know, big changes in the geographic area where I operate check your keywords right check your your your topics. The other one and this is something that I know we all we always say everyone could always do a better job is when you’re talking to customers and customers are saying oh yeah, we got this going on it’s things that would be a good time to look at those changes when there’s if you use predictive analytics or even if you just have known periods of time throughout the year when changes occur, you should be doing that. So right now, we are just wrapping up budget season for 2022 a lot of our clients have gone through and done their annual budgets and things you should know in the time period before that, that there was no there’s some substantial changes in the way people search they’ll be searching for marketing budget template, right? And typically, October is when people start doing this strategic planning process which always seems backwards to me like why would you do your planning before you do a budget but whatever.
Katie Robbert 28:19
That’s it That’s a whole different show.
Christopher Penn 28:21
That’s a whole different show, but we know that now you’re rolling out things like your content marketing strategy, your social media strategy, your annual planning, you know, marketing annual planning template, all those things it would be time to refresh those sets of keywords
Katie Robbert 28:38
right make sense.
Christopher Penn 28:41
So we just rerun that analysis let’s go ahead now and attach our new download.
Let’s do text file downloads we’re gonna repeat the exact same thing so Keyword Difficulty volume access through reverse this axis change our volume now to logarithmic here slap our keywords on put reference line one at the median good reference line to the median make the view as big as can get. And now with with those changes we made Katie you can see this is a bit more density right? Now you have some stinkers in here, right you know you Easy but not great, right? How to Change Manager that’s really bad difficulty 50 times 100 people 100 searches for it, like that’s just out the door, changing a process, you know, process change, these are the ones that are good volume, low difficulty management process. That’s outdoor team. Yeah, there’s a couple overlapping there. So now you’ve got a more refined list or a list of some greater opportunities. And the thing that I would do next, that is something you can do, you can do it with, like machine learning technology, or in this case, because there’s not that much of it, you can just do it by hand, it would be starting to cluster together the terms that are semantically related, it’s like all the team building stuff would be like in one bucket, all the change match will be in another bucket, all the management consulting would be a third bucket. So you can see what is sort of the the logical topics within that thing.
Katie Robbert 30:55
Yeah, I mean, that’s something you know, I could export this back into Excel, and just put them all on different columns here, different tabs, or whatever, which I think makes sense, because that then helps me, you know, so sort of the third point is okay, now that I have all these keywords, what the heck do I do about it, and I think you’re absolutely First off is starting to cluster them together into topics, so that I can start to point out, okay, these are the kinds of things that I need to be writing about.
Christopher Penn 31:25
Exactly. Now, if you want to do this just in a spreadsheet, and you don’t want to use visualization software at all, that’s fine, there’s actually a way to do that, that is mathematically sound, that we actually some folks do this as a matter of exercise, I’m gonna delete all the columns we aren’t using, just gonna focus on difficulty and volume. What you can do, let’s make this a little bigger. So we can see, what we’re doing here is we can essentially weight these, the volume of by the difficulty. So if a term has very high difficulty, the chances of us getting any volume at a relatively low. So let’s call this weighted volume. And we’re gonna make this, we’ll take our volume, and multiply it times, let’s see, well, so I want this to be 100 minus the difficulty. And then that’s divided by 100.
Alright, so logically, I’m probably I’m not going to get 44 43,000 searches for a consultant, right? It’s such a high volume term with a lot of difficulty, that the likelihood of me getting early advisors is, you know, relatively low. So I’m going to take this column here reshuffle. Now I’ve got these terms where those terms where there’s a lot of, there’s not as much volume, but there’s lower difficulties, I can start to prioritize some of those searches as well. So team building, or key performance indicators falls down pretty far, just because it’s got such a high difficulty number, that the likelihood of me getting even more than a fraction of this is pretty low. This is not as good. I like doing it with a scatterplot better. But it is a way to do it just inside of Excel.
Katie Robbert 33:21
So if I, let’s say I, you know, Copy this formula, what am I looking for that because if you scroll back up to the top, Chris, it if you scroll back up to the top of your list, please? Yes, I am. Okay. Um, you know, what you’re saying is don’t go after consultant? Don’t go after sdlc? Because those are terms that already your basis.
Christopher Penn 33:45
Yeah, you would still even with the discounting? It’s it’s, you’ve got still valuable a lot of volume. Yeah. Okay. And this is where again, like the Russian doll thing, now you would take something like sdlc I would take that into a tool like answer the public for example, and and see what we can do with it.
John Wall 34:17
What’s the deal with this? Did they just scrape for questions is that all this is
Christopher Penn 34:23
they they linguistically take, you know, one or two phrases and essentially sort of do a mix and match and then very quickly check keyword volumes to see how it matches up. So in this case, can sdlc be agile? Who presents the sdlc model? How does it work, and so on and so forth. This is sort of like, you know, conceptual map of different ways to ask questions about the topic that you can then write content about.
Katie Robbert 34:50
That’s right. Okay. All right. We’re done.
John Wall 34:54
Yeah, no, no, I’ve never played this.
Katie Robbert 34:59
Well, then You didn’t read my latest newsletter opener, John, where I cover this, Jonathan,
John Wall 35:06
last week of the corner baby.
Katie Robbert 35:09
I would rather you be selling things.
John Wall 35:11
Yes. We can always know what newsletters this,
Katie Robbert 35:15
this is one of the tools that I’ve referenced in terms of you know, how to think about creating useful content. So where you get your content ideas from, it’s literally answering, answering the questions that people are asking. And so you know, doing your keyword research, looking at tools like, answer the public, looking at Reddit, looking at Korra, to see what kinds of questions people are asking about those topics using your social listening tools. And those are all I would think the next steps, once you have your keyword list is, well, what do people want to know about this thing? Because it’s not enough to just say, I’m going to write down what change management is, someone’s already done that a million times, clearly from the keyword volume. So what are the specific questions that people are asking, you know, how do I affect change management? One of the questions I saw recently was like, you know, how do I make change, change management happen when I don’t have any authority in my company? And so those are really good specific questions that we would want to make sure we have answers for that are available to people.
Christopher Penn 36:23
Yep, so the here’s what’s changed match components what what change management is and stuff. Now here’s your your pro move that folks don’t do. You take that export from? Answer the public. Put that back into your keyword Explorer, now you can you can score the questions by volume, they’ve got to be lower volume, for sure. Because they’re right. But now, you see it says a good 569 keywords, but now you’ve got those longer searches, those longer suggestions that you can use for as a starting point for a lot of those questions are modifying our is change management, a competency and so on and so forth. So now you can say okay, well, what are these terms, I should be maybe writing content about what’s changed match which change magic model is best. So you can prioritize that questions list and clean it up a little bit.
Katie Robbert 37:19
And you know, it’s interesting, too, because what we haven’t covered and maybe this is a different show is the way in which people interact with search engines has changed drastically, because it’s not just people sitting in front of a computer and typing in change management. It’s, hey, Google, tell what’s changed management. And they’re speaking in more complete sentences when they’re asking questions to the smart devices, even to my phone. Hey, Google, what’s the weather going to be like in Detroit today? versus Detroit weather?
Christopher Penn 37:54
Right, exactly. So, again, that Russian doll approach can really help because you can now see, okay, change manual. So I think, what phrase would somebody be looking to speak into a device or ask, you know, through voice translation?
Katie Robbert 38:10
What is the best change management template? Where do I get started with change management? And those are the things that I would assume would be questions. And obviously, I will confirm that through my research. And so it sounds like, Chris, what you’ve been able to do in 38 minutes is give me a whole lot of homework of content that I now need to go create, based on our keyword research and questions that people are asking about these keywords
Christopher Penn 38:38
we have, the other thing to think about, is, I guess the the mirror side of this would be taking the same set of keywords and comparing it to the data in Google Search Console to see Do any of your pages rank for anything in these lists? Right? And if the answer is no, then clearly, you know, it’s it’s green fields, you can write whatever you want. But if you are, if you have a more established blog, or a podcast, like marketing over coffee, it’s been around for 15 years, probably one or more posts in your back catalogue match. One of the terms you care about, and so the question would be how do you elevate that? How do you take that and bring it forward? The other thing you can do and be careful with this because for less experienced content practitioners, it’s it is an easy path to the dark side, namely plagiarism. You can also look at the ranking content for a given term and see just language wise what what are the relevant things that that show up so here, all management is change management and HBr article change management models, eight proven examples you can see these are are very relevant pieces of content. And you get a sense thematically for what does well.
Katie Robbert 39:56
That makes sense but yes, word of caution. Do not Then directly copy and paste this and slap your name on it because you will likely 100% get in trouble.
John Wall 40:06
Yes, especially HBr article, so you can’t be the John’s Business Review article. And you do not
Christopher Penn 40:13
want Harvard lawyers coming after you.
Katie Robbert 40:15
No, thank you. I don’t want any lawyers coming after be to be quite honest.
Christopher Penn 40:19
Yes. But hardwood floors.
Katie Robbert 40:22
Yeah. Alright, so it’s I mean, so what we’ve covered, you know, in SEO keyword analysis basics is, there’s a lot of different kinds of keywords. And yes, it’s great to rank for yourself. But unless people know exactly who you are, and what you’re do, you should probably spend some time focusing on those unbranded keywords, the things the types of things you do the services, the questions that you answer the things you want to be known for, and really digging into the keyword analysis, the volume and the difficulty, because if you just wake up one morning, say, I want to be known for water bottles, Okay, I’m gonna start reading about water bottles, what the chances are, you’re probably not going to be known for that thing, because there’s a million other companies that already own or are already ranked for that term. So what else can you do that semantically related to water bottles? And so doing that research upfront? As we say, do you hear requirements, do all of that planning upfront saves you headache down the line where you have to then start to backtrack and undo the things that you’ve done and do them again?
Christopher Penn 41:28
Exactly. And we have not even touched upon the second half of this process, which is, you need to go and get links to your content. Once you’ve got it out there, publish it and it will come does not work. Even in organic search. You need to get attention and traffic to it. So maybe that’s another show.
Katie Robbert 41:47
I think that that’s a future episode for sure.
Christopher Penn 41:52
Alright, well, I guess for now that’ll do it for this week. If you got questions, you know, come hit us up and analytics for market and stuff. We’ll have a link for that in a second. But thanks for tuning in. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast, and a weekly email newsletter at Trust insights.ai slash newsletter. got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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