Planning and researching your SEO keywords - Google Analytics Tutorial

- Before you can optimize your website, you need to know what you're optimizing for. And those are keywords. It's important to understand what words or phrases users are typing or speaking into search engines so we can optimize our pages to show up in the results for those terms. Formal keyword research is the foundational piece in SEO that will help you understand just that. What we're talking about is discovering the right keywords and choosing which ones we'll target based on relevance, search volume and competitiveness. The first step is to brainstorm a list. Start by answering some basic questions. What products and services do you offer? What problems do you solve? Be as comprehensive as you possibly can and list out phrases that you might type into a search engine from the perspective of a potential customer. And remember, as people who work in our own businesses day in and day out, we often have a very different way of talking about our products and services than our customers. Maybe you've got a website for a local ice cream shop. While it might be tempting to start writing down things like fruit and flavor-infused dairy-based frozen desserts and confections, and while technically, that is what you sell, people are probably more likely to be searching for things like ice cream shop near me. Now, that's a relevant search term if you sell ice cream. You might also be tempted to put the term ice cream on your list but in the context of keyword research, that's actually not that relevant. With ice cream shop near me, we can be pretty sure of the user's intent. They want to have some ice cream in their hands in the very near future. But someone typing in ice cream might be doing it to research a school paper on how it was invented or how to make it at home or for any other number of reasons. While brainstorming can get you started, there are some great tools that can help you find and suggest more and similar keywords to expand your list of possibilities. Google Search Console offers insights into exactly how people are already finding your site and that's a great place to start. Some additional favorite expansion tools in the SEO industry include Google Trends, AnswerThePublic, Moz's Keyword Explorer and more. These tools offer suggestions around new target phrases based on your chosen keyword and they help to understand exactly how people are searching. Once you've got that list of potential relevant keywords, it's time to look at search volume and competition. You'll probably notice that a handful of your most obvious keywords get typed in thousands and thousands of times every day, and that they're very competitive. But there are a whole lot more keywords that don't get typed in nearly as often. They're usually more descriptive, maybe even more relevant, less competitive and they're known as long tail keywords. Long tail keywords in SEO are incredibly useful. While individually, there may not be as much search volume on each term, collectively, they can represent a lot of great visitors. For example, if I were selling iPhone cases, I can see the keyword iPhone cases gets typed into search engines a lot. But everyone knows this and it's extremely competitive and probably very difficult to rank for. So what about a long tail keyword, like protective iPhone cases? It doesn't have the same search volume but if you sell iPhone cases, it's going to be extremely relevant and less competitive. Now, here's the important part. You might be able to find hundreds or even thousands of these long tail keywords that together have the potential to get you more traffic than ranking for iPhone cases would have from the start. Last, you'll want to identify themes to group your keywords around, a process known as keyword categorization. Maybe you would create a group that will include protective iPhone cases for all the different models of the phone or alternatively, we could go by color. There's no right or wrong way to do this but some organization will help to manage these groups of keywords as you optimize for them. Remember, keyword research is an exploratory and discovery exercise. Be open minded. Put yourself in the mindset of your potential customers and find the balance between relevance, search volume and competition as you create and then revisit your target keyword list over time.