Transcript of this Keyword Research Tutorial:

[00:00:00] -Hello. Hello. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about keyword research for content planning. I like to do this research before any content campaign, whether it be social seo, or even when I’m just creating a new brand or expanding a content plan. The sales pitch of this video is for 10 bucks and 20 minutes of your time. You can do all the keyword research that you’re gonna need for the foreseeable futur

[00:00:28] But why start with key words?

[00:00:30] In my opinion, keywords are clues to what your customer may want.

They’re hashtags.

[00:00:36] They can go in your captions, so TikTok has some context around your video, or you can go the traditional way and use them as search terms in organic or paid marketing .

[00:00:45] They can be customer questions, and those customer questions can feed your FAQ, social channels, emails and wherever you really need to put stuff.

[00:00:53] So in my opinion, keywords are the answer, or at the very least, an important foundational block of [00:01:00] your content strategy.

[00:01:01] With all that mumbo jumbo out of the way, I have to ask you to please like and subscribe so that my ego will be fulfilled and soar to the high heavens.

[00:01:11] Why not free keyword research? Well, it is a hundred percent possible to do this without a paid tool. I am too old to spend my time doing it that way but if you’re young with time to waste or just really are energetic to figure it out, then go forth and do my friend. I’ll help you. If you got a question, put it in the comments.

[00:01:32] So traditionally, where do keyword ideas come from? Search results pages. You can go to Google, type it in, see what the related queries say at the bottom of the page. You can use the Google keyword tool tied to the ad product. It gives you a good estimation of the interest and the amount of content that’s out there.

[00:01:53] You can look at social hashtags, their usage. The implied activity gives you a sense of the current buzz [00:02:00] around a topic. You can use a tool like SEM  Rush or Word Stream, which cost in the hundreds of dollars every month.

[00:02:08] Or there’s the tool I’m gonna show you right now, which is Keywords Everywhere.

[00:02:12] Keywords everywhere is an extension for Chrome and Firefox that basically brings the keyword data into your searches on the different sites. You can get it by clicking the link in the description or going to keywords everywhere.com.

[00:02:28] To set it up, all you gotta do is click the install button it will open the Chrome Store. You click add to Chrome. Give it the permissions that it requests.

[00:02:38] And then, as you can see here, it adds an icon that gives you the ability to turn the tool off and on. We’ll get into how to use it specifically in a few minutes.

[00:02:48] First, I want to quickly go through the steps we’re going to do when building a good base of keywords to use for our project. First of all, we’re gonna gather the raw data. As I said [00:03:00] earlier, you can use any tool in this video. I’m using Keywords Everywhere, but the same process applies.

[00:03:06] So pick your weapon,

[00:03:08] Once we’ve gathered all the raw data, we’re going to categorize it into sections that make sense around themes, topics, base keywords. However, we want to split our plan out to use the data that we’ve collected.

[00:03:21] Once we get everything categorized and sorted, we’re going to prioritize, look for the biggest opportunities, or at the very least, the opportunities that are best suited for our campaign. Then you’re gonna create as much content as you can for all the channels that your campaign needs.

[00:03:38] Now, if you are looking to plan a campaign, I have a video on how to map your channels, as well as another on organizing the copy decks to keep track of all of your content. So go ahead and take a look at those if you do need help with the other steps of planning your campaign.

[00:03:56] The fifth step, which is not gonna be covered in this video, is around [00:04:00] auditing and republishing to continue to improve your content as you go.

[00:04:04] In this video, we’re gonna focus on the first three steps. So go ahead, open up your browser with Keywords Everywhere installed and follow along.

[00:04:13] now I’m gonna run you through a real world example of how I would use this when working on a project. Don’t focus too closely on the content. The main takeaway here is the concepts. Look at the steps and the thought process. I’m applying and put it on your thing.

[00:04:29] Also, like and subscribe.

[00:04:31] For my example, we’re going to use heavy.business. It is a metal slash office themed apparel site. We’re looking to add a blog and generate some social content, and to do so, we’re going to do some keyword research.

[00:04:46] As I mentioned, you will need some credits applied to your Keywords Everywhere account to follow along. In this $10, we’ll give you a hundred thousand credits. That’s more than enough for multiple projects, [00:05:00] so just go ahead, put it in there. One thing to be aware of is they do expire annually, so if you don’t use your a hundred thousand.

[00:05:07] Then you’re gonna lose them and have to buy them again next year. But odds are you’ll have generated so much money from your content planning. Another 10 bucks won’t matter to you.

[00:05:18] Before we get started here, you’re going to want to start a new spreadsheet to store all the keyword data. We’re just gonna dump it all here and then sort it out

[00:05:26] I’m just gonna turn on my Keywords Everywhere and make a search. In my case, I’m just gonna reload the page. Now we’re doing it broadly just to get a sense of the market you could also start more specific, but I like to go broad and then narrow into it,

[00:05:42] When the searches returned, the toolbar does a lot of interesting data collection for us. We now know there’s about 246,000 monthly searches.

[00:05:53] It also gives us some difficulty metrics up here. If we’re doing SEO work, 84 out of a [00:06:00] hundred means it’s quite difficult. So if your site is newer, you’re gonna be looking for lower, longer tail scores there. But we’ll get into that as we collect our data.

[00:06:09] It also provides trend for the term you’re currently searching.

[00:06:13] As you can see, heavy metal is going outta style, but heavy metal will never die.

🤘

[00:06:18] Down below the answer boxes. Here is where the real action is happening. It’s added these boxes with trending keywords, related keywords the people also searched for, and long tail keywords. So long tail keywords.

[00:06:33] If you’re not familiar with that term, I recommend you read the Moz Intro to SEO. It’ll tell you everything you need to know and not, derail this video.

[00:06:43] Appear in the trending keywords. You have an example of where you need to be filtering when you’re doing searches. This broad heavy metal in chocolate is probably related to food illness and not related to our satirical little metal fan [00:07:00] site.

[00:07:00] Heavy metal guitars, heavy metal parking lot. It’s a film, so maybe we could do some content around that..

[00:07:06] If you did want to do some curation in the tool, you can click the little stars and then when you go up to my favorite keywords, it’ll open a new tab and show you that data. You can export it into the different formats here. I, however, prefer more of a big data dump approach, so we’ll just copy everything to the spreadsheets.

[00:07:33] So there’s some good ideas here. Heavy metal bands, definitely content to be done. You’ll notice it’s adding quite a bit more historical data for the non trending keywords. Also, it’s December right now so it’s not really as surprising to see things like heavy metal Christmas songs coming up in the list.

[00:07:55] King Diamond. No presents for Christmas is the song you’re looking for. If that’s a search you’ve ever [00:08:00] done,

[00:08:00] If you’re looking for thematic keywords or categories of things, the people also search for tab in the long tail keywords are super helpful.

[00:08:10] I just like to take everything and dump it into the sheet and then I’ll sort it out later.

[00:08:15] If you do want to explore one of the related terms, you can just click on it.

[00:08:19] And it will search Google with that term and provide you the same list of data.

[00:08:24] Now the related keywords on this one looks like it has tons of good stuff. Things like eighties heavy metal songs. That volume is low, but it’ll add up over time and we can probably put together a nice little article around it.

[00:08:36] I’m just gonna copy all of this stuff to my sheet

[00:08:41] and then pick another one, that has some higher volume. So best heavy metal songs, and again, I’m just copying all of this stuff. We’re gonna do all of the analysis once we get the data. So right here, this is taking up, you know, a few minutes of your time.

[00:08:58] It looks super [00:09:00] ugly, but it’s about to get way better once we do a little bit of spreadsheet Magic

[00:09:05] I’ll pick one more and we’ll copy them all again

[00:09:10] There’s bound to be duplicates in here and that’s totally fine. We’re gonna filter them out. So there you have it. A huge, messy spreadsheet of keywords.

[00:09:20] The first thing we’re gonna do is just highlight the whole thing.

[00:09:23] All data, all rows.

[00:09:25] We’re going to Sword range. Say it has a column, and then just search by whatever makes sense.

[00:09:32] Now, somewhere in this list, there’ll be a big row of keywords. So you can just take those, delete ’em, take the last one, Cut it and up at the top, just paste it over top,

[00:09:49] do a little formatting so it’s easier to look. One of my mentors told me, you can judge a person by the clarity of their spreadsheets, so always take a [00:10:00] few minutes to make sure your spreadsheet looks its best. I personally like to do a little this, maybe get crazy and freeze the pane and boom, there you go.

[00:10:16] Now quick scan down column A here. You see there’s a lot of duplicates. So we’re just gonna go Data > Data Cleanup > Remove Duplicates, tell it that it has a header row, and then choose the row we want to remove duplicates from, which is the keywords and HAZA! 18 duplicates removed. And we have a clean little list of 76 different directions we could take our content.

[00:10:47] I’ll make this a bit bigger and just scanning through these, I already see some categories that I could break out and then do more research on. So best drum and bass parts, [00:11:00] so instrument based topics, era based topics, recommendations, classics. Consumer products, holidays, instruments, specific songs for specific actions. There’s already a lot of content ideas kind of brewing here.

[00:11:25] If I’m doing this research for an SEO play, I’m going to also want to just search and sort my data for volume. So you just select the whole thing. And then sort, the range has a row, and we want to sort by volume. Highest to lowest, and then we go back up to the top here and we have a new sort specific around search volume, if that’s what we were looking to do.

[00:11:53] Now for my plan, I am looking for other ideas, so some of these ones [00:12:00] with less volume could still be super helpful for things like social content. So best metal music of 2020. , maybe I do a Twitter thread that’s a wrap up, a TikTok that runs through my favorite albums. Or we say, which billboard metal charts are best for killing it to spreadsheets to lots of ideas can come from this raw material,, but always keep in mind, keywords are raw material. You’re not just looking to plug them into your content. You’re looking to use them to build ideas and serve your target demographic.

[00:12:38] So there it is, a few dollars, a few minutes you’ve gathered, categorized, prioritized. Now you can start looking at content ideas that sit on top of the keywords. And that is the key thing about keywords. They’re just words. You still need to use those words inside of good ideas to make [00:13:00] engaging content.

[00:13:01] Your audience will actually like the days of stuffing words on a page and ranking high in Google and making millions of dollars. Many years ago, so focus on quality not just keywords

[00:13:15] With that little rant out of the way, let me know what you thought of this video in the comments below. Please like, subscribe, check out the other videos and let me know if you have questions about how to use this tool in your own content plan.

[00:13:29] As I mentioned, we will go into points four and five. Further in future videos. I’ll show you some hacks, some tips, some tricks, some free throws, some kick flips, a bunch of stuff. If you have questions about any of the information I just showed around gathering, categorizing, and prioritizing keywords, put it in the comments below.