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Storytelling Through Data: A New Inbound Marketing & SEO Report Structure

Posted by ajfried

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

No matter what business you are in, it’s a pretty sure thing that someone is going to want to monitor how efficiently and productively you are working. Being able to show these results over time is crucial to maintaining the health of the long-term relationship.

To us, reporting has become much less about the data, and more about the story you can tell with it. Not to say that data isn’t important, but while a big spike in traffic is awesome, the drop that comes after it might not necessarily be a bad thing. It could be seasonal. Or maybe it’s just leveling back after the brand was mentioned in a news report. To be totally honest, the same thing could apply to the spike itself, so hold off on those celebrations!

For the sake of transparency, this is something that we always felt we could improve on more at Kahena. We have tried it all, from email write ups, to using straight ranking reports (blerg, I know – so 2007), to a template-based Excel model (which is what we currently use), and even as far as planning a future web-based reporting platform for all of our clients to log in to and utilize as needed.

This whole project really started in the wake of Google blocking all keyword data and turning it all into [not provided]. This really forced us to break old and bad habits and redefine what important metrics and insights we were sharing with clients.

We had two goals in mind during this project which were to:

  1. Automate the report as much as possible so that we have more time to analyze the data and provide deeper, more valuable insights, both for our clients and our own internal strategies.
  2. Keep the template intact so there was standardization across our reports.

Categorizing all the data

We held a brainstorm and decided to compartmentalize the data into 3 different categories:

  • KPIs: These are the key performance indicators that we felt show bottom line progress from the campaign.
  • Leading Indicators: These metrics add value to the story by exhibiting a correlation with the KPIs. These are all things that clients need to know to understand the KPI outcomes.
  • Nice to know: These metrics don’t necessarily make or break the campaign, but are notable and worth mentioning because they provide some insight into overall performance.

Here’s what the brainstorm looked like after our meeting:

What this ultimately turned into is the following (click on the report for a full-sized version):

Now, let me be clear, this could have gone in lots of different directions, and in many cases it does depending on the client. We chose the metrics above for our template because we felt they provided the best high-level insight. Let me explain.

The KPI’s we thought were most important were traffic and goals. That was a relatively simple one to decide since this is ultimately what clients hire us to improve.

Leading indicators were a bit more challenging to solidify. We decided that for the purposes of story-telling, landing page data would be able to explain to our clients the progress we were making around specific landing pages we were optimizing. It also would provide more data into which *groups* of keywords were doing well and which needed a bit more attention. We also put an emphasis on vertical rankings (we partner with Rank Ranger to get that data). We specifically did not want to focus on individual keywords, although there is still a section for specific changes which are chosen to highlight campaign progress.

The nice to know information is the one section that we didn’t trend, and in the future we still might decide to do that. For now, we highlight user engagement data like pages per visit, bounce rate and average time on site. The one area we do trend here is site indexation, because that can have a major effect on a site’s search engine health and provides an early warning to any index bloat issues

A bonus area we added to the report allows our account managers to think creatively regarding non-standard data highlights and observations. Interestingly, this is often the section that gets the most comments from clients.

The most time-consuming piece in this whole process was setting up the initial template. The report itself is actually quite simple after that. The client-facing portion is one tab, which allows us to PDF everything, and it pulls data from other data tabs.

Most of the tabs have a similar table which has the date and the metric you want to visualize. This is just copying and pasting numbers from Analytics – nothing fancy. But, if you’re curious, the tables where we put this data look like this:

Pulling the data

Once set up, the only data we are pulling from Analytics is the number of:

  • Total organic visits, broken down by the traffic source
  • Goal conversions (transactions and revenue for e-commerce)
  • Micro goal conversions (newsletter signups, or event tracking on important buttons)
  • Total page views
  • Bounce rate
  • Time spent on site

The report basically does the rest since the data sources for all the graphs and charts have already been selected.

We also download landing page data from Google Analytics which includes two segments: organic and total traffic compared by current and previous month. Similarly, when added into the appropriate columns, the template populates the data into this section:

All this data pulling and automation helps a lot with the time element. The problem we found was with a 10 person team (let alone a team of significantly more people), everyone wanted some level of customization, which was completely understandable. Each client is going to have specific requests, and each account manager is going to want to tweak it to their liking. The problem with everyone customizing the template is that it often resulted in some elements displaying weirdly when we made it into a PDF, or worse, broke some of the formulas that caused the template to work.

When we investigated this, we found that 80% of our clients could use one of 2 templates:

  • A conversion and micro conversion report which reported on a goal we had set up and included events and micro conversions we were targeting
  • An e-commerce report which reported on transactions and revenue generated from organic search

Keeping the rest of the report intact involved some creativity. For this, if you are not familiar with offsets, then I suggest paying close attention.

The offset function creates magic

This is a little-used Excel function from what I have found, but it’s super powerful. What it does is:

“Returns a reference to a range that is a specified number of rows and columns from a cell or range of cells. The reference that is returned can be a single cell or a range of cells. You can specify the number of rows and the number of columns to be returned.” Source: Microsoft Excel Help

In other words, one cell could control pivoting the entire report between months. Every single table that you have in the report can be linked to one cell and change as that cell changes. Even better, if you can create a button that is connected to this cell, with the simple click of the button, it can adjust data in various parts of the template such as the date, the header, footer, and even provide a way for clients to navigate themselves through the data (if set up correctly).

Here is how it works for us:

In many ways, this serves as a database that holds historical data so it’s saved for the future. Using this, we can show a trended analysis of the progress we have made over time without having to do a ton of data pulling, saving us a significant amount of time.

Given the amount of reports we, as an agency, run on a monthly basis, we need to find better ways of automation without the restrictions that come with third party tools. We have started developing an interactive web-based reporting tool built on the Microsoft Reporting framework. This will work by setting up scheduled jobs to collect data from various data sources (including Google Analytics) and automatically store them in our database so that we don’t even have to pull the data. This will allow our team (and in the future – our clients) to access this data via pre-templated online reports and more time to tell stories and analyze trends.

For now, we are still using Excel, which our clients still love.

The real point that I want to stress is that no matter what method you use for reports, the story is key. The data is crucial, but the insight around the data is what management wants to see. They want to visually see what is happening with their business, and understand through our analysis why it’s happening.

We have received an incredible amount of feedback from clients who have said things like “I really LOVE the format of having the charts or graphs, and then having your commentary/insights right next to it…TOTALLY works for me”

So they are happy. We are happy.

And that’s our process – I hope you found something you can take away for your reports as well.

One final tip to build the report

This is not something that could be done alone. It really took the entire team’s effort, ranging from junior associates up to the CEO, getting buy-in, agreeing on the metrics, and believing in the vision for what we were trying to accomplish with reporting. The ideas and feedback were invaluable and they should all be proud of what we accomplished together.

Download the template

To help you get started, we have made the template available for you to download. I am happy to answer any specific questions in the comments and help you as you set up your own report for you and your clients.


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Keywords to Concepts: The Lazy Web Marketer’s Guide to Smart Keyword Research

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

The SEO’s system for themed keyword research.

If Google’s Penguin update and Knowledge Graph have taught us anything, it’s that concepts have become more important than individual keywords for search marketing.

Many people in the SEO space mistakenly assume that because Google withholds keyword referral data in the form of (not provided), keywords no longer matter.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Every search begins with keywords. Over 5 billion Google searches a day. Consider the following:
  • Google’s entire business is based on selling keywords – over 40 billion dollars a year, most of it from keyword sales through advertising.
  • (not provided) affects only post-click analytics. It doesn’t influence the pre-click keywords users type into search boxes.
  • Keywords and their meaning remain the primary input search engines use to deliver answers to users (while other inputs such as location data and app integration are on the rise).

Marketers who invest in smart keyword research will continue to have a huge advantage over the competition.

The trick today is turning those keywords into concepts.

From single keywords to themed concepts

When most of us first learned SEO, we learned to research one keyword at a time. We optimized our page for that keyword by placing it in the title tag, in the headline, a few times in the body, and maybe the alt text of a photo.

If we were really fancy we’d optimize a page for two keywords. Oh dear.

In truth, optimizing pages with a single keyword mentality hasn’t worked well for a long time.

Content today has to be about something.

The difference today from years past is the shift from individual keywords to concepts. Concepts relate to search marketing in three primary ways:

1. What the user intends

Search engines try to better understand what the user asks by relating that question to concepts. If I search for “movie about tiger on boat” Google will likely understand that I am asking about the movie Life of Pi, not about pages optimized for those specific keywords.

2. What your content is about

Search engines read the keywords on your pages to try and figure out what those pages are conceptually about.

3. Relating concepts to one another

The Knowledge Graph shows us how Google relates concepts to each other. In the case of Life of Pi, this may be showing how the film relates to ratings, reviews, actors, writers, and the cast.

Keyword targeting: the dumb, hard way

In the post How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint, I first addressed the concept of themed keyword research. The guide lists the biggest mistakes people make when choosing keywords. Here’s what we want to avoid:

  1. Choosing keywords that are too broad
  2. Keywords with too much competition
  3. Keywords without enough traffic

  4. Keywords that don’t convert
  5. Trying to rank for one keyword at a time

Instead, let’s take the opposite approach.

The basic idea is that we’re going to focus our content around ideas instead of keywords, and thus give us the potential to rank for 100s or 1000s of keywords at a time.

The smart system of themed keyword research

Let’s explore a new way of thinking about keywords. It requires discarding some of our old ideas and taking advantage of how Google may likely decide what our content is about.

To accomplish this, we’ll leverage some obvious truths about search traffic.

Truth #1: Over 70% of the traffic you earn for any given page will come from keywords you didn’t try to optimize for.

If you’ve ever seen a keyword report in your analytics platform or Google Webmaster Tools, you know this is true.

What are these keywords? They may be synonyms, thematically related, or closely related ideas that search engines thought best matched your content. Sometimes they are way off base, but we won’t concern ourselves with those.

With this in mind, optimizing for a only a single keyword means ignoring the majority of your potential traffic.

Truth #2: Ranking number one is not a requirement for earning thousands of visits.

Given what we know about point #1, it’s often better to rank in position 2 or lower for hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords than it is to rank number one for a single keyword.

Truth #3: The best keyword tools in the world will only show you a fraction of the keywords you can potentially rank for.

Have you ever compared your long tail keyword data with data from Google’s own Keyword Planner?

Most of those keywords will show little potential search traffic or won’t even register, but you know this isn’t true because these are the same keywords that brought you traffic.

Relying on keyword research tools alone wont bring you to your full ranking potential. You need content that fully explores your themed concepts.

Truth #4: Search engines sell keywords grouped into concepts and themes.

We can learn from this strategy.

When you purchase keywords through AdWords, Google suggests keywords to you in tightly grouped themes and ideas. In fact, they do everything they can to discourage you from bidding on individual keywords.

Of course, this is one way for Google to make more money, but it’s also because Google knows that concepts are often a better indicator of searcher intent than individual keywords.

Part of this is due to the fact that 15% of all Google searches, or over half a billion per day, have never been seen by before.

Now let’s put these ideas into action.

Step 1: Gather your keyword seeds

Folks talk about different processes of keyword research depending on whether you are going after

  • Traffic: good for pure pageviews and ad-based revenue sites, or
  • Conversions: for example, when you sell goods or services or need brand awareness

Most of the time, you already have a good idea of what your keyword topic broadly covers, especially if you’re working with an established business or website.

For our purposes, let’s explore ideas around the keyword “seo tools” – a term near and dear to our hearts here at Moz. In reality, this is an extremely competitive keyword, and for your own research you’d likely want to begin with a longer-tail, less competitive term.

Brainstorming

There are literally hundreds of keyword research tools out there to experiment with, but a few SEO favorites include:

In the end, you will likely rely heavily on Google AdWords Keyword Planner, but you never want to rely on it as your sole tool. It’s best to explore and play around with many tools to discover new ideas.

Here are keyword suggestions from Grepwords.

There are no rules except to have fun and try to discover new keywords you haven’t considered before.

Step 2: Get specific with modifiers

This is basic stuff, but it bears emphasizing: The more specific your keywords, the easier it typically is to rank for those keywords.

Sure, it would be great to rank for the keyword “SEO tools” itself, but most people aren’t searching that way. Instead, they are likely looking for something more specific.

Common keyword modifiers include:

  1. Time and Date: “SEO Tools 2014″
  2. Quality and/or Price: “Free SEO Tools”, “Fastest SEO Tools”
  3. Intent: “Buy SEO Tools”, “Find SEO Tools”
  4. Location: “SEO Tools Online”, “Canadian SEO Tools”

Your chosen keyword research tools will uncover these and many more qualifiers, but you’ll want to include them in your searches as well.

Case Study: the $70,000 keyword modifier

Seasonal keywords are often super-effective. I discovered this myself a few years ago as an independent SEO with the keyword “IRA contribution limits.” The keyword had good volume but was super-competitive, so I knew I was never going to rank for it.

Using Google Trends, I found that usage for this keyword spiked at certain times of the year, and that in fact people were looking for information for a specific year, i.e. “IRA contribution limits 2012.”

Using Google Trends is a great way to validate any keyword idea, as it will often reveal hidden patterns and insight not present in other tools.

Armed with the new knowledge, I found many more date-specific keywords themed around this topic and built an entire domain around them. Although it took a lot of hard work, the site eventually drew tons of seasonal traffic and I was able to sell the site with a significant profit.

It’s a good idea to validate all your important keyword ideas through Google Trends, as it will often reveal patterns and insights not present in other keyword research tools.

Step 3: Using Google AdWords Keyword Planner

For small and medium-sized research jobs, nothing beats going directly to Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool for relevant suggestions and search volume. (For larger and enterprise-type projects, see the alternatives at the end of the post.)

This is basic stuff, but you’ll want to search for New Keyword and Adgroup Ideas and head straight to the to the Keyword Ideas tab. For a more complete guide to using the planner, Kristi Hines wrote a great guide here.

Hint: While most seasoned SEOs skip over the Ad Groups tab, there’s a wealth of ideas there tightly grouped into themed keywords – exactly what we are looking for!

Traditionally, marketers use Google’s keyword tool because of search volume and competition scores, but most web marketers underplay one of the most powerful features of this tool: the ability to sort keyword suggestions by relevance.

This gives us a huge advantage in creating themed keyword lists, and helps us create more targeted content.

Because the top suggestions often contain your core keywords, it’s helpful to use negative keywords to discover more variation.

Step 4: Defining the concepts further

Now that you have your basic keyword idea, the next step is creating your keyword theme by finding keywords that are conceptually related.

There are several ways to do this. For our example of “SEO tools” let’s try the popular methods to build out our themed list.

Google’s Related Searches

At the bottom of most Google results is a section called Related Searches. This is a gold mine of conceptually related concepts.

By clicking through the results and then examining those related searches (and repeating this process over and over) you can quickly find many long-tail opportunities much easier than using Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner.

Google Trends

At the bottom of each trends report is a “Related Searches” section that can be used to discover conceptually related queries.

Wikistalker

This cool tool introduced to me by Peter Bray “illustrates the relations between different things by visualizing the semantic relevance between the inter-connected structure of their Wikipedia entry articles.”

So if we search Wikistalker for “Search Engine Optimization” it shows us the following Wikipedia articles with the highest semantic relevance.

  • Internet Marketing: 85% relevant
  • Google Webmaster Tools: 70% relevant
  • Marketing: 59% relevant

Other tools

In fact, many other keyword research tools like Deeperweb Search, SEMRush, YouTube Analytics or WordStream can help you discover related keyword phrases.

Step 5: Empathy, your secret keyword weapon

Ask yourself what a visitor wants to find on this page.

As Rand explains in this excellent Whiteboard Friday, putting yourself in the visitor’s shoes and anticipating their needs provides a wealth of conceptually related keyword ideas.

Searchers of “SEO tools” are usually asking a number of similar questions:

  • How much does it cost? Free, plans and pricing, free trial
  • What kinds of tools are there? Link building, crawling, and indexing
  • Who are the tools for? Agency software, small business
  • How good are the tools? Best, endorsed by, customer review

By answering as many searcher questions as we can, we continue to build our themed keyword concept.

Step 6: Can you rank? Getting strategic with competition

In this case, it’s much better to go straight to the search engine results page (SERP). This was covered in How to Rank, so let me plagiarize myself by repeating the important points here.

You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:

  1. Automated tools like Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool
  2. Eyeballing the SERPs

If you have a paid subscription to Moz, or even a free trial, the Keyword Difficulty Tool calculates — on a 100-point scale — a difficulty score for each individual keyword phrase you enter.

If you run a full report you can break down the SERP for each keyword and judge the individual strengths of each URL that ranks. You can even add your own URL to see how you stack up.

Keyword phrases in the 60-100 range are typically very competitive, while keywords in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.

Manual method: the eyeball check

Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to simply look at the top results currently ranking.

Run a non-personalized search query for your keywords. Examine the top few results and ask yourself the following questions (SEO toolbars like the MozBar or SEOquake can help speed up the process):

  • Are the first few results optimized for the keyword?
  • Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
  • What’s the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
  • What’s the inbound anchor text?
  • Can you build links and/or mentions around this keyword?
  • Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword than the top ranking sites?

The last question is the most important: can you deliver higher quality content for this keyword than the competition?

The answer must be yes if you expect to deserve to rank.

Step 7: Pulling it all together

By this point, you’ve probably analyzed hundreds or thousands of keywords and organized them into themed, related groups.

You’ve found keywords that relate to your business or website, around which you can create shareable content, with a high enough search volume, and that you believe you can rank for.

Often, the keywords that you choose depend as much on your business or website as they do on the competition. We chose the keywords above not only because they relate to our primary keyword, but also because they relate to our business. Google may rank keywords based on relevance, but only you can decide if those keywords relate to your audience, product, and brand.

In the case of our “SEO Tools” example, our themed keyword list might look like this.

  • Free SEO Tools
  • Best SEO Software
  • Keyword Research
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Link Building Toolset
  • Best SEO Tools in 2013
  • Online Marketing
  • SEO for Google
  • Best SEO Tools for Agencies

Remember, we started with a very broad keyword. In practice, your final keyword will be much more tightly focused.

We’ll now use this list for creating content around our keyword theme. In a future post, we’ll discuss integrating these concepts for optimal on-page SEO.

Tips for scaling and large sites

The above method works if you’re building out keyword lists for small to medium sites, but scaling this process for large and enterprise sites requires a different, more mathematical approach.

If you want to research tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of keywords at a time, I highly recommend the looking into the following resources:

Conclusion

The above method is only one method of keyword research. There are hundreds more and you’ll likely invent your own method.

Regardless of the method you use, thinking about keywords in terms of concepts and themes represents a hugely important step in content development.

What are your favorite keyword tips to organize content around concepts?


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

From Keywords to Concepts: The Smart SEO’s System for Themed Keyword Research

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

If Google’s Penguin update and Knowledge Graph have taught us anything, it’s that concepts have become more important than individual keywords for search marketing.

Many people in the SEO space mistakenly assume that because Google withholds keyword referral data in the form of (not provided), keywords no longer matter.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Every search begins with keywords. Over 5 billion Google searches a day. Consider the following:
  • Google’s entire business is based on selling keywords – over 40 billion dollars a year, most of it from keyword sales through advertising.
  • (not provided) affects only post-click analytics. It doesn’t influence the pre-click keywords users type into search boxes.
  • Keywords and their meaning remain the primary input search engines use to deliver answers to users (while other inputs such as location data and app integration are on the rise).

Marketers who invest in smart keyword research will continue to have a huge advantage over the competition.

The trick today is turning those keywords into concepts.

From single keywords to themed concepts

When most of us first learned SEO, we learned to research one keyword at a time. We optimized our page for that keyword by placing it in the title tag, in the headline, a few times in the body, and maybe the alt text of a photo.

If we were really fancy we’d optimize a page for two keywords. Oh dear.

In truth, optimizing pages with a single keyword mentality hasn’t worked well for a long time.

Content today has to be about something.

The difference today from years past is the shift from individual keywords to concepts. Concepts relate to search marketing in three primary ways:

1. What the user intends

Search engines try to better understand what the user asks by relating that question to concepts. If I search for “movie about tiger on boat” Google will likely understand that I am asking about the movie Life of Pi, not about pages optimized for those specific keywords.

2. What your content is about

Search engines read the keywords on your pages to try and figure out what those pages are conceptually about.

3. Relating concepts to one another

The Knowledge Graph shows us how Google relates concepts to each other. In the case of Life of Pi, this may be showing how the film relates to ratings, reviews, actors, writers, and the cast.

Keyword targeting: the dumb, hard way

In the post How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint, I first addressed the concept of themed keyword research. The guide lists the biggest mistakes people make when choosing keywords. Here’s what we want to avoid:

  1. Choosing keywords that are too broad
  2. Keywords with too much competition
  3. Keywords without enough traffic

  4. Keywords that don’t convert
  5. Trying to rank for one keyword at a time

Instead, let’s take the opposite approach.

The basic idea is that we’re going to focus our content around ideas instead of keywords, and thus give us the potential to rank for 100s or 1000s of keywords at a time.

The smart system of themed keyword research

Let’s explore a new way of thinking about keywords. It requires discarding some of our old ideas and taking advantage of how Google may likely decide what our content is about.

To accomplish this, we’ll leverage some obvious truths about search traffic.

Truth #1: Over 70% of the traffic you earn for any given page will come from keywords you didn’t try to optimize for.

If you’ve ever seen a keyword report in your analytics platform or Google Webmaster Tools, you know this is true.

What are these keywords? They may be synonyms, thematically related, or closely related ideas that search engines thought best matched your content. Sometimes they are way off base, but we won’t concern ourselves with those.

With this in mind, optimizing for a only a single keyword means ignoring the majority of your potential traffic.

Truth #2: Ranking number one is not a requirement for earning thousands of visits.

Given what we know about point #1, it’s often better to rank in position 2 or lower for hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords than it is to rank number one for a single keyword.

Truth #3: The best keyword tools in the world will only show you a fraction of the keywords you can potentially rank for.

Have you ever compared your long tail keyword data with data from Google’s own Keyword Planner?

Most of those keywords will show little potential search traffic or won’t even register, but you know this isn’t true because these are the same keywords that brought you traffic.

Relying on keyword research tools alone wont bring you to your full ranking potential. You need content that fully explores your themed concepts.

Truth #4: Search engines sell keywords grouped into concepts and themes.

We can learn from this strategy.

When you purchase keywords through AdWords, Google suggests keywords to you in tightly grouped themes and ideas. In fact, they do everything they can to discourage you from bidding on individual keywords.

Of course, this is one way for Google to make more money, but it’s also because Google knows that concepts are often a better indicator of searcher intent than individual keywords.

Part of this is due to the fact that 15% of all Google searches, or over half a billion per day, have never been seen by before.

Now let’s put these ideas into action.

Step 1: Gather your keyword seeds

Folks talk about different processes of keyword research depending on whether you are going after

  • Traffic: good for pure pageviews and ad-based revenue sites, or
  • Conversions: for example, when you sell goods or services or need brand awareness

Most of the time, you already have a good idea of what your keyword topic broadly covers, especially if you’re working with an established business or website.

For our purposes, let’s explore ideas around the keyword “seo tools” – a term near and dear to our hearts here at Moz. In reality, this is an extremely competitive keyword, and for your own research you’d likely want to begin with a longer-tail, less competitive term.

Brainstorming

There are literally hundreds of keyword research tools out there to experiment with, but a few SEO favorites include:

In the end, you will likely rely heavily on Google AdWords Keyword Planner, but you never want to rely on it as your sole tool. It’s best to explore and play around with many tools to discover new ideas.

Here are keyword suggestions from Grepwords.

There are no rules except to have fun and try to discover new keywords you haven’t considered before.

Step 2: Get specific with modifiers

This is basic stuff, but it bears emphasizing: The more specific your keywords, the easier it typically is to rank for those keywords.

Sure, it would be great to rank for the keyword “SEO tools” itself, but most people aren’t searching that way. Instead, they are likely looking for something more specific.

Common keyword modifiers include:

  1. Time and Date: “SEO Tools 2014″
  2. Quality and/or Price: “Free SEO Tools”, “Fastest SEO Tools”
  3. Intent: “Buy SEO Tools”, “Find SEO Tools”
  4. Location: “SEO Tools Online”, “Canadian SEO Tools”

Your chosen keyword research tools will uncover these and many more qualifiers, but you’ll want to include them in your searches as well.

Case Study: the $70,000 keyword modifier

Seasonal keywords are often super-effective. I discovered this myself a few years ago as an independent SEO with the keyword “IRA contribution limits.” The keyword had good volume but was super-competitive, so I knew I was never going to rank for it.

Using Google Trends, I found that usage for this keyword spiked at certain times of the year, and that in fact people were looking for information for a specific year, i.e. “IRA contribution limits 2012.”

Using Google Trends is a great way to validate any keyword idea, as it will often reveal hidden patterns and insight not present in other tools.

Armed with the new knowledge, I found many more date-specific keywords themed around this topic and built an entire domain around them. Although it took a lot of hard work, the site eventually drew tons of seasonal traffic and I was able to sell the site with a significant profit.

It’s a good idea to validate all your important keyword ideas through Google Trends, as it will often reveal patterns and insights not present in other keyword research tools.

Step 3: Using Google AdWords Keyword Planner

For small and medium-sized research jobs, nothing beats going directly to Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool for relevant suggestions and search volume. (For larger and enterprise-type projects, see the alternatives at the end of the post.)

This is basic stuff, but you’ll want to search for New Keyword and Adgroup Ideas and head straight to the to the Keyword Ideas tab. For a more complete guide to using the planner, Kristi Hines wrote a great guide here.

Hint: While most seasoned SEOs skip over the Ad Groups tab, there’s a wealth of ideas there tightly grouped into themed keywords – exactly what we are looking for!

Traditionally, marketers use Google’s keyword tool because of search volume and competition scores, but most web marketers underplay one of the most powerful features of this tool: the ability to sort keyword suggestions by relevance.

This gives us a huge advantage in creating themed keyword lists, and helps us create more targeted content.

Because the top suggestions often contain your core keywords, it’s helpful to use negative keywords to discover more variation.

Step 4: Defining the concepts further

Now that you have your basic keyword idea, the next step is creating your keyword theme by finding keywords that are conceptually related.

There are several ways to do this. For our example of “SEO tools” let’s try the popular methods to build out our themed list.

Google’s Related Searches

At the bottom of most Google results is a section called Related Searches. This is a gold mine of conceptually related concepts.

By clicking through the results and then examining those related searches (and repeating this process over and over) you can quickly find many long-tail opportunities much easier than using Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner.

Google Trends

At the bottom of each trends report is a “Related Searches” section that can be used to discover conceptually related queries.

Wikistalker

This cool tool introduced to me by Peter Bray “illustrates the relations between different things by visualizing the semantic relevance between the inter-connected structure of their Wikipedia entry articles.”

So if we search Wikistalker for “Search Engine Optimization” it shows us the following Wikipedia articles with the highest semantic relevance.

  • Internet Marketing: 85% relevant
  • Google Webmaster Tools: 70% relevant
  • Marketing: 59% relevant

Other tools

In fact, many other keyword research tools like Deeperweb Search, SEMRush, YouTube Analytics or WordStream can help you discover related keyword phrases.

Step 5: Empathy, your secret keyword weapon

Ask yourself what a visitor wants to find on this page.

As Rand explains in this excellent Whiteboard Friday, putting yourself in the visitor’s shoes and anticipating their needs provides a wealth of conceptually related keyword ideas.

Searchers of “SEO tools” are usually asking a number of similar questions:

  • How much does it cost? Free, plans and pricing, free trial
  • What kinds of tools are there? Link building, crawling, and indexing
  • Who are the tools for? Agency software, small business
  • How good are the tools? Best, endorsed by, customer review

By answering as many searcher questions as we can, we continue to build our themed keyword concept.

Step 6: Can you rank? Getting strategic with competition

In this case, it’s much better to go straight to the search engine results page (SERP). This was covered in How to Rank, so let me plagiarize myself by repeating the important points here.

You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:

  1. Automated tools like Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool
  2. Eyeballing the SERPs

If you have a paid subscription to Moz, or even a free trial, the Keyword Difficulty Tool calculates — on a 100-point scale — a difficulty score for each individual keyword phrase you enter.

If you run a full report you can break down the SERP for each keyword and judge the individual strengths of each URL that ranks. You can even add your own URL to see how you stack up.

Keyword phrases in the 60-100 range are typically very competitive, while keywords in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.

Manual method: the eyeball check

Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to simply look at the top results currently ranking.

Run a non-personalized search query for your keywords. Examine the top few results and ask yourself the following questions (SEO toolbars like the MozBar or SEOquake can help speed up the process):

  • Are the first few results optimized for the keyword?
  • Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
  • What’s the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
  • What’s the inbound anchor text?
  • Can you build links and/or mentions around this keyword?
  • Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword than the top ranking sites?

The last question is the most important: can you deliver higher quality content for this keyword than the competition?

The answer must be yes if you expect to deserve to rank.

Step 7: Pulling it all together

By this point, you’ve probably analyzed hundreds or thousands of keywords and organized them into themed, related groups.

You’ve found keywords that relate to your business or website, around which you can create shareable content, with a high enough search volume, and that you believe you can rank for.

Often, the keywords that you choose depend as much on your business or website as they do on the competition. We chose the keywords above not only because they relate to our primary keyword, but also because they relate to our business. Google may rank keywords based on relevance, but only you can decide if those keywords relate to your audience, product, and brand.

In the case of our “SEO Tools” example, our themed keyword list might look like this.

  • Free SEO Tools
  • Best SEO Software
  • Keyword Research
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Link Building Toolset
  • Best SEO Tools in 2013
  • Online Marketing
  • SEO for Google
  • Best SEO Tools for Agencies

Remember, we started with a very broad keyword. In practice, your final keyword will be much more tightly focused.

We’ll now use this list for creating content around our keyword theme. In a future post, we’ll discuss integrating these concepts for optimal on-page SEO.

Tips for scaling and large sites

The above method works if you’re building out keyword lists for small to medium sites, but scaling this process for large and enterprise sites requires a different, more mathematical approach.

If you want to research tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of keywords at a time, I highly recommend the looking into the following resources:

Conclusion

The above method is only one method of keyword research. There are hundreds more and you’ll likely invent your own method.

Regardless of the method you use, thinking about keywords in terms of concepts and themes represents a hugely important step in content development.

What are your favorite keyword tips to organize content around concepts?


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

The Lazy Web Marketer’s Guide for Smart Keyword Research

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

From keywords to concepts: the smart SEO’s system for how to do themed keyword research

If Google’s Penguin update and Knowledge Graph have taught us anything, it’s that concepts have become more important than individual keywords for search marketing.

Many people in the SEO space mistakenly assume that because Google withholds keyword referral data in the form of (not provided), keywords no longer matter.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Every search begins with keywords. Over 5 billion Google searches a day. Consider the following:
  • Google’s entire business is based on selling keywords – over 40 billion dollars a year, most of it from keyword sales through advertising.
  • (not provided) affects only post-click analytics. It doesn’t influence the pre-click keywords users type into search boxes.
  • Keywords and their meaning remain the primary input search engines use to deliver answers to users (while other inputs such as location data and app integration are on the rise).

Marketers who invest in smart keyword research will continue to have a huge advantage over the competition.

The trick today is turning those keywords into concepts.

From single keywords to themed concepts

When most of us first learned SEO, we learned to research one keyword at a time. We optimized our page for that keyword by placing it in the title tag, in the headline, a few times in the body, and maybe the alt text of a photo.

If we were really fancy we’d optimize a page for two keywords. Oh dear.

In truth, optimizing pages with a single keyword mentality hasn’t worked well for a long time.

Content today has to be about something.

The difference today from years past is the shift from individual keywords to concepts. Concepts relate to search marketing in three primary ways:

1. What the user intends

Search engines try to better understand what the user asks by relating that question to concepts. If I search for “movie about tiger on boat” Google will likely understand that I am asking about the movie Life of Pi, not about pages optimized for those specific keywords.

2. What your content is about

Search engines read the keywords on your pages to try and figure out what those pages are conceptually about.

3. Relating concepts to one another

The Knowledge Graph shows us how Google relates concepts to each other. In the case of Life of Pi, this may be showing how the film relates to ratings, reviews, actors, writers, and the cast.

Keyword targeting: the dumb, hard way

In the post How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint, I first addressed the concept of themed keyword research. The guide lists the biggest mistakes people make when choosing keywords. Here’s what we want to avoid:

  1. Choosing keywords that are too broad
  2. Keywords with too much competition
  3. Keywords without enough traffic

  4. Keywords that don’t convert
  5. Trying to rank for one keyword at a time

Instead, let’s take the opposite approach.

The basic idea is that we’re going to focus our content around ideas instead of keywords, and thus give us the potential to rank for 100s or 1000s of keywords at a time.

The smart system of themed keyword research

Let’s explore a new way of thinking about keywords. It requires discarding some of our old ideas and taking advantage of how Google may likely decide what our content is about.

To accomplish this, we’ll leverage some obvious truths about search traffic.

Truth #1: Over 70% of the traffic you earn for any given page will come from keywords you didn’t try to optimize for.

If you’ve ever seen a keyword report in your analytics platform or Google Webmaster Tools, you know this is true.

What are these keywords? They may be synonyms, thematically related, or closely related ideas that search engines thought best matched your content. Sometimes they are way off base, but we won’t concern ourselves with those.

With this in mind, optimizing for a only a single keyword means ignoring the majority of your potential traffic.

Truth #2: Ranking number one is not a requirement for earning thousands of visits.

Given what we know about point #1, it’s often better to rank in position 2 or lower for hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords than it is to rank number one for a single keyword.

Truth #3: The best keyword tools in the world will only show you a fraction of the keywords you can potentially rank for.

Have you ever compared your long tail keyword data with data from Google’s own Keyword Planner?

Most of those keywords will show little potential search traffic or won’t even register, but you know this isn’t true because these are the same keywords that brought you traffic.

Relying on keyword research tools alone wont bring you to your full ranking potential. You need content that fully explores your themed concepts.

Truth #4: Search engines sell keywords grouped into concepts and themes.

We can learn from this strategy.

When you purchase keywords through AdWords, Google suggests keywords to you in tightly grouped themes and ideas. In fact, they do everything they can to discourage you from bidding on individual keywords.

Of course, this is one way for Google to make more money, but it’s also because Google knows that concepts are often a better indicator of searcher intent than individual keywords.

Part of this is due to the fact that 15% of all Google searches, or over half a billion per day, have never been seen by before.

Now let’s put these ideas into action.

Step 1: Gather your keyword seeds

Folks talk about different processes of keyword research depending on whether you are going after

  • Traffic: good for pure pageviews and ad-based revenue sites, or
  • Conversions: for example, when you sell goods or services or need brand awareness

Most of the time, you already have a good idea of what your keyword topic broadly covers, especially if you’re working with an established business or website.

For our purposes, let’s explore ideas around the keyword “seo tools” – a term near and dear to our hearts here at Moz. In reality, this is an extremely competitive keyword, and for your own research you’d likely want to begin with a longer-tail, less competitive term.

Brainstorming

There are literally hundreds of keyword research tools out there to experiment with, but a few SEO favorites include:

In the end, you will likely rely heavily on Google AdWords Keyword Planner, but you never want to rely on it as your sole tool. It’s best to explore and play around with many tools to discover new ideas.

Here are keyword suggestions from Grepwords.

There are no rules except to have fun and try to discover new keywords you haven’t considered before.

Step 2: Get specific with modifiers

This is basic stuff, but it bears emphasizing: The more specific your keywords, the easier it typically is to rank for those keywords.

Sure, it would be great to rank for the keyword “SEO tools” itself, but most people aren’t searching that way. Instead, they are likely looking for something more specific.

Common keyword modifiers include:

  1. Time and Date: “SEO Tools 2014″
  2. Quality and/or Price: “Free SEO Tools”, “Fastest SEO Tools”
  3. Intent: “Buy SEO Tools”, “Find SEO Tools”
  4. Location: “SEO Tools Online”, “Canadian SEO Tools”

Your chosen keyword research tools will uncover these and many more qualifiers, but you’ll want to include them in your searches as well.

Case Study: the $70,000 keyword modifier

Seasonal keywords are often super-effective. I discovered this myself a few years ago as an independent SEO with the keyword “IRA contribution limits.” The keyword had good volume but was super-competitive, so I knew I was never going to rank for it.

Using Google Trends, I found that usage for this keyword spiked at certain times of the year, and that in fact people were looking for information for a specific year, i.e. “IRA contribution limits 2012.”

Using Google Trends is a great way to validate any keyword idea, as it will often reveal hidden patterns and insight not present in other tools.

Armed with the new knowledge, I found many more date-specific keywords themed around this topic and built an entire domain around them. Although it took a lot of hard work, the site eventually drew tons of seasonal traffic and I was able to sell the site with a significant profit.

It’s a good idea to validate all your important keyword ideas through Google Trends, as it will often reveal patterns and insights not present in other keyword research tools.

Step 3: Using Google AdWords Keyword Planner

For small and medium-sized research jobs, nothing beats going directly to Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool for relevant suggestions and search volume. (For larger and enterprise-type projects, see the alternatives at the end of the post.)

This is basic stuff, but you’ll want to search for New Keyword and Adgroup Ideas and head straight to the to the Keyword Ideas tab. For a more complete guide to using the planner, Kristi Hines wrote a great guide here.

Hint: While most seasoned SEOs skip over the Ad Groups tab, there’s a wealth of ideas there tightly grouped into themed keywords – exactly what we are looking for!

Traditionally, marketers use Google’s keyword tool because of search volume and competition scores, but most web marketers underplay one of the most powerful features of this tool: the ability to sort keyword suggestions by relevance.

This gives us a huge advantage in creating themed keyword lists, and helps us create more targeted content.

Because the top suggestions often contain your core keywords, it’s helpful to use negative keywords to discover more variation.

Step 4: Defining the concepts further

Now that you have your basic keyword idea, the next step is creating your keyword theme by finding keywords that are conceptually related.

There are several ways to do this. For our example of “SEO tools” let’s try the popular methods to build out our themed list.

Google’s Related Searches

At the bottom of most Google results is a section called Related Searches. This is a gold mine of conceptually related concepts.

By clicking through the results and then examining those related searches (and repeating this process over and over) you can quickly find many long-tail opportunities much easier than using Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner.

Google Trends

At the bottom of each trends report is a “Related Searches” section that can be used to discover conceptually related queries.

Wikistalker

This cool tool introduced to me by Peter Bray “illustrates the relations between different things by visualizing the semantic relevance between the inter-connected structure of their Wikipedia entry articles.”

So if we search Wikistalker for “Search Engine Optimization” it shows us the following Wikipedia articles with the highest semantic relevance.

  • Internet Marketing: 85% relevant
  • Google Webmaster Tools: 70% relevant
  • Marketing: 59% relevant

Other tools

In fact, many other keyword research tools like Deeperweb Search, SEMRush, YouTube Analytics or WordStream can help you discover related keyword phrases.

Step 5: Empathy, your secret keyword weapon

Ask yourself what a visitor wants to find on this page.

As Rand explains in this excellent Whiteboard Friday, putting yourself in the visitor’s shoes and anticipating their needs provides a wealth of conceptually related keyword ideas.

Searchers of “SEO tools” are usually asking a number of similar questions:

  • How much does it cost? Free, plans and pricing, free trial
  • What kinds of tools are there? Link building, crawling, and indexing
  • Who are the tools for? Agency software, small business
  • How good are the tools? Best, endorsed by, customer review

By answering as many searcher questions as we can, we continue to build our themed keyword concept.

Step 6: Can you rank? Getting strategic with competition

In this case, it’s much better to go straight to the search engine results page (SERP). This was covered in How to Rank, so let me plagiarize myself by repeating the important points here.

You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:

  1. Automated tools like Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool
  2. Eyeballing the SERPs

If you have a paid subscription to Moz, or even a free trial, the Keyword Difficulty Tool calculates — on a 100-point scale — a difficulty score for each individual keyword phrase you enter.

If you run a full report you can break down the SERP for each keyword and judge the individual strengths of each URL that ranks. You can even add your own URL to see how you stack up.

Keyword phrases in the 60-100 range are typically very competitive, while keywords in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.

Manual method: the eyeball check

Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to simply look at the top results currently ranking.

Run a non-personalized search query for your keywords. Examine the top few results and ask yourself the following questions (SEO toolbars like the MozBar or SEOquake can help speed up the process):

  • Are the first few results optimized for the keyword?
  • Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
  • What’s the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
  • What’s the inbound anchor text?
  • Can you build links and/or mentions around this keyword?
  • Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword than the top ranking sites?

The last question is the most important: can you deliver higher quality content for this keyword than the competition?

The answer must be yes if you expect to deserve to rank.

Step 7: Pulling it all together

By this point, you’ve probably analyzed hundreds or thousands of keywords and organized them into themed, related groups.

You’ve found keywords that relate to your business or website, around which you can create shareable content, with a high enough search volume, and that you believe you can rank for.

Often, the keywords that you choose depend as much on your business or website as they do on the competition. We chose the keywords above not only because they relate to our primary keyword, but also because they relate to our business. Google may rank keywords based on relevance, but only you can decide if those keywords relate to your audience, product, and brand.

In the case of our “SEO Tools” example, our themed keyword list might look like this.

  • Free SEO Tools
  • Best SEO Software
  • Keyword Research
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Link Building Toolset
  • Best SEO Tools in 2013
  • Online Marketing
  • SEO for Google
  • Best SEO Tools for Agencies

Remember, we started with a very broad keyword. In practice, your final keyword will be much more tightly focused.

We’ll now use this list for creating content around our keyword theme. In a future post, we’ll discuss integrating these concepts for optimal on-page SEO.

Tips for scaling and large sites

The above method works if you’re building out keyword lists for small to medium sites, but scaling this process for large and enterprise sites requires a different, more mathematical approach.

If you want to research tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of keywords at a time, I highly recommend the looking into the following resources:

Conclusion

The above method is only one method of keyword research. There are hundreds more and you’ll likely invent your own method.

Regardless of the method you use, thinking about keywords in terms of concepts and themes represents a hugely important step in content development.

What are your favorite keyword tips to organize content around concepts?


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →