Transcript
Put simply, keywords are the phrases that people type into search engines when they’re looking for things online.
For example, if somebody needs a plumber in Manchester, they might search for something like plumber Manchester or maybe emergency plumber near me or 24-hour plumbers Manchester, etc.
And if you can get your website to come up when people search for that, it can be a complete game-changer for your business. So, in this lesson, I’m going to guide you through what keywords are, how to find them and most importantly, how to use them to grow your business online.
When somebody searches for scaffolding higher prices, they’re wanting to find a page that provides them with information about the prices of scaffolding. It doesn’t matter how well SEO optimized your pages for the scaffolding higher prices keyword. If your page doesn’t provide the information and therefore doesn’t meet their intent, they’re going to leave your website pretty quickly.
This alone would be a strong enough signal for Google to realize that your page isn’t a very good fit for that keyword. However, in most cases, Google is smart enough to figure this out long before it would ever rank in a relevant page for a competitive keyword.
Now that you understand what search intent is, the next step is understanding the different types of intent that sit behind the keywords. In general, keywords fall into four intent categories. And once you understand these, choosing the right keywords and the right page type becomes a lot easier.
Now, the first one we’re going to look at is called informational keywords. These are used when people want to learn something. For example, someone might search something like how to stop my tap leaking or what does an electrician do? Or how often does my boiler need to be serviced and so on.
At this stage, the person isn’t looking to buy anything. They’re just trying to understand the problem, learn how something works, or get an answer to a question. And because of that, these keywords work best with educational content like blog posts or videos. Trying to rank a service page for informational keyword usually doesn’t work very well because it doesn’t give the person what they’re actually looking for.
The next type of keywords are called navigational keywords. These are used when someone already knows where they want to get to. For example, they might search for Facebook login or BBC weather or HSBC online banking or something like that. And in these cases, the user isn’t exploring the options. They’re just trying to get to a specific website or platform as quickly as possible. And because of that, navigational keywords are only usually worth targeting if they relate directly to your own brand. Optimizing for your company’s name or your branded searches is definitely very important, but trying to rank for another business’s navigational keywords rarely works.
Google already understands the user’s intent and will almost always send them straight to the site that they’re actually looking for.
Next, we have commercial keywords. Commercial keywords are used when someone is considering a purchase, but they haven’t made a final decision yet. These are search terms like best portable AC for a bedroom, iPhone versus Samsung Galaxy, best laptop, best flea treatment for dogs, top marketing agencies, and so on.
At this stage, the person knows that they have a problem. They know that they’re likely to pay someone to solve it, but they’re just comparing options, prices, approaches or providers before taking any action. These types of keywords are going to work really well with comparison pages, things like pricing guides, pros and cons, articles and pages that explain the different options honestly and clearly.
Now, if you get these right, you’re going to build trust before the person is ready to buy, which puts you in a very, very strong position when they are ready to buy.
Finally, we have what are known as transactional keywords. And these are the ones that are used when someone is pretty much ready to take action. They’re going to search for something like TV deals, emergency plumber Manchester, electrician near me, washing machine repair, buy iPhone, and so on.
Now, by the time somebody types in one of those searches, they already know what they want, and they’re just looking for the right company to go with. And that’s why these are usually going to be the most valuable keywords for most businesses because people typing in these search terms are already very, very close to buying.
Pages targeting transactional keywords should make it very easy for the user to take that next step. Whether it’s submitting an inquiry form, clicking a buy now button or calling a very prominent number on the website.
When you first start to go through the process of researching keywords, you’ll likely notice hundreds of potential keywords that you could target. But before you start creating any content, you must always ask yourself these three important questions.
Number one is, could this turn into a sale or lead? Number two is, does it increase brand exposure? And number three is, is it relevant to my business?
A lot of businesses make the mistake of targeting keywords just because they get a lot of searches. But if those searches aren’t from potential customers, there’s often a little point.
For example, you might run a scaffolding company and notice that how to build scaffolding gets a good amount of monthly searches. You might look at the SERP and determine that you could do a better job of creating a guide than most of the current people are doing. But most of the people who are searching for this are trying to put up scaffolding themselves and not hire a company to do it for them.
So your time would actually be much better spent focusing on targeting keywords that are more likely to bring potential customers into your website instead. That might mean targeting terms with lower search volumes, but the traffic you get is going to be much more valuable to your business.
It’s always going to be better for you to have 100 people on your website who are interested in hiring your company than 10,000 people who are not.
Finding the right keywords is all about understanding how your customers actually search for your products and services. And this is where it gets quite interesting because customers often search for things in a very different way than what many business owners expect.
While you might call yourself a residential waste management specialist, your potential customers might actually be searching for house rubbish collection. And the truth is, you often don’t know until you start doing the keyword research.
And so, in this section of the video, we’re going to be taking a look at some ways to do that.
There are various different keyword research tools like Ahrefs and Moz that can show you how people search in your industry. And one of the easiest ways to do this is using Ahrefs.
What you do is you type in your competitor’s website address and then you click on organic keywords to see which keywords they’re getting traffic from.
Now, you can actually run all of your competitors through here and then quickly get a good idea of the way that people are searching for your services and what the keywords are that you should be going after.
Another good idea is to use Ahref’s keyword explorer. This tool allows you to enter what’s known as your seed keyword, which is basically a broad term that describes the main product or service you offer.
So, for example, if you’re a plumber, your seed keyword would be plumber. If you run a scaffolding company, your seed keyword would be scaffolding. If you run an appliance shop, one of your seed keywords might be washing machine or tumble dryer and so on.
Now, once you enter that seed keyword into Ahref, you’ll be able to get back a load of related terms that people use that include that phrase.
And this is where you’re going to find these valuable longtail keywords, which are basically the more specific searches like emergency plumber in Manchester, scaffolding for high-rise buildings, black AKG washing machines, etc.
And even though these keywords are going to have lower search volumes than the very broad terms, they’re often much easier to rank for and far more valuable because the person searching for longtail keywords is really clear about what they’re looking for.
Another really useful place to find keyword ideas is Google Search Console. Now, it’s worth saying up front with this one that it won’t be very helpful if your website is either brand new or if it doesn’t have much content on it yet.
Because if Google doesn’t have much to work with, it’s not going to have much data in there. But if your site has been around for a little while, you can go into the performance report and then have a look through the actual search terms that people are typing into Google when your website is appearing in the search results.
And what’s really important here is that you don’t need to be ranking well for a keyword to have it show up in the report. And if you do see a keyword in here that’s getting a good amount of impressions that you’ve not yet targeted, that’s a really good indication that if you did decide to target it properly, you’ve got a very good chance of ranking for it.
So, now that you understand what keywords are, the different types of keywords, and how to find the right ones to target, the next step is to target them using on-page SEO. And that’s exactly what we’re going to be covering in the next lesson.