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Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success
Larry & Will’s Proven Keyword Strategy
In t roduct ionIn this guide, two renowned search marketing experts
share their insights and keyword strategy honed over
decades of collective experience in the industry. You
will learn literally everything you need to know about
keywords for search engine success, including:
• The fundamentals of and theories behind
keyword research
• A logical and time-saving workflow for more
effective keyword research
• Larry’s keyword research and analysis process
• How to best use keywords to help drive your overall
marketing strategy
• Tools and tactical secrets to help execute a smarter
keyword strategy with real business benefits
Larry Kim @larrykim Founder and Chief Technology Officer, WordStream
Larry Kim is the Founder and CTO of WordStream, a
leading provider of online advertiser software and tools
designed to make search marketing campaigns more
organized and profitable. Larry founded WordStream
in 2007 after a successful career in software
engineering, software product management and internet marketing. He is
the author or four award-winning books on software development and an
author for the WordStream blog, Search Engine Journal, Marketing Profs,
Search Engine Watch, Inc.com and a number of other industry-leading
publications.
Will Critchlow @willcritchlow Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Distilled
Will Critchlow is the Co-Founder and CMO of Distilled,
an online marketing agency with offices in London,
New York and Seattle. A mathematics graduate of the
University of Cambridge, Will worked as a programmer
and strategy consultant before founding his agency.
His company organizes the popular SearchLove conference series and is
an author at the Distilled and Moz blogs.
Meet the ExpertsLarry & Will’s Proven Keyword Strategy is brought to you in part by PPC University, a free resource offering accessible, high-quality pay-per-click knowledge to marketers worldwide.
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 2©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 3©2014 WordStream, Inc.
What Is Keyword Research?
Let’s start from the beginning: what is
keyword research?
At its most basic level, keyword
research is the process of
understanding the words and phrases
that people use to find information on the major search
engines when they’re looking for content, products, services
– or they’re looking to find your website.
However, I think it’s actually something much bigger than
that, in the sense that it is a direct insight into the minds of
consumers. It’s as close as we’ll ever get to seeing them in
their own environment, telling us exactly what it is they want.
Old-school market research would have done this through
user panels and surveys. But in all of those scenarios, you’re
working in a somewhat unnatural environment. You’re getting
people to imagine that they want something and you’re
asking them what kind of variation of that thing they’d want.
With keyword research, they’re in that actual environment.
They’re actually looking for it right now and it’s unfiltered. In
that sense, you get really honest answers.
Keyword intelligence is much more than just understanding
the ways people search your websites. It’s really much more
about thinking, “What is it they really want? What is it that
differentiates different customers for them? What is it that
they’re looking to achieve?” You can look for the gaps in that
and see how your USP fits into the market opportunities.
Keyword research is modern market research and we should treat it as such.
The traditional flow for keyword research has you stepping
through this set of processes where you first of all discover
this raw data. These are the raw ways people search when
they’re looking for a certain kind of product or service.
We can filter that based on all kinds of segments. But
fundamentally, we’re just trying to capture data at this stage.
So we discover the ways they search.
Then we need to start making some sense of that. To do
so, we typically group the keywords together into themes or
conceptual areas so we can start drilling down and making
sense of them.
The next stage is one of understanding those themes and
those concepts. We’re not just looking at the words and
phrases that the consumers use, but actually drilling deeper
“Keyword research ... is
a direct insight into the minds of consumers. It’s
as close as we’ll ever get to seeing them in their own
environment, telling us exactly
what it is they want.”
DISCOVER GROUP UNDERSTAND VALUE USE
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 4©2014 WordStream, Inc.
to understand why those are the words and phrases they’ve
used and what they’re actually looking for. Crucially, we’re
looking for how our own company’s product or service or
offering can satisfy that need and also how we can position
ourselves to win their business.
Once we’ve done that, we can value the various different
themes, opportunities and keywords, so we can prioritize
them and put them to work.
Larry is going to talk a little bit more later on about the
two ends of this: the discovery stage and the valuing of
keywords. I want you to focus your attention right now on the
“understanding” element.
This is critical, because when we think about market
research, what we’re looking for are insights – where data is
all well and good and actions are definitely beneficial. But the
magic source, if you like – the thing we’re really looking for
to help us win – is to understand:
• The intent of the consumer
• What they’re looking for
• The intersections between what we have, what they want
and what our competitors maybe aren’t as good at
Keyword research is market research. But it’s also creative planning. It also sits into the work that we
do in our publishing. Brands are increasingly looking like
publishers, especially online where essentially everything
is content. It’s crucial to realize as we do this that it has
changed over the years. If you’ve been doing keyword
research since the early days of the Web, you’ll have realized
that not only have the data sources changed, but user
behavior has changed, as well.
Google’s “Not Provided” Data & the Age of Imperfect Keyword Data
The biggest tactical impact is that we don’t necessarily have
access to all the data that we used to have. The search
engine (particularly Google) has moved towards what they
call “Not provided.” This is where they don’t necessarily tell
you even the keywords that people used to search before
they clicked through and came to your website. This is
limiting in a variety of ways.
Also, the data they put through the same mechanism – the
data that third parties can collect, which you can gather and
query in aggregate – has changed over the years. We don’t
necessarily have access to the same granularity of data in
some areas. However, there’s still more data being produced
than ever before and we still have the opportunity to gather
some of these insights that I’m talking about.
I highly recommend reading this article; it’s a study done by
Conductor before and after the release of the new Keyword
Planner tool. This is a tool from Google that releases data
on the search volumes and competitiveness of different
keywords.
It’s a crucial tool in our armory, but it has evolved over
the years. The old keyword tool was better in many ways,
unfortunately. The new one is perhaps slightly more focused
on the advertising sales that Google needs to do.
Supplement your keyword strategy with
these free tools:
➜ Top 8 Keyword Research Tools of
All Time
➜ WordStream’s Free Keyword Tools Suite
TIP
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 5©2014 WordStream, Inc.
However, Conductor did this study which showed some
discrepancies between the data presented by the old tool
and the new tool.
The biggest takeaway for me here is not those tactical
differences, but more that we should realize that what we’re
looking at here is not perfect data and it never will be.
We’re working with third-party platforms and they have
incentives not to give us all of the data. It doesn’t necessarily
drive what we do; it just drives how we think about the
keyword research.
In particular, it drives how we present it to our clients or our
bosses. It emphasizes even more the need to think about
understanding the insights rather than focusing on exact
ordering and saying, “This keyword is definitely searched for
one and half times as much as that keyword.”
I wouldn’t fixate on the numbers. I see keyword research
largely as a qualitative play and we’re looking for those
insights and understanding.
“Don’t fixate on the numbers. I see keyword
research largely as a qualitative play and we’re
looking for those insights and
understanding.”
Source: Conductor
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 6©2014 WordStream, Inc.
The 80/20 Rule – Does the Traditional Statistical Rule Apply to Keywords?
There’s a more structural reason why it’s difficult to gather
perfect data about keywords. It comes from a theory called
“The Long Tail.” Some of you may be familiar with the book
of the same name. It talks about the differences in human
behavior in online versus offline.
Offline, the Pareto principle, which is also called the 80/20
law, typically holds. It says that 80% of the benefit comes
from 20% of the things. This is the idea that in most retail
operations, for example, 80% of the turnover comes from
20% of the SKUs of the products the business sells.
It holds true across quite a broad range of things in the real
world. But online, it gets turned on its head in a surprising
way. Namely, in the offline world, inventory is expensive. It’s
expensive to hold stock – physical space is at a premium
and there’s a large incremental cost to stocking more things.
In the online world, those things are generally not true.
Having a bigger website is not a lot more expensive than having a smaller website. Because you’re taking
an order and then fulfilling it, you can often utilize just-in-
time practices with your supply chain. It’s not necessarily
more expensive to list a broader catalog than it is to kind of a
smaller catalog.
What this all builds up to is saying that unlike the offline
world where we get this 80/20 rule, it’s typically not the
case online that 80% of the benefit comes from 20% of the
things. In particular, it’s not true about keywords.
TWEET THIS
If you’re not focusing on longtail #keywords
you’re missing out. They make up 70% of
all searches @willcritchlow #SEO
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 7©2014 WordStream, Inc.
If we think about keyword volume, as in “how many people
search for each keyword in aggregate,” it is definitely not true that 80% of the searches come from 20% of the keywords. There’s this incredible long tail of keywords
that are searched very infrequently – maybe only once a
month, or even less frequently than that – and they make up
most of the volume.
Many of them have never even been seen before in the entire life of the Internet up until this point.
That’s the part that really blows my mind. It’s particularly in
this part that we see perfect keyword research is never really
possible.
Solid Keyword Research Is About Understanding
Google has now, at this point, seen trillions of unique
keywords. Yet, supposedly every day, 20 to 25% of the
keywords Google sees are brand-new; they’ve never been
searched for before. This shows us both the power of human
ingenuity to find new ways to search for old things and the
amount of new content being produced. It demonstrates the
amount to which things online are driven by events in the
real world.
All of those elements create search phrases that have never
been on the horizon before. It all adds up to one more reason
why keyword research is really about understanding.
It’s about understanding the shape of the market, rather than perfectly quantifying all those keywords, because
in many cases it’s literally impossible – they haven’t
happened yet. We’re looking for that insight.
Every day, 20 to 25%
of the keywords Google
sees are brand-new;
they’ve never been
searched for before.
Did You Know
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 8©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Tools for Keyword Research
Now let’s run through some tools and
tricks we’ve used at Distilled and that
I’ve used personally to gain some of
that understanding and insight.
The first of the tools we’re going to look
at is “Search Suggest.” This is when you start typing a query
in Google and you get a drop-down list of suggested queries.
Using Search Suggest for Keyword Research
The important thing to gaining this insight, first of all, is to
understand what the tools that you have at hand actually do.
What is Google telling us when it gives us this kind of
Search Suggest list? Google is saying, “We have inventory
for these searches. Essentially, we have answers. Here’s a
list of searches that are related to the one it looks like you’re
typing. If you’d like to perform any of these searches, I know
that I have an answer. I know that I have a webpage that I’m
going to send you to.”
In other words, this is largely driven by publishing data.
When you’re doing Search Suggest, you’re getting insight
into what people have already published a lot of content
about. This is useful for gaining insights not only into what
your competitors are up to, but also into the broader market
space and the themes people have found interesting to write
about in the past. It doesn’t mean you should avoid these,
but it should all feed into your understanding of the plan that
you’re going to build out.
Using Wild Cards in Search Suggest
While you’re at it, you should remember a trick I picked up
from Tom Anthony here at Distilled. You can actually use
wild cards when you’re searching, in order to see a more
complete list of suggested search terms.
In the example below, I’ve used an underscore, but you can
also use an asterisk. If you use an underscore in the middle
of a phrase (in this case, “Best_ for Hiking,”) Google will treat
the underscore as a wild card.
In other words, Google will look for the things that people
have written about that use all of the words that you’ve used
and have something else in that wild card space.
Use wild cards to get a more complete list of suggested search terms by placing an
underscore in the middle of a phrase (e.g.
“Best_ for Hiking”).
TIP
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 9©2014 WordStream, Inc.
The example we’ve used here is “Best_ for Hiking.” Google
has come up with, “Best GPS for Hiking,” “Best Socks for
Hiking,” “Best Day Pack for Hiking,” and “Best Shoes for
Hiking.” This goes straight to where we get to see an outline
of what the marketplace looks like in publisher terms. These
are all things that people have written about on the Internet.
Related Searches
The flip side to publisher volume is searcher volume. To a
large degree, this determines the related searches that are
at the bottom of the page when you’ve completed a search:
Search Suggest is what drops down as you’re typing. But
when you’ve hit enter – when you’ve completed your search
and you scroll to the bottom of the page – you’ll see a section
of related searches. These are related but not necessarily
semantically. You’ll often see things that don’t use the same
words and phrases that you’ve used in your search query, nor
are they related by publisher.
These are related by searcher behavior. These are
searches that other people who did the search you did, also
do. It’s a little bit like Amazon’s “also bought” products list.
They’re interesting partly because they speak to searcher
behavior, but also because they aren’t necessarily exactly
semantically related. They relate to searcher behavior, so
they’re not raw search volume; these are not the most
searched for words and phrases ever. They’re the ways that
people typically refine the search that you just did.
In the above example, I did a search on “New York graphic
designer.” Google tells me the way people typically refine
that search are in these ways. It’s kind of like a search funnel
– these are the searches people do after they’ve done the
search that they’ve started with.
This can be really useful for mapping out the mindset of the consumer and seeing the ways the spaces fit together.
You can see examples of it not necessarily needing to be an
exact match keyword phrase if you do searches for brands. If
you do a search for a luxury car brand like Mercedes, there’s
a fair chance you’ll find related searches for other luxury car
brands that don’t even mention Mercedes – like Audi, for
example. They’re connected through that searcher behavior.
In the path to refine their searches, people sometimes
iterate through a list of car brands. Google knows that, so it
is presenting that to you in related searches. As a marketer,
this really helps you map out the mindset of the consumers
that you’re trying to target.
Using Google’s Keyword Planner Tool for Related Searches
I mentioned the Keyword Planner tool earlier and despite its
limitations, it’s got some really nice functionality. One of the
features it offers is this ability to pull out keywords related to
a URL.
“Google’s Keyword
Planner… helps you explore the edges and the
outer reaches of words that are related to [your
search].”
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 10©2014 WordStream, Inc.
You type in your URL and say, “Dear Google, tell me what
keywords you think people would search for in order to find
this page.”
This is useful on your own pages, to check that your
targeting is correct and you’re coming across the way you
want to come across. But I really liked an article that Dan
Shure wrote based on something he picked up from Josh
Bachynski. He experimented with a number of ways of
putting in URLs that you don’t own in order to get insights
into, say, the shape of the market.
This helps you explore the edges and the outer reaches of
words that are related to the thing that you’re searching for.
The examples they give include things like dropping in the
Wikipedia page, which is a really clever example, not only
because it gets a broad brush set of key phrases related to
the topic. There’s also the nature of the way that Wikipedia is
produced, where it’s collaboratively edited (and largely edited
by your target market) and you get to understand the words
and phrases that your target market uses, rather than the
jargon you might you use yourself.
Shure has some other great examples and I love this one
in the screenshot below. It’s the idea of using Freebase,
which is a structured database Google bought a while ago. It
contains information about nouns, essentially, and tells you
how different concepts are connected together.
TWEET THIS
It pays to think laterally about
#keywords in terms of grouping & in terms of
subject area @willcritchlow #SEO
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 11©2014 WordStream, Inc.
When you’re writing about a topic or a noun Freebase knows
about, dropping that noun page into Keyword Planner can
help you get a really good concept of what the space around
that noun looks like. This all helps you really flesh out your
understanding of how people think and search in these
spaces.
Using Your Website’s Site Search
While you’re doing this, you should definitely pay attention
to the data you’re capturing on your own website. These are
not the searches that people use to reach your website: I’m
talking about site search. These are the searches people
perform once they’re already on your website, if your website
has a search box. It’s really easy to track this stuff. If you’re
using Google Analytics, you just need to set it up to tell
Google what a search results page looks like on your site
and how to pull the keyword out of the URL.
Once you’ve done that, it tracks it automatically and you
can run reports for the most searched for things, unfulfilled
searches, etc.
The great thing about using this data to drive your market
research is that it’s telling you a whole set of things that are
really important when it comes to building out content for
your website. It’s telling you, not only does somebody want
information about this thing, but crucially, that they couldn’t
find it on your website. Either you don’t have it, you haven’t
written this content yet, or it’s not easily findable via your
navigation.
These are problems, but they’re problems in different kinds
of ways. When you see a big, glaring opportunity – when you
see someone searching for something on your website that
should be critical to their interactions with you – it’s a really
good sign that you need to make that content more visible
on your website.
Then, when you get down into the longer-term reaches of
it, it gives you insight into the kinds of things people wish
you would write about. These are more often content gaps
or things that you haven’t written about yet. I just love the
realization of the intent behind that desire and unfulfilled
need. This is a user not only telling you they want something, but that they can’t find it. That’s really
powerful.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a great source of data relating to how
search volume fluctuates over time. This helps you pull
out the times of year when search volume in your industry
spikes.
“The great thing about using this
data to drive your market research is that it’s telling you . . . not only does somebody
want information about this thing, but crucially, that
they couldn’t find it on your
website.”
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 12©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Some of this data will be very obvious and you could just do
it off the top of your head without using a tool. However, it
will also help you identify other things that spike it around
the same time.
One of the tools within Trends lets you say, “Show me related
keywords by seasonality.” In other words, these are not
semantically related – they’re not even necessarily related
in the search funnel. These are things that, when there’s a spike in searches for keyword A, there’s also a spike in searches for keyword B. This data can help
you build out related content and go after new market
opportunities.
When you scroll down the page on Google Trends, you get
to see segmentation via region. Zoomed out, that’s basically
telling you where in the world it speaks your language. But
as you zoom in, you get to see in a more concrete way what
regional variations there are, how it varies by town, city or
state. You get to build out a plan for attacking those things
and you see the related terms on the right-hand side which,
again, are terms that peak at the same times (see below).
Google Trends data can reveal crucial insights
into regional search patterns – invaluable
information for businesses hoping to
drive foot traffic.
TIP
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 13©2014 WordStream, Inc.
This is something we’ve used in the past, particularly to
highlight the differences between the U.K. and the U.S.
Most memorably, we made a recommendation to an
e-commerce retailer that was really into the U.K. market
from the U.S. to point out the differences between the way
people search around the holidays. In the United States, the
big shopping holiday is around Thanksgiving. You have Black
Friday and Cyber Monday – those are the times of year
when people search. Retailers target those very heavily with
content, sales and advertising.
In the U.K., one of the big shopping holidays is Boxing Day,
the day after Christmas. Boxing Day sales are a cultural
event in the U.K. in a similar way to Black Friday.
At the time, at least, the two things were done very
differently in the two countries. There were very few people
running Black Friday sales in the U.K. and very few American
retailers running Boxing Day sales. We pushed that client
and said, “You should be running a Boxing Day sale in the
U.K. and get out ahead of that opportunity.” This geographic
insight helps you understand and drive insight as to why
there might be differences in region or in dialect.
Once you’ve gathered all of this insight and this
understanding, there are a number of actions it should feed
into your marketing plan.
It is vital for businesses operating in
international markets to identify and leverage unique opportunities to
drive traffic using regional data.
Watch the video ➜ International SEO
TIP
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 14©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Keyword Research and Your Marketing Plan
How does this feed into your marketing
plan?
By way of competitor research.
You’ve got these keyword themes,
you’ve got these concepts. You might want to know what a
specific competitor is doing in that area. Google itself is a
great tool for doing that, with structured advanced queries
like the site call-on query or in-URL, in-title, those kinds of
things.
We actually have a free module in our Distilled-U training
platform on Search Operator, if you want to learn more
about it.
You can use these “operators” in a Google search to restrict
to certain things. So this search, for example, is searching
the site Competitor.com.
We’re looking for the exact words in the quotes; the key
phrase, in this case. And by using this across a few different
competitors, you can get an understanding of the shape of
the market and the content that’s done well in that space.
It helps to build out the gaps you can go and target.
Don’t think only about your direct competitors – the people
you think of as obviously being like you. It’s also worth
thinking about your search result competitors, who are the
people who might rank for the queries you want to rank for.
Often, they’re media companies or broader competitors.
For example, if you’re a hotel website and you write about
your local area, a more general travel website might also
write about that same area and potentially conflict with you
on some of those local terms. You can build out a more
complete shape of the market using competitor research. It
should drive your information architecture and your website
structure.
This is the idea that the biggest words and phrases, the
most powerful ones – whether by the most competition
or the most volume – need to be the things that are most
prominent on your website. That’s for a variety of reasons,
not only for search opportunity and the chance of ranking
those things, but also because that’s what users want.
TWEET THIS
Make #keywords & phrases w/ the most
competition & volume the most prominent on
your website @willcrithclow #SEO
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 15©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Let’s go back to the site search example. These are the
things that people need to be able to find very easily on your
website by navigating to them, rather than having to perform
a search on your website.
Keyword research should drive your content strategy.
Have a content calendar designed to hit these high points
and to backfill in as much of the long tail as you can.
➜ Longtail Keywords: A Better Way to
Connect With Customers
FURTHERREADING
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 16©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Actionable Keyword Strategy for Your Business
Let’s switch gears and talk about taking
all of the important information Will
has shared. How do you implement an
actionable keyword strategy for your
business using these insights?
Here’s my take on keyword research: I kind of view it as a
game of global domination. If anyone has ever played the
game Risk, I think this is a really good analogy. The goal of
this game is to run the tables and conquer all of the territory
on the map. That’s how I think of keyword research in terms
of my PPC and SEO combined strategies.
What do I mean by this? Roughly five years ago, I started
blogging. The first post on the WordStream blog was called,
“Welcome to My Blog.” I was very creative, wasn’t I? It got
a total of zero tweets and zero LinkedIn shares and two
Facebook thumbs up. I think one of them was me and maybe
the other was a worker here.
The point is that you start off really small – everyone does.
But this is what effective keyword research can look like over
time.
This is our blog traffic over time, starting in early 2009.
Back then, there was hardly any traffic at all. Today, we’re
generating over 600,000 visitors to the blog every month.
Even more impressively, we continue growing that traffic
consistently at a rate of 8% per month over the last 60
months.
Content is a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t give
up on content due to the delay in results.
Resist the temptation to throw in the towel and keep going. You
WILL see results if you give it time.
TIP
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 17©2014 WordStream, Inc.
The question is: “How do you do something like this?” I will
reveal my secret strategy here.
Specifically, I’m going to show you how I go about picking
and grouping and organizing the different keywords we
use in our marketing strategy. In one of the more important
steps, you will learn to prioritize the keyword research you
generate. Additionally, you’ll learn how to act on the keyword
research in terms of your paid search and organic search
strategies, in order to get lots of traffic and money to your
site so you can just kick up your feet and let the traffic roll in.
Developing Your Keyword Taxonomy
In any global domination strategy, you need a plan. The plan
for me here was to try to make it so that we could show up
in the search results for virtually every conceivable keyword
search relating to Internet marketing. If you’re searching
for “keyword tool,” for example, which is something that
every Internet marketer would search for, I want my website
to show up. Whether you’re searching for landing page
optimization or pay-per-click marketing or link building ... any
possible word you can think of related to Internet marketing,
I want my site to show up.
To dominate this search category, we needed a plan using
a sort of keyword taxonomy. A keyword taxonomy allows
you to come up with all of the different ways that people
are searching for products and services within your industry
niche.
The key here, in the early stages, is that you’ve got to be really exhaustive, specific and relevant.
You need to come up with a big list of all the different ways
people can think of searching for your business.
This list, by the way, can be tens of thousands of keywords
long; it can be hundreds of thousands of keywords. For
WordStream, it’s actually in the hundreds of thousands. I
know some companies that have millions of keywords on
their lists.
You end up with this big, exhaustive list. You then need to
group and organize those keywords into niches. The general
idea here is that not every keyword has a different keyword
intent. There could be multiple search queries with similar intent – they’re kind of looking for the same thing.
You can group and organize keyword searches with similar
intent into smaller lists, also known as “keyword niches.”
➜ An Expert’s Guide to Keyword Research for
SEO Copywriting
➜ Kill It in Content Creation by Knowing
Your Customer Conversion Funnel
FURTHERREADING
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 18©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Once you’ve got these keyword niches, you can prioritize
the work. The reality is that if there are tens of thousands of
keywords or hundreds of thousands of keywords, there are
simply way more keywords than hours in the day to come up
with paid search ads or organic content.
You need to prioritize your work so you’re focusing your energy where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck.
Finally, it’s not just about the theory of coming up with your
keyword lists in grouping and prioritizing it. You have to
take action. You have to balance the research with concrete
actions, such as new content or new ad groups within your
various campaigns.
Larry’s Keyword Research Plan of Attack
I use Google’s Keyword Planner to do keyword research for
my blog. The way it works is you have to type out all the
words that are relevant to your business. For us, these were
things like “PPC Advertising,” “Link-Building,” “SEO,” and
“AdWords.”
Larry’s Keyword Plan of Attack• Figure exactly how people are
searching for your products/services • Be Specific, be Relevant, be Exhaustive.
• Group your keywords into focused keyword niches
• Organize your big list of keywords into smaller lists (“keyword niches”).
• Prioritize your work
• Take action! • It’s important to balance “researching”
with “doing”
TWEET THIS
Be as specific as possible w/ keyword targeting. Traffic may
not soar but you’ll establish a strong
foundation @larrykim #SEO
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 19©2014 WordStream, Inc.
The point is, you can spend a lot of time coming up with
these different seed keywords. Once you have these seed
keywords in your Google Keyword Planner, click “Get Ideas.”
One of the really neat things I love about the Keyword
Planner is that it gives you two lists of keywords. You have
all of the different keywords, as well as expansions of those
different keywords. It also can group those keywords for you
into different niches.
I think that’s pretty interesting because here, you can do
search engine rankings. Remember how it said there are
multiple ways of searching on similar keywords? Well, these
nine different keywords have a very similar intent. They’re all
related to improving search engine rankings or top search
engine rankings.
It might not be necessary to come up with different pages
of content for every one of these keywords. Rather, you
could come up with one article which then includes various
related keywords to cast a wider net and rank on a portfolio
of keywords. Similarly, it might not be necessary to come up
with a different ad group for every one of these keywords;
you could have one ad group contain all of these keywords.
You could point to one landing page and assume that these
were all very similar in intent.
Again, this is very powerful. I happen to love the Keyword
Planner. I know a lot of people don’t like it very much, but
when they redid it last year, they made it much more along
the lines of how I think about my keyword research.
So what do you do with all these keywords?
First, add the keywords to your plan by clicking “Add to
Plan.” You then proceed to a second stage, where you review
various estimates.
What you do here is just enter a large bid. It’s trying to
forecast how many clicks you’ll get based on the bids and
budgets. Let’s assume we have an infinite budget, just to
see what the costs would be if we could soak up all of the
available clicks that were available in our various geo-targets
(United States English on the Google search network). I just
put in hopelessly big numbers so Google doesn’t throttle
back on the numbers.
These are first position rankings – the prices and the
number of clicks, given first page rankings.
Now that I have all the keywords and the estimates, I can
download the plan. What I like to do is download it as an
Excel CSV.
The key fields that I care about a lot are:
• the keyword,
• the monthly search volume,
• the competition estimate,
• and the estimated bid for first place.
You don’t necessarily
want to go after the
most competitive
keywords, because you
are less likely to rank
for them. The key is to
find your sweet spot
and prioritize.
Did You Know
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 20©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Why only those? The reason is because this will help me with
my prioritization. In this example, there are 800 keywords on
this list. However, it’s really important when you’re getting
started that you focus on one ad group at a time and one
organic search listing at a time. You want to make it so that
when anyone does any search relating to the products or
services in your niche, you have something show up – either
your ads or your organic listings or ideally both, if that makes
sense for your business.
How do I know to go after one keyword versus the other keywords?
I prioritize based on this little formula that I will be sharing
with you here.
Larry’s Priority – How to Prioritize Keywords
I’ll call it “Larry’s Priority.” The way I define this priority is I
take the number of monthly searches – in this case, 1,300
searches for website optimization. I multiply that by the
suggested bid. Then I divide it by the competition level on
that keyword.
Let me explain why that works. Basically, it has to do with
the average monthly search volume. That gives you the
extent of the opportunity available here. Obviously, you would
want to prioritize keywords with more searches rather than
less searches. That’s why I start with the average monthly
search volume.
Now, why do I multiply it by the suggested bid? Simply
because paid search has lots of different advertisers bidding
for different keywords.
The price of a keyword can give you an indication of the commercial value of that keyword.
If people are bidding $20 or $30 for that keyword, chances
are it’s a very valuable keyword that you would want to
prioritize, either in your organic or paid search efforts. If it’s
a five-cent keyword, then maybe it doesn’t have as much
commercial content.
For example, I noticed that the term “Google Analytics” has
a suggested bid of just six pennies. The reason for that is
because it’s not a commercial query. People who search for
Google Analytics are mostly looking to just log into Google
Analytics, so they tend to not click on the ads for that
particular keyword. It’s an example of a keyword with low
commercial intent.
I just multiply through the number of searches times the
suggested bid, to get the market capitalization or the total economic value on the table presented by a particular
keyword opportunity. I then divide by competition.
“Make it so that when anyone
does any search relating to the
products or services in your niche, you have something show up – either your
ads or your organic listings or
ideally both.”
• Estimated Volume ~ Opportunity • Estimated CPC ~ Commercial Value • Keyword Competition ~ Likelihood of Success
Priority =
(Estimated Volume) x (Estimated CPC)
Keyword Competition
Larry’s Formula for Keyword Prioritization
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 21©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Why would I divide by competition?
Just because you’re targeting a keyword doesn’t mean you’ll
be fortunate enough to either rank organically or get your
ads in a prominent position. Hopefully, that works out for you,
but there’s no guarantee.
The higher the competition, the less likely it is that you’ll be competitive.
It’s kind of like going into the big leagues. The lower the
competition, the more likely it is you will be successful.
By normalizing, it gives me a better sense of what to target,
based on what is realistic for me to achieve.
By the way, Google reports competition level on a number
between 0.00 to 1.0. It’s sort of a real number, so 1 would
be sort of a very highly competitive keyword. Examples of
this are “Advertising,” for example, or “Online marketing,”
with a score of 0.92. “SEO companies” has 0.97. These are
very close to 1, so that means they’re highly competitive
keywords.
Other keywords, such as SEM with a score of 0.3, show
much lower competition in relation to some of those other
keywords.
What I then do is apply that formula to all my keywords and resort.
It gives me a really good idea of which keywords, out of all
the hundreds of these keywords I have, should be tackled
first.
What I’ve really done is gone through the list and ranked
them. For example, the word “keyword” is somewhere on the
first page.
What I do is rank-order the keywords, based on the
economic value and competition value. Then, we go through
the list, coming up with one piece of themed content for
each primary keyword and/or one ad group that targets that
keyword in the ads.
This is not a get-rich-quick strategy.
We do spend millions of dollars creating content and
promoting the content and managing the AdWords
campaigns and just spending on ad campaigns, in general.
You won’t get rich quick; it’s a disciplined approach where
we created several pieces of content per week over six
years. What you’ll see may be more of a get-rich-slow
strategy, but it’s slow and steady that wins the race.
Hopefully this gives you an idea of how I look at the whole
universe of keywords related to my business.
I systematically go after every keyword, one by one, in priority order.
Then you can get to work on building out a land grab that
just dominates everything.
Try it yourself. Do some searches on keywords related to
Internet marketing. Check to see if content from WordStream
shows up. If you see something like that, that was because
of my plan. It was intentional! You don’t get these results by
accident.
➜ The Difference
Between Brands With
Fans and Anonymous
Content
➜ Cutting Through the
Clutter As the Content
Channel Clogs
➜ Tips From 35 Experts
on Competitive Keyword
Analysis
FURTHERREADING
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 22©2014 WordStream, Inc.
To reiterate, here’s my top secret keyword prioritization formula:
Take the priority, multiply the estimated volume from the
Keyword Planner times the estimated cost-per-click. Then
normalize by the keyword competition level, which is only
available in the Keyword Planner when you export the data
into a spreadsheet file.
If you don’t export the data and you’re only looking at the
Keyword Planner user interface, what you’ll see is something
like high, medium and low – it’s not as helpful. But when
you export it, that number gets translated into a real number
between zero and one.
Again, volume is proportional to the opportunity, estimated cost-per-click is proportional to commercial value and the keyword competition number is proportional to your likelihood of success.
Export the data instead of only using Google’s Keyword Planner user interface to get a real number between zero
and one. Then use that number to calculate
keyword priority.
TIP
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 23©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Applying Keyword Insights to On-Page SEO & PPC
Now, in this case, the Keyword Planner
is giving you paid search competition.
However, I have found that paid search
competition levels are a good proxy for
organic search competition levels as well.
Basically, the same keywords people are bidding on in paid
search and trying to pay lots of money for work in organic
because they’re so valuable. Those tend to be the same
keywords that a lot of smart, organic search marketers are
also trying to target.
There are some parallels there. If you want, you can
definitely swap out the keyword competition metrics with
something like the Moz keyword difficulty tool data or some
other formula that you have internally that is geared towards
estimating keyword competition.
Now let’s talk about how to take those prioritized keyword niches and apply it to on-page SEO. My
favorite website from an SEO perspective is Wikipedia.
Why? Because they think about keyword research the
same way I do. They’re trying to dominate every word in the
encyclopedia. What could be more ambitious than trying to
show up for every search in the encyclopedia?
So how the heck do they rank on every keyword search in
the world?
The answer is: they have very themed, topical content.
In this keyword search for “venture capital,” you can see that
they have a specific URL for this topic.
Within that topic, they not only write about venture capital,
but also leverage the use of variations like “venture
capitalists,” “venture capital,” “ventures,” “VC fund,” etc.
What they’re doing is casting a wider net. This article
ranks for both the primary keyword of the niche and also
the variations of how people search for things. Remember,
people search for the same thing in many different ways.
“My favorite website from an SEO perspective
is Wikipedia. Why? Because
they think about keyword research
the same way I do. They’re trying
to dominate every word in the
encyclopedia.”
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 24©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Another cool thing they do is they have this very strong internal linking structure.
If you happen to have an article related to a keyword within
your article, you can make an internal link. The “private
equity” keyword then goes to the focus page on private
equity. There are other pages on Wikipedia that talk about
venture capital; those would all link back to a designated
page on venture capital.
Having a taxonomy can be very helpful. What it allows you to
do is keep track of all the pages of content you’ve created,
so you know what pages to link to and what pages to link
from as you’re creating your content.
Applying Keyword Research to Smarter Paid Search Strategy
I’m not biased one way or the other – I believe you need to
dominate both the paid and the organic, if possible.
In paid search, paying for keywords can be very expensive.
What you want to do is get these discounts on the cost per
click by having a high Quality Score.
Basically, Google rates the quality of your ads and gives you
a score from one to ten, with ten being a really good quality
ad. A score of one indicates a terrible ad. The higher your
quality score, the better your ad exposure, the lower your
cost-per-click and the cheaper your conversions.
The best way to optimize your pay-per-click (PPC)
campaigns for Quality Score is to get very high click-through
rates. The whole Quality Score algorithm is based
on beating an expected click-through rate for any given ad position.
One really powerful way to get above-average click-through
rates has to do with keyword groupings. On the left in the
image below, where it says “bad,” imagine if I had to group
together these kinds of top-level entities like cat, dog, fish,
birds, snakes, guppies. Say I grouped them together as one
ad for an online pet superstore.
Well, that’s not a very good ad because the person looking
for “dog” may have been looking for dog photos. Or the
person looking for “cat,” who knows? Maybe they were
looking to adopt a cat or something. These keywords are just
hopelessly broad and unspecific.
What you should be doing is breaking them down into that
taxonomy, where you break the keywords into niches or sub-
categorizations. You can then better infer the intent of the searcher and reflect that back in the content of your ads.
You can see how you can make this increasingly granular
by going after canned cat food rather than just cat food, for
example. Then you reflect that back in the ad copy.
These are effectively the keyword niches that we just used
for the organic searches. You use one page per keyword
➜ CASE STUDY: Determining Site
Architecture From Keyword Research
➜ Why Do Keywords Matter for PPC?
FURTHERREADING
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 26©2014 WordStream, Inc.
niche and/or one ad group per keyword niche. Having this
kind of strategy allows you to really dominate the results for
the keywords that matter to your business.
The Importance of Understanding Intent
Different types of keywords have different intent associated
with them, in terms of, “Why was the person searching with
this keyword? What did they want?”
It turns out there are some keywords that are better targeted
for SEO and some keywords that are better targeted for paid
search. And it has to do with the intent of the search.
Commercial queries are the types of queries where
somebody is looking to buy something, such as a stainless
steel dishwasher or Volkswagen Jetta. For keywords where
people are clearly looking to buy, what we find is that the
paid search does much better.
Why is this? Well, it’s because Google also knows that
someone is looking to buy something. In that case, they like
to show their ads.
Often, 85% of the above-the-fold pixels on a Google search
results page will be occupied by ads. Just 8.9% of the page
is dedicated to organic search; you can see how it would
be very difficult for a small or medium-sized business to be
competitive here. There are only one or two spots here above
the fold. Who are those spots going to? They’re going to
Sears and Home Depot, or other fairly big brands. It might be
very difficult to compete against those companies for organic
search.
85% of above-the-fold
pixels on a Google
search results page are
occupied by ads.
Did You Know
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 27©2014 WordStream, Inc.
However, there are many more ad spots – eight Product
Listing Ad spots and three other ad spots above the fold.
You may be better off targeting keywords with high commercial intent using ads.
Now, the opposite of keywords with high commercial intent
are keywords with informational intent. This is where the
searcher is just looking for information – they’re not looking
to buy anything. They just want to learn some information
about something that they’re researching, such as “Who
is Thomas Jefferson?” That person is clearly not looking to
buy something. Most search queries are informational or
navigational in nature, not commercial.
Make every effort to understand user intent.
Unless you know why someone performed
their search, you can’t leverage that intent to provide them with the
results they want.
TIP
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 28©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Google doesn’t even bother showing ads for informational
queries like this in the first place, so these terms would be
very hard to target with ads. Google doesn’t like to bother
users with ads on informational queries. They would rather
just throw up the Knowledge Graph and Wikipedia and
Biography.com results. These are all informational sites
that offer the best answers to these kinds of informational
questions.
Informational keyword searches are actually much better targeted using organic search.
You can rank and answer those questions using long-form
content on your blog.
So why doesn’t Google want to show ads for informational
queries? We’ve discovered that Google expects great
performance of the ads they offer up as answers to
searchers. This is why it’s not possible to bid on the keyword
term, “Who is Thomas Jefferson?” Your ad simply won’t be
as good an answer as one of the organic results. People
aren’t looking to buy anything.
For commercial queries, Google has an expected click-
through rate for your ads. If you’re in the top ad position,
they expect those ads to perform at a 5.5% click-through
rate. If you’re in the third ad spot, well then, those ads better
be getting at least a 3% minimum click-through rate, etc. As
you go into less prominent positioning for your ads, there’s a
lower expected click-through rate.
The key here is that it’s very difficult to go after informational
keywords using paid search, because you’ll get these below-
average click-through rates. The people aren’t looking to buy
something, so they will ignore your ads.
Then, Google actually shuts down the ads that fall way below
the expected click-through rates, because they deemed
them as being kind of a nuisance or totally irrelevant. Why
should they bother showing ads nobody is clicking on?
Google is crowding out the commercial keywords with ads
and giving no room for organic search results on commercial
queries, but the opposite is true for the informational
keywords. All of the space is dominated by organic results
and there’s not even a single ad on the page.
TWEET THIS
Relevant, useful & interesting content is perfect for targeting
informational keyword searches @larrykim
#keywords #SEO
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 29©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Why Does Quality Score Matter?
We learned that achieving a high Quality Score is all about
beating an expected average click-through rate. But why do
you care?
Above-average click-through rates give you discounts on
high click-through rate, high-quality score keywords – you
pay less for each click.
That’s right – a higher Quality Score saves you money.
The low click-through rate keywords--and this is why
paid search won’t work for informational keywords – are
penalized by as much as 400% in extra costs. Increasing the
cost for bad ads is an incentive for advertisers to run better
ads that people actually want to click on.
In fact, here’s how much Quality Score can affect the costs
you pay for each click:TWEET THIS
Quality Score is the single most important metric in paid search
@larrykim #PPC
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 30©2014 WordStream, Inc.
We discussed a lot of very important strategic concepts throughout this
e-book and shared tips and tactics to help you build your business through
better keyword research.
The key points you want to remember and refer back to are:
• Seek to understand the intent of the consumer, what they’re looking for and
those intersections between what we have, what they want and what our
competitors maybe aren’t as good at.
• Get okay with the fact that keyword data is not perfect – and it never will be.
• Understand the Long Tail theory and that many searches every day are
completely new, never before seen.
• Try these tools for keyword research:
❍ Search Suggest
❍ Wild Cards
❍ Related Searches
❍ Google’s Keyword Planner tool
❍ Site Search
❍ Google Trends
• Use your competitor research to identify content opportunities and build out
your site and information architecture.
• Keyword research for SEO & PPC is a game of global domination.
• Develop an exhaustive, specific and relevant keyword taxonomy.
• Build out the keywords relevant to your business using Google’s Keyword
Planner tool.
• Rank and order your keywords so you know exactly where to focus using
the Larry’s Priority formula.
• Focus on themed content and develop a logical internal linking strategy.
• Improve your Quality Scores with smarter keyword grouping.
• Always, always differentiate between commercial and informational intent
and target keywords using the appropriate channel to meet that intent.
• Understand the Quality Score calculation and how mastering this one
component of your paid search campaigns can save you money big time.
In closing, we’d just like to remind you that this is not a get-rich-quick
scheme. It’s not easy, but this is how you can achieve very real, meaningful
and long-term changes in your SEO and PPC results and your business as a
whole.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to
@larrykim or @willcritchlow on Twitter!
Quick Reference Key Takeaways
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 31©2014 WordStream, Inc.
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Addi t iona l Resources
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 32©2014 WordStream, Inc.
Addi t iona l Resources
Online Marketing Education
PPC University is a free educational resource, brought to you by the pay-per-click
advertising experts at WordStream, to help you learn paid search marketing. PPC
is a complicated topic; there’s so much conflicting information out there which
can make it overwhelming for beginners and even for people who have been
doing search marketing for years! PPC U serves as an organized, manageable
framework of PPC courses to teach you everything from the basics to advanced
PPC strategies, all in an easy-to-follow format.
Think of PPC U as a free Google AdWords training program. It’s organized into
three courses. Beginners can start with PPC 101 and then move onto PPC 102
and Advanced PPC. In these three training courses, you’ll learn the basics, best
practices, campaign optimization, and advanced strategies.
Distilled University also has a special offer for Will & Larry’s Proven Keyword
Strategy readers: a special 25% off discount for Distilled Online University, a
fantastic online resource for all things online marketing.
ppc university
Everything You Need to Know About Keywords for Search Engine Success 33©2014 WordStream, Inc.
About WordStream
WordStream Inc. provides search engine marketing software and
services, shares digital marketing thought leadership on their award-
winning blog, and provides paid search education through PPC University.
Founded in 2007, WordStream is the 6th fastest growing private company in
Massachusetts according to Inc. 500|5000, recently surpassed $10 Million
in annual recurring revenue, and helps thousands of customers worldwide
grow their business using paid search marketing.
WordStream’s easy-to-use software allows for more effective paid
search campaigns through the 20-Minute PPC Work Week, a customized
workflow that guides marketers through steps that greatly improve their
AdWords campaigns. Landing Pages & Leads, a feature of the WordStream
Advisor software platform, enables users to create, edit and publish landing
pages that adhere to PPC best practices, and subsequently track their
performance directly in AdWords. WordStream also offers an award-winning
free PPC tool, the AdWords Performance Grader, which evaluates users’ PPC
accounts and provides valuable tips for improvement. To date, WordStream
has evaluated more than 50,000 AdWords accounts and $15 billion in PPC
ad spend.
About Distilled
Distilled is a creative online marketing agency with a love of sharing
knowledge via their blog, DistiledU online university, and interactive training
conferences. Distilled’s mission is to discover, implement and share ways
of helping great businesses succeed online and is trusted for their genuine
insights and intelligent advice. Distilled is unique in their support of learning
and in belief of sharing this with their clients and community.
Distilled is constantly striving to discover new ideas and resources. At
the core of Distilled is the desire to improve. Working with a team of SEO
enthusiasts, stats geeks, developers, designers and creative marketers,
Distilled works to implement their knowledge into clients’ marketing plans in
order to effect change and push them to be exceptional.
