Choosing the right keywords from thousands

[TacoCat]

So I'm doing keyword research on few topics.

Basically I got free 14 day trial on SemRush, I'm spying on few websites.

So I pick a piece of content that I want to rank for as well.
Then I place the content link in SemRush and it gives me all the keywords that this peace is competing for.

The range usually is from 300 - 2000 keywords.

Now my question is how in your right mind do you pick the best keywords?

My first thought was choosing keywords that have at least 100 searches per month (Keep in mind that these are not buying intent keywords). But what criteria else?

You can't possibly go trough all of them manually and check SERP's for each keyword to see which one will be easyer to outrank.

 

[Ryuzaki]

You shouldn't have to check out every keyword. Since you're seeing what terms this post is ranking for (not site, but a specific post), then most of those keywords are likely going to be occupied by the same Top 10 sites with little variation.

I'd look at the main core keyword it's ranking for first and foremost. The long-tails are going to have a very similar top 10. So at that point all you really need to do is check the Top 3 spots on that main keyword. See how good their on-page is and how many links the pages have and the domains themselves.

If it's just about traffic and not buying intent keywords, I would find my competitors who are weaker than me and slightly stronger and plug their entire domains in, export the data, and sort it by position first and then volume. If they are #1 or even top 3 for something, you can likely just steal the rankings outright, especially if there are few links to those pages. Most of the time they have negligible to non-existent on-page as well.

 

[TacoCat]

You shouldn't have to check out every keyword. Since you're seeing what terms this post is ranking for (not site, but a specific post), then most of those keywords are likely going to be occupied by the same Top 10 sites with little variation.

I'd look at the main core keyword it's ranking for first and foremost. The long-tails are going to have a very similar top 10. So at that point all you really need to do is check the Top 3 spots on that main keyword. See how good their on-page is and how many links the pages have and the domains themselves.

If it's just about traffic and not buying intent keywords, I would find my competitors who are weaker than me and slightly stronger and plug their entire domains in, export the data, and sort it by position first and then volume. If they are #1 or even top 3 for something, you can likely just steal the rankings outright, especially if there are few links to those pages. Most of the time they have negligible to non-existent on-page as well.

This is for a completely new website, so it is not stronger than any competitor. But I got your point.

 

[CCarter]

So I'm doing keyword research on few topics.

Are you doing research on entering a new niche or going after traffic within a selected niche already?

 

[TacoCat]

Are you doing research on entering a new niche or going after traffic within a selected niche already?

I have already selected a vertical and a niche.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'd go after the main terms and try to include all of the easier long-tails with lesser volume within the article.

If you spend the effort to make an amazing article that's worthwhile, you don't want to try to take down a lesser term while abandoning the chance for the big one. You'll scoop up the lesser terms along the way as you work towards ranking the main one.

I'm thinking in terms of writing a nice article for a lesser term and then later deciding you're ready to tackle the big one. You won't necessarily want to rewrite the article or disrupt your rankings by trying to re-optimize the original unless you're real careful. But at that point, you're spinning your wheels somewhat when you could have prepared for the big term originally.

It'll be possible to own all of the terms if done properly, since the lesser terms will be less competitive. Usually it's pages optimized for the big term that take down all the long-tails because they are the ones that end up with all of the links and shares.

If you want to try to scoop up easier to rank terms quickly, I'd find ones that are long yet are the main terms. Anywhere you can go for the main term, I'd do that.

Take into consideration that I'm only talking about non-buying intent keywords as you've mentioned.

 

[CCarter]

@TacoCat - Your approach assumes your competition knows what they are doing or are smarter than you with better tools. This thought process is disappointing.

If you research what Elon Musk talks about with first principles discipline you would see you are coming at this whole approach backwards, worrying about weaker competition or ranking in the serp - which assumes the same competition will even be there tomorrow. What if you waste a whole day researching the top 20 of 50 keywords and tomorrow the rankings shift? (cause they do that). The problem isn't even about monitoring the serps, its about your audience.

The whole of your keyword research needs to focus on your audience, answering their questions by grouping them into segments, newbie, intermediate, and advanced are my preferred methods, but there are others like gender, age, ego, and WHY this type of person *cough* customer profile from market research *cough*, is going to be on your site. Then once you narrowed down the top level focus, you then hunt for the keywords you want and figure out which competitors know their shit and are worthy of studying. Without a top level focus you are not organizing a voice or story to tell for your audience, so your content will read as if its just piecemealed instead of being a consistent voice and thought WHICH will then create stickiness.

To give you an example, if you see me, CCarter, write something, there are certain tones, ideas, and consistencies you expect, there is a voice behind it which you understand, you may not agree with, but you understand. That's because of the past experiences you've had, but also the narrative I've woven. What if I were to write content based off of keyword research first without any planning? I would probably write content that was the same old drivel the whole SEO blogosphere consist of today, bla bla nonsense with no real action or meat on the bone - cause they don't have a narrative in the minds of what overall message they want to convey.

To put it another way, imagine you are writing a fiction novel, and each chapter title you are about to write is done by keyword research... How insane does that sound? Its ludicrous. How would the book read? Where is the consistency or overall themed message? Your articles/chapters are just going to be garbled up content for robots designed to create a split second weak human connection and no stickiness.

Define your audience first, create an outline of topics they want to learn about, create the structure to your "story" then go and do keyword research with the overall structure and messaging embedded in the back of your mind while you find keywords/chapters for your novel.

 

[TacoCat]

@TacoCat - Your approach assumes your competition knows what they are doing or are smarter than you with better tools. This thought process is disappointing.

If you research what Elon Musk talks about with first principles discipline you would see you are coming at this whole approach backwards, worrying about weaker competition or ranking in the serp - which assumes the same competition will even be there tomorrow. What if you waste a whole day researching the top 20 of 50 keywords and tomorrow the rankings shift? (cause they do that). The problem isn't even about monitoring the serps, its about your audience.

The whole of your keyword research needs to focus on your audience, answering their questions by grouping them into segments, newbie, intermediate, and advanced are my preferred methods, but there are others like gender, age, ego, and WHY this type of person *cough* customer profile from market research *cough*, is going to be on your site. Then once you narrowed down the top level focus, you then hunt for the keywords you want and figure out which competitors know their shit and are worthy of studying. Without a top level focus you are not organizing a voice or story to tell for your audience, so your content will read as if its just piecemealed instead of being a consistent voice and thought WHICH will then create stickiness.

To give you an example, if you see me, CCarter, write something, there are certain tones, ideas, and consistencies you expect, there is a voice behind it which you understand, you may not agree with, but you understand. That's because of the past experiences you've had, but also the narrative I've woven. What if I were to write content based off of keyword research first without any planning? I would probably write content that was the same old drivel the whole SEO blogosphere consist of today, bla bla nonsense with no real action or meat on the bone - cause they don't have a narrative in the minds of what overall message they want to convey.

To put it another way, imagine you are writing a fiction novel, and each chapter title you are about to write is done by keyword research... How insane does that sound? Its ludicrous. How would the book read? Where is the consistency or overall themed message? Your articles/chapters are just going to be garbled up content for robots designed to create a split second weak human connection and no stickiness.

Define your audience first, create an outline of topics they want to learn about, create the structure to your "story" then go and do keyword research with the overall structure and messaging embedded in the back of your mind while you find keywords/chapters for your novel.

This makes a lot of sense, because when I was doing keyword research on my competitors I was thinking to myself that basically what I will do is make the same content with just different wording. Basically I will be copying my competitors, that puts be out of my game because the least thing I want to do is be a copycat just an online scavenger that collects shit that everyone has and aranges it differently.

I want to give them some new and original content.

I've built and approximate profile of what my ideal customer might look like. And I've came up with some good ideas for content that my ideal customer would be interested.

The question is, how do I find the Ideal customer? Where do I even begin to look for keywords and more content ideas.

 

[CCarter]

The question is, how do I find the Ideal customer?

Finding the Ideal customer... That's the billion dollar question. There are hundreds of startups right now getting funded without even having the slightest clue who their ideal customers will end up being. As well there are traditional industries who started out doing one thing but ended up pivoting towards a segment of the audience they never considered. The ONLY way to find the ideal customer is to start fishing and throwing your net into different waters. Another main reason I talk about how important customer support is to a business is because customers will ask questions, make comments, and suggestions that can lead you to ideas you never considered or were planning on implementing because you've had your own vision.

Most customers don't have all the answers, they probably don't have any. But they'll be able to tell you what they don't want loudly.

The quote goes if Henry Ford asked a focus group what they wanted they would have said "build a faster horse", instead he went his understanding of the problem through a first principles approach and built a car. He saw people needed to get from point A to point B. Conventional wisdom said for thousands of years people got there on horseback.

But if you go at it from a first principles method, you don't need horses, you just need something to get you to point B. What if a cart didn't need a horse pulling it? What if some mechanism could make it start and stop on it's own?

That type of thinking is EXTREMELY hard, but for the people that practice asking "Why?" or "What IF?" every day to the current conventional wisdom like a child following you around asking "Why?" to every answer you give them, you'll learn more about the world and explore new ways of thinking.

I'll give you personal examples with one of my SAAS. The system tracks SERPs top 100, it was originally top 20, and in early conversations with people Jason told the idea to they ALL said "no one needs to know that much information, that's too much". In fact one competitor who sloppily implemented a faux SERPWoo even stated a year before SERPWoo launched that it should only show the top 10. We didn't listen to any of that nonsense cause they came at it from a "current solution" standpoint. They were seeing the environment only solvable by the current conventional methods.

For our potential customers their problem was how do they know they increased rankings cause of their efforts or because 5 of their competitors dropped in rankings, or maybe a single major competitor dropped in ranking across their whole industry? Maybe the competition started buying bad PBN links but you'll never know cause all you see in your old school rank tracker solution is your site increases.

The only way to do that is to monitor the top results. We started out with only the top 20 when we launched. The numbers within the first 5 days were ridiculous in terms of paid signups, and we only gave customer 20 keywords MAX for a paid account. We did what we projected to do in 3 months in 5 days. That told us the conventional wisdom of the current industry was so off that it ended up causing us to be a huge success.

Eventually some customers came to us and said if we did the first 3 pages it would be perfect for ORM. In ALL our planning and working we NEVER considered the ORM aspect, even though it seems obvious when you step back and look at what it does. So we added the top 30, eventually we did the top 100 to get a bit inline with what customers expected from their data.

6 months later we were brainstorming on how we can get people to input more keywords into the system so they can get a better understanding of their SERPs. Currently the method was copy and paste from spreadsheets, or textfile, there were no import options. Basically getting started with SERPWoo created another barrier to entry, cause you'll have to do all this work outside of SERPWoo first before creating a project within SW. That's a barrier to entry, but looking at conventional wisdom, what were the other old school rank trackers doing to combat this problem? Nothing. I've got folders upon folders with textfiles upon textfiles with detailed logs of my competition, their marketing strategies, their products' functionalities, their interfaces, and what their customers like and don't like about them. Even today I spend my weekends watching competition, seeing what they did this week and planning on the future.

Not a single standalone rank tracker solved this problem. That's when I came up across a tool that was a simple keyword researching tool and realized, shit we can implement this right into SERPWoo so users can do research and start immediately tracking data they found. A week later Keyword Finder was born. Now there is a powerful internal tool that helps the overall main tool and removes a HUGE barrier to entry for usage.

There are a ton of other smaller functions and ideas like Tagging URLs an ORM color to track your ORM campaign and ORM Goggle mode that came from customer's asking questions and making comments about what would take things to the next level. I would say besides the Keyword Finder, 90% of the features within SERPwoo besides the core are from customers asking questions and comments, and us listening to what they want and more importantly WHY they want a solution like that.

So how do I identify the ideal customer? It's based on behavior patterns, questions and comments they make, and more importantly the reason they need a tool like this. The idea of ORM tracking wasn't in our heads until a customer said it was the only tool which allowed this level of tracking - BAM! Now I know ideal customers are doing ORM campaigns for clients, businesses, or individuals are an ideal match for SERPWoo. Maybe eventually we would have come to the conclusion ourselves, but it took us getting our feet wet and diving into the water and experience what the customers wanted and needed which allowed us to pivot towards ORM.

Ontop of that now the keyword tool is becoming a serious contender in its own right against other keyword tools. When the online conversation turned to SERPWoo versus SEMRush and other major brands which I highly admire and respect, that told me we made enough of a disturbance within the industry by making a couple of tweaks here and there to the conventional wisdom of how things are normally done. The customers we originally thought were going to be the biggest segment turned out not to be, yet a segment we completely ignored, agencies and large enterprise companies jumped onboard faster and have stayed longer. I haven't found the perfect ideal customer but from the years of experience and talking to customers I can tell their mindset and what they are looking for and if we'll be able to deliver on what they want.

Right now I'm about to go on a marketing campaign that's going to test out a dozen different segments I've identified of potential ideal customers. It's no different for an informational based site than it is for a SAAS or brick and mortar business. You just have to jump into the water and keep trying different methods, ideas, and segements of your audience.