5 Tips to Get Off the Content Marketing Struggle Bus & Create Content Your Audience Will Love

Posted by ronell-smith

(Original image source)

The young man at the back of the ballroom in the Santa Monica, Calif., Loews hotel has a question he's been burning to ask, having held it for more than an hour as I delivered a presentation on why content marketing is invaluable for search.

When the time comes for Q&A, he nearly leaps out of his chair before announcing that he's asking a question for pretty much the entire room.

"How do I know what content I should create?" he asks. "I work at a small company. We have a team of content people, but we're typically told what to write without having any idea if it's what people want to read from us."

When asked what the results of their two blog posts per week was, his answer told a tale I hear I often: "No one reads it. We don't know if that's because of the message or because [it's the] wrong audience for the content we're sharing."

In fishing and hunting circles circles, there's a saying that rings true today, tomorrow, and everyday: "If you want to land trophy animals, you have to hunt in places where trophy animals reside."

Content marketing is not much different.

If you want to ensure that the right audience consumes the content you design, create and share, you have to "hunt" where they are. But to do so successfully, you must first know what they desire in the way of bait (content).

For those of us who've been involved in content marketing for a while now, this all sounds like fairly simplistic, 101-level stuff. But consider this: While we as marketers and technologists have access to sundry tools and platforms that help us discern all sorts of information, most small and mid-size business owners — and the folks who work at small and mid-size businesses — often lack the resources for most of the tools that could help flatten the learning curve for "What content should I create?"

If you spend any time fishing around online, you know very well that the problem isn't going away soon.

Image courtesy of Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs

For small and mid-size business looking to tackle this challenge, I detail a few tips below that I frequently share during presentations and that seem to work well for clients and prospects alike.

#1—Find your audience

First, let's get something straight: When it comes to creating content worth sharing and hopefully linking to, the goal is, now and forevermore, to deliver something the audience will love. Even if the topic is boring, your job is to deliver best-in-class content that's uniquely valuable.

Instead of guessing what content you should create for your audience (or would-be audience), take the time to find out where they hang out, both online and offline. Maybe it's Facebook groups, Twitter, forums, discussion groups, or Google Plus (Yes! Google Plus!).

Whether your brand provides HVAC services, computer repair, or custom email templates, there's a community of folks sharing information about it. And these folks, especially the ones in vibrant communities, can help you create amazing content.

As an example, the owner of a small automobile repair business might spend some time reading the most popular blogs in the category, while paying close attention to the information being shared, the top names sharing it, and common complaints, issues, or needs that commonly arise. The key here is to see who the major commenters, sharers, and influencers are, which can easily be gleaned after careful review of the blog comments over time.

From there, she could "follow" those influencers to popular forums and discussion boards, in addition to Facebook groups, Google Communities, and wherever else they congregate and converse.

The keys with regard to this audience research is to find out the following:

• Where they are
• What they share
  
• What unmet needs they might have

#2—Talk to them

Once you know where and who they are, start interacting with your audience. Maybe it's simply sharing their content on social media while including their "@" alias or answering a question in a group or forum. But over time, they'll come to know and recognize you and are likely to return the favor.

A word of warning is in order: Take off your sales-y hat. This is the time for sincere interaction and engagement, not hawking your wares.

Once you have a rapport with some of the members and/or influencers, don't be shy about asking if you can email them a quick question or two. If they open that door, keep it open with a short, simple note.

With emails of this sort, keep three things in mind:

• Be brief
• Be bold
• Be gone

Respect their time — and the fact that you don't have enough currency for much of an ask — by keeping the message short and to the point, while leaving the door open to future communication.

#3—Discern the job to be done

We've all heard the saying: "People don't know what they want until they've seen it."

Whether or not you like the bromide, it certainly rings true in the business world.

Too often a product or service that's supposedly the perfect remedy for some such ailment falls flat, even after focus groups, usability testing, surveys, and customer interviews.

The key is to focus less on what they say and more on what they're attempting to accomplish.

This is where the Jobs To Be Done theory comes in very handy.

Based primarily on the research of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a framework for helping businesses view customers motivations. In a nutshell, it helps us understand what job (why) a customers hires (reads, buys, uses, etc.) our product or service.

Christensen writes...

"Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the 'average' customer in their category may do — but they often buy things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve. With an understanding of the 'job' for which customers find themselves 'hiring' a product or service, companies can more accurately develop and market products well-tailored to what customers are already trying to do."

Christensen's latest book provides a thorough picture of the "Jobs To Be Done" theory

One of the best illustrations of the JTBD theory at work is the old saw we hear often in marketing circles: Customers don't buy a quarter-inch drill bit; they buy a quarter-inch hole.

This is important because we must clearly understand what customers are hoping to accomplish before we create content.

For the auto repair company preparing to create a guide for an expensive repair, it would be helpful to learn what workarounds currently exist, who are the people experiencing the problem (i.e., DIYers, Average Joes, technicians, etc.), how much the repair typically costs, and, most important, what the fix allows them to do.

For example, by talking to some of the folks in discussion groups, the business owner might learn that the problem is most common for off-roaders who don't feel comfortable making the expensive repair themselves. Therefore, many of them simply curtail the frequent use of their vehicles off-road.

Armed with this information, she would see that the JTBD is not merely the repair itself, but the ability to get away from work and into the woods on the weekend with their vehicles.

An ideal piece of content would then include the following elements:

• Prevention tips for averting the damage that would cause the repair
• A how-to video tutorial of the repair
• Locations specializing in the repair (hopefully her business is on the list with the most and best reviews)

A piece of content covering the elements above, that contains amazing graphics of folks kicking up dirt off-road with their vehicles, along with interviews of some of those folks as well, should be a winner.

#4—Promote, promote, promote

Now that you've created a winning piece of content, it's time to reach back out the influencer(s) for their help in promoting the content.

First, though, ask if what you've created hits the threshold of incredibly useful and worth sharing. If you get a yes for both, you're in.

The next step is to find out who the additional influencers are who can help you promote and amplify the content.

One simple but effective way to accomplish this is to use BuzzSumo to discern prominent shares of your amplifiers' content. (You'll need to sign up for a free subscription, at least, but the tool is one of the best on the market.)

After you click "View Shares," you'll be taken to a page that list the folks who've re-shared the amplifier's content. You're specifically looking for folks who've not only shared their content but who (a) commonly share similar content, (b) have a sizable audience that would likely be interested in your content, and (c) might be amenable to sharing your content.

As you continue to cast your net far and wide, a few things to consider include:

• Don't abuse email. Maintain the relationships by offering to help them in return as/more often than you ask for help yourself.
• Share content multiple times via social media. Change the title each time content is shared, and look to determine which platforms work best for a given message, content type, etc.
• Use engagement, interaction, and relationship to inform you of future content pieces. Don't be afraid to ask, "What are some additional ideas you'd be excited to share and link to?"

#5—Review, revise, repeat

The toughest part of content marketing is often understanding that neither success nor failure are final. Even the best content and content promotion efforts can be improved in some way.

What's more, even if your content enjoys otherworldly success, it says nothing about the success or failure of future efforts.

Before you make the commitment to create content, there are two very important elements to adhere to:

1.) Only create content that's in line with your brand's goals. There's lots of good ideas for creating solid content, but many of those ideas won't help your brand. Stick to creating content that in your brand's wheelhouse.

2.) This line of questioning should help you stay on track: "What content can I create that's (a) in line with my core business goals; (b) I'm uniquely qualified to offer; and (c) prospects and customers are hungry for?"

My philosophy of the three Rs:

• Review: Answer the questions "What went right?", "What can we do better?", and "What did we miss that should be covered in the future?"
• Review: You'll need to determine the metrics that matter for your brand before creating content, but whatever they are ensure they're easy to track, attainable, and, most important of all, have real meaning and value.
• Repeat: Successful content marketing efforts occur primarily through repetition. You do something once, learn from it, then improve with the next effort. Remember, the No. 1 reason we have less and less competition each year is many aren't willing to pay the price of doing the little things over and over.

This post is, by no means, an exhaustive plan of what it takes to create effortful content. However, for the vast majority of brands struggling with where to start, it's exactly what the doctor ordered.

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Google's War on Data and the Clickstream Revolution

Posted by rjonesx.

Existential threats to SEO

Rand called "Not Provided" the First Existential Threat to SEO in 2013. While 100% Not Provided was certainly one of the largest and most egregious data grabs by Google, it was part of a long and continued history of Google pulling data sources which benefit search engine optimizers.

A brief history

1. Nov 2010 - Deprecate search API
2. Oct 2011 - Google begins Not Provided
3. Feb 2012 - Sampled data in Google Analytics
4. Aug 2013 - Google Keyword Tool closed
5. Sep 2013 - Not Provided ramped up
6. Feb 2015 - Link Operator degraded
7. Jan 2016 - Search API killed
8. Mar 2016 - Google ends Toolbar PageRank
9. Aug 2016 - Keyword Planner restricted to paid

I don't intend to say that Google made any of these decisions specifically to harm SEOs, but that the decisions did harm SEO is inarguable. In our industry, like many others, data is power. Without access to SERP, keyword, and analytics data, our and our industry's collective judgement is clouded. A recent survey of SEOs showed that data is more important to them than ever, despite these data retractions.

So how do we proceed in a world in which we need data more and more but our access is steadily restricted by the powers that be? Perhaps we have an answer — clickstream data.

What is clickstream data?

First, let's give a quick definition of clickstream data to those who are not yet familiar. The most straightforward definition I've seen is:

"The process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting aggregate data about which pages users visit in what order."
– (TechTarget: What is Clickstream Analysis)

If you've spent any time analyzing your funnel or looking at how users move through your site, you have utilized clickstream data in performing clickstream analysis. However, traditionally, clickstream data is restricted to sites you own. But what if we could see how users behave across the web — not just our own sites? What keywords they search, what pages they visit, and how they navigate the web? With that data, we could begin to fill in the data gaps previously lost to Google.

I think it's worthwhile to point out the concerns presented by clickstream data. As a webmaster, you must be thoughtful about what you do with user data. You have access to the referrers which brought visitors to your site, you know what they click on, you might even have usernames, emails, and passwords. In the same manner, being vigilant about anonymizing data and excluding personally identifiable information (PII) has to be the first priority in using clickstream data. Moz and our partners remain vigilant, including our latest partner Jumpshot, whose algorithms for removing PII are industry-leading.

What can we do?

So let's have some fun, shall we? Let's start to talk about all the great things we can do with clickstream data. Below, I'll outline a half dozen or so insights we've gleaned from clickstream data that are relevant to search marketers and Internet users in general. First, let me give credit where credit is due — the data for these insights have come from 2 excellent partners: Clickstre.am and Jumpshot.

Popping the filter bubble

It isn't very often that the interests of search engine marketers and social scientists intersect, so this is a rare opportunity for me to blend my career with my formal education. Search engines like Google personalize results in a number of ways. We regularly see personalization of search results in the form of geolocation, previous sites visited, or even SERP features tailored to things Google knows about us as users. One question posed by social scientists is whether this personalization creates a filter bubble, where users only see information relative to their interests. Of particular concern is whether this filter bubble could influence important informational queries like those related to political candidates. Does Google show uniform results for political candidate queries, or do they show you the results you want to see based on their personalization models?

Well, with clickstream data we can answer this question quite clearly by looking at the number of unique URLs which users click on from a SERP. Personalized keywords should result in a higher number of unique URLs clicked, as users see different URLs from one another. We randomly selected 50 search-click pairs (a searched keyword and the URL the user clicked on) for the following keywords to get an idea of how personalized the SERPs were.

1. Dropbox - 10
2. Google - 12
3. Donald Trump - 14
4. Hillary Clinton - 14
5. Facebook - 15
6. Note 7 - 16
7. Heart Disease - 16
8. Banks Near Me - 107
9. Landscaping Company - 260

As you can see, a highly personalized keyword like "banks near me" or "landscaping company" — which are dependent upon location —receive a large number of unique URLs clicked. This is to be expected and validates the model to a degree. However, candidate names like "Hillary Clinton" and "Donald Trump" are personalized no more than major brands like Dropbox, Google, or Facebook and products like the Samsung Note 7. It appears that the hypothetical filter bubble has burst — most users see the exact same results as one another.

Biased search behavior

But is that all we need to ask? Can we learn more about the political behavior of users online? It turns out we can. One of the truly interesting features of clickstream data is the ability to do "also-searched" analysis. We can look at clickstream data and determine whether or not a person or group of people are more likely to search for one phrase or another after first searching for a particular phrase. We dove into the clickstream data to see if there were any material differences between subsequent searches of individuals who looked for "donald trump" and "hillary clinton," respectively. While the majority of the searches were quite the same, as you would expect, searching for things like "youtube" or "facebook," there were some very interesting differences.

For example, individuals who searched for "donald trump" were 2x as likely to then go on to search for "Omar Mateen" than individuals who previously searched for "hillary clinton." Omar Mateen was the Orlando shooter. Individuals who searched for "Hillary Clinton" were about 60% more likely to search for "Philando Castile," the victim of a police shooting and, in particular, one of the more egregious examples. So it seems — at least from this early evidence —that people carry their biases to the search engines, rather than search engines pushing bias back upon them.

Getting a real click-through rate model

Search marketers have been looking at click-through rate (CTR) models since the beginning of our craft, trying to predict traffic and earnings under a set of assumptions that have all but disappeared since the days of 10 blue links. With the advent of SERP features like answer boxes, the knowledge graph, and Twitter feeds in the search results, it has been hard to garner exactly what level of traffic we would derive from any given position.

With clickstream data, we have a path to uncovering those mysteries. For starters, the click-through rate curve is dead. Sorry folks, but it has been for quite some time and any allegiance to it should be categorized as willful neglect.

We have to begin building somewhere, so at Moz we start with opportunity metrics (like the one introduced by Dr. Pete, which can be found in Keyword Explorer) which depreciate the potential search traffic available from a keyword based on the presence of SERP features. We can use clickstream data to learn the non-linear relationship between SERP features and CTR, which is often counter-intuitive.

Let's take a quick quiz.

Which SERP has the highest organic click-through rate?

• A SERP with just news
• A SERP with just top ads
• A SERP with sitelinks, knowledge panel, tweets, and ads at the top

Strangely enough, it's the last that has the highest click-through rate to organic. Why? It turns out that the only queries that get that bizarre combination of SERP features are for important brands, like Louis Vuitton or BMW. Subsequently, nearly 100% of the click traffic goes to the #1 sitelink, which is the brand website.

Perhaps even more strangely, pages with top ads deliver more organic clicks than those with just news. News tends to entice users more than advertisements.

It would be nearly impossible to come to these revelations without clickstream data, but now we can use the data to find the unique relationships between SERP features and click-through rates.

In production: Better volume data

Perhaps Moz's most well-known usage of clickstream data is our volume metric in Keyword Explorer. There has been a long history of search marketers using Google's keyword volume as a metric to predict traffic and prioritize keywords. While (not provided) hit SEOs the hardest, it seems like the recent Google Keyword Planner ranges are taking a toll as well.

So how do we address this with clickstream data? Unfortunately, it isn't as cut-and-dry as simply replacing Google's data with Jumpshot or a 3rd party provider. There are several steps involved — here are just a few.

1. Data ingestion and clean-up
2. Bias removal
3. Modeling against Google Volume
4. Disambiguation corrections

I can't stress how much attention to detail needs to go into these steps in order to make sure you're adding value with clickstream data rather than simply muddling things further. But I can say with confidence that our complex solutions have had a profoundly positive impact on the data we provide. Let me give you some disambiguation examples that were recently uncovered by our model.

Keyword	Google Value	Disambiguated
cars part	135000	2900
chopsuey	74000	4400
treatment for mononucleosis	4400	720
lorton va	9900	8100
definition of customer service	2400	1300
marion county detention center	5400	4400
smoke again lyrics	1900	880
should i get a phd	480	320
oakley crosshair 2.0	1000	480
barter 6 download	4400	590
how to build a shoe rack	880	720

Look at the huge discrepancies here for the keyword "cars part." Most people search for "car parts" or "car part," but Google groups together the keyword "cars part," giving it a ridiculously high search value. We were able to use clickstream data to dramatically lower that number.

The same is true for "chopsuey." Most people search for it, correctly, as two separate words: "chop suey."

These corrections to Google search volume data are essential to make accurate, informed decisions about what content to create and how to properly optimize it. Without clickstream data on our side, we would be grossly misled, especially in aggregate data.

How much does this actually impact Google search volume? Roughly 25% of all keywords we process from Google data are corrected by clickstream data. This means tens of millions of keywords monthly.

Moving forward

The big question for marketers is now not only how do we respond to losses in data, but how do we prepare for future losses? A quick survey of SEOs revealed some of their future concerns...

Luckily, a blended model of crawled and clickstream data allows Moz to uniquely manage these types of losses. SERP and suggest data are all available through clickstream sources, piggybacking on real results rather than performing automated ones. Link data is already available through third-party indexes like MozScape, but can be improved even further with clickstream data that reveals the true popularity of individual links. All that being said, the future looks bright for this new blended data model, and we look forward to delivering upon its promises in the months and years to come.

And finally, a question for you...

As Moz continues to improve upon Keyword Explorer, we want to make that data more easily accessible to you. We hope to soon offer you an API, which will bring this data directly to you and your apps so that you can do more research than ever before. But we need your help in tailoring this API to your needs. If you have a moment, please answer this survey so we can piece together something that provides just what you need.

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How Can Small Businesses/Websites Compete with Big Players in SEO? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

It may seem like an impossible uphill battle to compete with big sites in the SERPs, but there are benefits to running a smaller site that can make a tremendous difference to your SEO. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how small businesses and websites can target opportunities the big sites can't, in spite of their natural advantages.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how you, as a small site, could compete against big sites.

Big site advantages

Now look, big sites in SEO have some big advantages. Those include things like:

• Domain authority
• Quantity and diversity of the links that are coming to them, which bias engines to generally rank their content higher than they ordinarily might if it were on a brand-new site or a smaller site that they didn't recognize.
• Trustworthiness. They've built brand associations in the space through advertising and through their size and scale and their reputation over time and over years that means that people have these biases towards trusting that brand, liking that brand, buying from that brand.
• Financial resources that likely you are not going to have as a small website. If we're talking about Expedia here versus randstravels.com, they have tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that they can put towards their web marketing efforts and their SEO efforts, and I have, well, my bad self.
• Ability to invest if and usually not just if, but if and when, if and when something is a major priority. If it's not the case that something is a major priority, then Expedia is probably not going to invest in that, and this is where a lot of your advantages come from.

Small site advantages

So as a small website:

• Nimbleness. You can choose to say, "Here are all the things we could be investing in right now, and you know what, this is the highest priority right now," and a week later decide this is no longer the highest priority. We're going to change direction and go pursue this instead. You don't have to check with a manager or a team or a boss. You don't have three layers of management that you have to run that approval process through. You can be extremely nimble. Small teams can get remarkable amounts done in small amounts of time compared to much larger teams.
• Creativity. You are allowed to go outside the boundaries of what's been set. If you have an idea, you can execute on it. If you have an idea at Expedia, you need to get a lot of approval before you can go after it, and you better make sure that all of the rest of your work is done, too.
• Focus. As a small business, you can choose to focus your web marketing efforts on one specific thing. So if you know that SEO is where all of your opportunity lies, you can ignore your other web marketing channels, you can ignore retargeting for a few weeks, you can ignore your PPC accounts for a few weeks and simply focus on SEO. At Expedia, a marketing manager is going to have a long list of things that they need to do that they are responsible for, and they can't simply ignore all their duties to focus on something new.
• Niche appeal. So yes, Expedia built up their brand around travel, and they have associations around hotels and flights and bookings and all this kind of stuff. But you can choose to take a small slice of those for your particular business and say, "We're going to focus exclusively on this, and we're going to become the authority in this particular niche," which gives you a bunch of advantages that we'll talk about.
• Authenticity on your side. So a big brand will often have big brand associations. A smaller brand can build very strong positive associations with, granted, a smaller audience, but you don't need to monetize as many or as fast or as directly as a big brand needs to. You can concentrate on building your brand's appeal to your very specific niche. If you monetize them well enough over time, you can build a great business, a small business but a great small business.

5 ways to compete

So, five ways to compete.

1. Target keywords the big sites are unwilling, unable, or so far aren't trying to compete on.

First off let's talk about keywords. So in the SEO keyword universe, there are going to be keywords that a big brand, like in this example Expedia, is unwilling, unable, or has chosen not to target yet because they have an indirect path to ROI or legal issues or PR issues. Those can be things like:

• Long-tail keywords. So maybe Expedia is definitely targeting something like "Istanbul city guide," but they are definitely not targeting something like "best shops to visit in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar." By the way, I looked that up, and I could not find a great list. So if someone wants to make a list of those, that would be real handy because the Grand Bazaar, very hard to find things.
• Comparison keywords. So Expedia can't go after their competitors' brand names, and they certainly wouldn't choose generally to compare themselves to another brand. So Venere flights versus Expedia flights, they're just not going to have a page on that. But you can have a page on that, and you can compare those things to each other. That's an advantage that a small website is going to have over a larger one.
• Editorial keywords. So Expedia has business relationships with a lot of different hotels. Therefore, it is not in their interest to rank hotels in a particular locale from 1 to 10 or from 1 to 100. As a small website, you don't have that constraint, and you can go after those types of keywords that your bigger competitors bias against doing, and that can be very powerful as well.

2. Aim for authority and brand association in a very specific niche

So like we talked about, Expedia is focused on travel. But Rand's Travels can focus on city-specific itineraries or ranking travel destinations or some other thin slice of a niche that Expedia can't build that same brand equity in.

3. Pursue indirect/harder-to-monetize content

So Expedia knows that they're generally pursuing not just keywords, but content that helps people buy directly from Expedia, and they're going to be looking at that path to conversion. But you might say, "I don't care if it takes three visits or four visits or five visits for someone to convert. I want to build trust. I want to build authority in my niche. Therefore, I can go after content that Expedia would not go after." They might be hotels, flights, cars, and cities. You might be recommended websites and travel education and news and tactics and tips and neighborhoods.

4. Go deeper and provide more value with content than what your big competition can afford to scale

You can invest more in a single piece of content than Expedia or a big brand ever could. So when you take your small niche and you say this keyword or this set of keywords is extremely important to me. This search intent is extremely important. I'm going to create 10x content. I'm going to put 10 times more effort and energy and resources into building that than what my big brand competitor can do. If they are a two-star resource, I'm going to be a five-star resource.

5. Build relationships 1-on-1 that big competition will never invest in

In addition to that element of building better content, you can also build better, more direct relationships with the people you need those relationships with. So Expedia goes through their PR team, and they have their teams of folks that do their relationships. But you can go direct. You can say, "I'm Rand's Travels. I'm going to go meet with people in Istanbul while I'm there and forge those relationships personally and build those relationships up on social media and have conversations and leave blog comments, and that will reinforce my authenticity and my niche appeal."

That's a huge advantage as well, and that can help to amplify the reach of your content and to get you visibility on these keywords and this content that your competitors simply can't touch because they're too big. They need to do this stuff at scale. When you need to do things at scale, you simply can't focus in the same way, and that's where your big advantages come from as a small website.

Now, looking forward to our comments and hearing more from you about how you've been able to compete against the big guys, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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The 4-Step Plan to Construct Your Own Keyword-to-URL Map

Posted by Carson-Ward

Knowing how to find and effectively use keywords is probably the most important skill for an effective search marketer. Smart keyword planning and tracking should also heavily inform content planning and strategy. Unfortunately, most keyword research is done on the fly as a new page is created. Rather than helping marketers find new opportunities and plan strategically, keywords are usually found and applied to existing posts and in-flight projects.

If you’re an SEO or content creator and don’t have a living, regularly referenced keyword map, this post is for you. We won’t discuss how to optimize existing pages. There are lots of well-done technical SEO posts around if the optimization process is new to you. But if the concept of a keyword plan is new to you, this post should walk you through the process completely. If you’re experienced, you’ll probably pick up at least one new trick or application for keywords.

If you’d like to follow along with a keyword research template I’ve created, feel free to make a copy of this Google doc. You’ll see images of it throughout the post that might make more sense if you open it up.

Finding and selecting keywords

Obviously the first step to using keywords is finding what people search for. While thorough and hopefully helpful, there’s nothing shocking or ground-breaking in this first section. The real magic is in how you use your keywords.

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Step 1: Build the “Big List”

Your goal in this first phase of keyword research is to gather every keyword that your business would want to appear for. You won’t achieve that goal, but set your sights high. Think outside the structure of your current site. Look beyond keywords you currently rank for and knowingly compete for.

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz’s Keyword Explorer is a great tool, and I’m not just saying that because of Moz’s resident hypnotist. I must have missed its launch somehow, yet it’s quickly become my first stop for collecting lots of keywords quickly. The grouping function is great for finding head terms, and the sub-terms will be useful later on in either optimizing terms on existing pages or finding related pages worth creating.

Here I'm using the Moz keyword tool and excluding very low-volume keyword terms that I know I'll be ignoring. Throughout this post I’m using our site, HighSpeedInternet.com, as an example.

Put in your known head terms and export them all using the “Export CSV” function. I’m impressed by the speed of the tool, and often use volume filters to avoid exporting terms I won’t actually use. That might sound small, but many tools force large exports prior to any estimation of search volume. Once you’re done gathering and exporting, you can remove duplicates and sort using Excel or a (slightly clumsier) Google Sheets script.

SearchMetrics

SearchMetrics is good for those who aren’t sure which keywords they want to rank for. We’ll need to input competitors’ sites to find keywords. For those who don’t know who competitors are, there’s a handy tool that shows likely candidates under “SEO research > Competitors.”

SimilarWeb (not shown) is also helpful in checking for competitors. If your site is new, simply plug in some of the queries you’d like to rank for and look those sites up. Once you’ve discovered some competitors, throw them into SearchMetrics and head over to the “Rankings” section under “SEO Research” and click “Long Tail.”

If this were a competitor’s site, I’d see a list of keywords they rank for and the potential traffic.

Other tools

• SEMrush has a tool that can find keywords with search volume by site or related terms. One of the better all-in-one tools for keyword research.
• UberSuggest spits out tons of related terms. It’s no longer a favorite, as many have found suggestions to be irrelevant or low-volume terms.
• KeywordTool.io is a good complement to a more full-featured tool. It’s reliably better than most tools at finding mid-tail terms that others don’t find.
• Google Keyword Planner offers free suggestions. One major downside is that your competitors will probably be using the tool the same way you do, resulting in lots of competition for the more narrow set of terms that Google suggests. Still, it would be fine to use this tool and nothing else if your tools budget is low.

There’s an almost unlimited number of keyword tools, but you really only need one or two. The more thorough your Big List process is, the more work you’ll save yourself later on. It’s usually worth it to spend a day or two gathering lots of keywords for a site you’ll be working on regularly.

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Step 2: Get keyword volume

Use Excel’s handy function or a Google Sheets script to remove duplicate keywords. For most of us the next step is to import/paste sets of keywords into the Google Keyword Planner, export the volume, and repeat. There’s a limit to how many keywords Google will allow you to run at one time, so pre-filtering bad keywords might be a good idea. For example, I often pull out competitors’ branded terms.

Work-around for “low-volume” accounts (+extra precision)

Google recently continued its creeping war against those who use Google products for free by returning ranges in the keyword planner for low-spending accounts. These ranges (as in the image below) are so broad they’re essentially useless for anything but pre-filtering.

To get around this limit, you can just click the nice “Add to plan” button on any one of your terms.

If you’re only curious about volume for a few keywords, you can just click the “Add to plan” button for multiple terms. It’s easier to paste them in the next step for larger lists. Once you’ve added at least one keyword, click the “Review plan” button.

Now you’re on a new page where you’ll need to be careful about avoiding the “Save to account” buttons unless you actually want to start bidding. Click “Add keywords” to paste your terms in, then save it to a new ad group.

Now click the ad group. You’ll see a large table that’s mostly blank. Fill in a $999 bid and set the range to monthly. I also like to try different match types, but I typically use exact-match.

So why is this cool?

• Impression count is more accurate, and not rounded like in the regular tool.
• You can set custom date ranges if you want a more accurate figure for forecasting purposes.
• You can play with match type again (which is something Google took away from the standard planner interface).
• It works for free accounts.

At the end of Step 2, you should have a simple two-column list.

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Step 3: Filter keywords

Notice I said we should filter keywords — not delete them. You’ll generally want to break keywords into three groups:

1.) Priority terms: Keywords you want to rank for immediately. A good priority term has the following attributes:

• Related to current and near-future business
• Implies a question you can answer well about a product you sell, OR implies a need you can fulfill
• High-enough volume to be worth the investment

2.) Secondary terms: We’ll want to go after these some day, but not before we have our priority keywords locked in with query-responsive, well-optimized pages. Secondary terms usually have the following traits:

• Doesn’t have buying intent, but has healthy volume and relates to what your site does
• Implies a question you don’t have the expertise to answer
• Low-volume terms that might convert

3.) Other terms: You might lay out some tertiary keywords (i.e those where you plan to expand the business), but you can generally stop there and label any others as keywords to “ignore for now.”

You’ll usually want to note why you are or are not pursuing a term so you don’t have to re-evaluate it every time you look for new keywords. Step three’s endpoint just adds a few columns:

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Using keywords effectively

Now that you’ve gathered keywords it’s time to figure out how to use them. Your ultimate goals are to 1) find new opportunities on existing pages, and 2) find keywords for which you don’t have a good landing page so that you can create or suggest a useful new piece of content. Before we can do either, we’ll need to map the keywords to pages on your site.

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Step 4: Map priority keywords

Just like you needed human judgment to determine priority keywords, you’ll need to use good judgment to map them to pages. You can skip the judgment steps and still come out with a final product, but it will ultimately be far less useful. Besides, this is why we have jobs that machines won’t be taking over for a while.

Scrape Google

First, scrape Google for your keywords and current ranking. Google frowns on rank tracking and SERP scraping, but consider it fair game for all the content they scrape and save. If you don’t want to scrape SERPs you can manually map each page, but it’s nice for larger sites to check yes/no rather than thinking through a list of potential pages every time.

There are tons of tools and services for this. AWR is probably the most common choice, as this is a one-time deal. You could also write a simple script with proxies or find a freelancer on one of a dozen sites. Moz Pro’s campaigns work up to your keyword limit, but the Moz tool is far better at helping after you’ve mapped keywords.

Mapping new & existing URLs

Once you have each keyword’s page and current rank, you’ll want to quickly check that the page matches the query.

• How does this page help the user? (Don’t confuse this with what the user does next.)
• Would the ideal version of that page do what you’d want if you typed this keyword into Google?
• Would a page about this keyword or set of keywords only serve the query better?

You don’t want to create new pages for every tiny keyword variation, but we do want to make sure the page feels tailored to the user question. You’re trying to close the gap between what people want from Google and what your site does, so it shouldn’t be surprising if the questions you ask yourself feel UX-heavy.

After asking these questions a few hundred times it’ll become second nature. You won’t rank at all for some terms, so you’ll have to either manually select a page or create a new one. For some pages (especially those 50+), Google will just be plain wrong and you’ll have to re-map them.

The hardest choice is often whether an existing page could be optimized to be a better fit, or if a new URL is more appropriate. As a general rule, anything that would augment an existing page’s core purpose can be added, but anything that would detract or confuse the core purpose should be placed elsewhere. Don’t worry if it’s not immediately clear what the core purpose of the page is. Part of the value in this process is refining page purpose with keywords.

If you have a page in the top 5 or 10, it’s usually best to assume optimizing the page is a better path than creating a new page. If you have sets of conflicting keywords (meaning optimizing for both confuses the page) ranking on the same URL, you can generally choose the higher-value terms and then link to a new page about the second set.

For example, if we had a page appearing for “internet providers by zip code” and “satellite internet providers,” these would be considered conflicting. Trying to talk about satellite Internet (which is available almost everywhere) and zip code-specific Internet at the same time would be confusing. We’d create a new page for satellite Internet, delete the existing satellite Internet content, and link to the new page from the ranking URL.

Building new pages

If you’ve identified new pages that have opportunity, well done! Ensure that the amount of effort is worth the reward, and utilize the opportunities in your production process. Keyword research done well comes with a built-in business case. If you can show keyword volume and argue for keyword intent, you only have to make some assumptions on click, call, or purchase rates to put a potential dollar figure on the project.

Once you’ve mapped keywords to a new page, you should also have scope settled at a high level. Knowing what questions you’re trying to answer and what the page should do gives everyone the information they need to contribute and determine the best way to build it.

Optimizing existing pages

Improving existing pages is usually easier and less time-intensive, but don’t simply optimize page titles and call it a day. Actually look at the page and determine whether it’s a good fit for what you’d want to see if you were the one Googling. Also consider the competition and aim to be better.

There will be a larger list of existing terms ranking below the top spot where optimization and improvement need to be prioritized. Here are a couple examples of prioritization helpers:

• Keyword opportunity: Find a click-through study, estimate the traffic you’re getting in your current position, and estimate how much traffic you’d get from the top spot. Consider both keywords and pages.
• Competitive opportunity: Combine the opportunity above with competition metrics (e.g. PA/DA in the SERPs).
• Crawl your pages to get titles and content, break the keyword into its individual words, and see how many of the words appear.

Use these figures as guides, and be smart about competition. It’s easy for analytical people to get too deep into a spreadsheet. Make sure you’re looking at your website and that of your competition, rather than making decisions on a pet formula alone.

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A word to skeptical content strategists/marketers

I understand if you think this looks like a post for SEOs. Content that comes from highly searched keywords tends to be evergreen, but the result of writing keyword-targeting content is rarely something your visitors will rush to share. It’s very rarely inspiring, timely, fun, or otherwise sexy. Keep some things in mind, though:

1. Depending on who you believe, organic traffic on average is 2–4x average referral traffic across the web. Don’t sell yourself short with a content strategy that only reaches half of your potential audience.
2. You don’t have to create content the way everyone else has. In fact, please don’t! See a bunch of dull articles ranking for the term? Maybe make it an interactive tool. Write something that’s not dull. Answer the question better than anyone else has.
3. You’ll drive more sales creating good content for boring searches than you will creating viral posts that get shared and linked to. Combine keyword hunting with shareable content for a truly business-changing organic/inbound strategy.

You don’t need an SEO’s permission to create useful content for things Google explicitly tells you your potential fans and customers are looking for. Incorporating a keyword strategy into a comprehensive content strategy almost feels like cheating.

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Getting started: A spreadsheet template

If all of this sounds a bit overwhelming, I’ve created a template in Google docs that you can begin using. Just choose “File > Make a copy,” read through the comments, and start entering in your own data once you feel comfortable.

Get your keyword mapping template

The Google doc does a lot of the boring stuff for you, like calculating keyword opportunity, title optimization (if you put in page titles), and organizing your keyword map by page and keyword with opportunity, volume, and more.

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When it’s time to automate

There are tools for doing much of what this spreadsheet does. The right tool will be worth the money as long as you keep some things in mind before you dive in and start paying:

1. It’s wise to know what you want a tool to do before buying it. Use the keyword mapping template, experiment with what you actually want and use regularly, and then you can start looking for tools to help you map keywords and optimize pages. Avoid tool clutter by using them deliberately.
2. Most tools will try to map keywords to pages, but none can reliably tell you when or how you should create new content. If you’re never actually looking at keywords with human judgment and asking, “Am I answering that query?”, then you’re probably over-relying on the tool.

For Moz Pro members, plugging in some keywords and playing around is a great place to start. Play around until you’re comfortable with rank tracking and page mapping, then look at some optimization suggestions. It’s now even better when combined with the keyword tool.

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