Hello everybody! Thanks for tuning in. In this video we are going to start talking about keyword research. I'm going to show you the tool that we use to of kick-start our keyword research process. Then in later videos we're going to show you some other tools to help grow your keyword list after we build the core list in this video. And finally, we will also show you how to analyze your keyword list to help you find the low hanging fruit to target for your content and editorial calendar.
In 2014 we saw the release of Google's Hummingbird update, which allows Google to better understand the actual context of a search query by analyzing the surrounding words in the query as well as search history. So while, keyword research isn’t quite as important as it used to be since this update it is still important for a few different reasons.
First of all, it helps you come up with new content ideas. Also, It's going to help you track the keywords you want to target for content so you can see which keywords are bringing you the most traffic and where you rank for those keywords.
By tracking those keywords you can find some low hanging fruit phrases to target with your content to help you quickly drive more traffic, which we're going to talk about in a later video.
For this video I want to show you the first tool that we use to kick off our keyword research process, and that's the Google Keyword Planner Tool. Now this tool's going to help us find topics and content ideas that people are interested in. It's also going to help us to understand what people are actually searching for in the search engines to make your content even more effective than it already is.
So to get the Google Keyword Planner Tool you're going to want to navigate to http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner and that's going to take you to the login page which you're looking at right now. So what you want to do is log in using your Adwords login credentials. If you don't have an Adwords account go ahead and create one, so we're going to go ahead and log in here...
Now, the Keyword Planner was created by Google recently to replace Google's old keyword tool. This tool is now designed to simplify the keyword research process and Adwords campaign planning.
To use the tool for our SEO and content marketing keyword research, we're going to want to choose the first option here, which is says, "Search for new keyword and add-group ideas." Here you have three different options for finding keywords. You can either type in a keyword phrase in the top box, you can paste a URL from a website that's related to your keyword, or you can choose an Adword's category.
For this video we're going to actually choose this first option and type in our keyword “content marketing” to find related keywords.
So we type in our phrase here and then we're going to click on 'get ideas'. And once you hit enter Google is going to return a lot of different keywords that are related to your search. It's also going to show you your average monthly search volume here. It's going to show you to the level of competition, and it's going to give you a suggested cost for click in case you're running an Adwords campaign.
You’ll see that there are two ways to really take a look and analyze these keywords. You can look at the Ad group ideas which is the first tab. These are keywords that Google has already grouped together for you by similar topics. You can also look at all the keyword ideas that Google thinks are related to your search.
So, now what you want to do once you get all the keywords back from Google, is to start compiling the keywords that you want to target with your content.
At this stage I'm not going to do any analysis, that's going to come later, I'm just going to start building the list. To do that, the first thing you can do is to start looking at the Ad group ideas to see if there's any that are relevant to our initial keyword. If you find one that sounds good you can either click on the double arrow here to add it to the plan on the right or you can click into the ad group and hit 'add all' right.
Now, once you've added that Ad group to your list on the right, you can open the Ad group by clicking on it and inspect the list to make sure all of the keywords are relevant. If they aren't, you can simply click on the X and that will delete the keyword out of the list.
That's how you're going to start building the list, and it's all going to be compiled over on the right. So you're going to go through all of these different ad groups. Once you've added all of the ad groups that are relevant, you can click on the ‘Keyword ideas’ tab to add even more keywords.
What I like to do in the ‘Keyword Ideas’ tab is to sort by average monthly searches. This brings all the highest searched keywords up to the top. When I do that, you’ll see some very broad keywords in this list, so I might want to do some filtering to narrow that list down even more.
I want to apply a filter to include only keywords that contain the word 'content'. So to do that I click on the edit option for including or excluding keywords on the left sidebar, and I want to only include keywords that contain ‘content’. Once I've done that I just hit enter, and you'll see that it brings back all the keywords that contain the keyword 'content'.
Then I'll take a quick look through all of the different keywords to see if I can see any patterns or any trends, any similar topics or themes. The keyword ‘content marketing plan’ is pretty similar to ‘content strategy’, so I'm just going to add that keyword to the ‘content strategy Ad group’ on the right.
So if I see a theme that doesn’t already have an ad group, what I'll do is create a new ad group on the right-hand, and we'll call this one 'content tips'. This is going to help us to separate our similar themed keywords into topic buckets. So we'll add any keywords that fit into the bucket ‘content tips’ as we browse through the keywords.
I'm seeing a lot of events, so let's create an add-group for 'content events', and that will include any keywords having words like conferences, trade shows, etc. So I can add content marketing events to that one.
You want to go through this whole list of keywords and add them to the topic buckets or ad groups on the right.
Once you're satisfied with your list, you can download the list by clicking the download button, choose Excel CSV, include the average monthly searches, competition, and other statistics, and hit download. Choose a name and save the file.
When you open it up, you've got your ad group or buckets in the first column, you've got the keyword in the second column, and in the rest of your data in the remaining columns in case you want to do some further analysis.
So that is how we kick off our content marketing keyword research. In the next few videos we're going to show you how to use some different tools to start adding more keywords to your list, so stay tuned for those videos. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.
