Wix and Mangools partner to give you insider tips on conducting keyword research for your site. You’ll learn how to choose the right keywords for your business and use them strategically across your site.
Transcript: Keyword research for SEO with Mangools
Speakers
Matthew Kaminsky, Product Marketing Manager, SEO Education, Wix.com
Maros Kortis, CMO, Mangools
00:00
Matthew: Welcome to our keyword research for SEO Webinar. My name is Matthew, I am on the SEO Marketing team here at Wix. And my goal here at Wix is to help all of you. My focus is on SEO education. So I'm here to help all of our users learn more about how to do SEO, and how to improve your visibility on search engines, whether it be Google, eBay, Amazon, Bing, all the above.
And a big part of that is keyword research. So tonight, we have partnered with Mangools, which is a fantastic keyword research tool. We are going to talk all about how to do keyword research. So I am going to turn it over to Maros. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today.
00:51
Maros: Hi, everybody, wow, thanks a lot for the introduction, Matthew. I’m really happy to be part of this. And I hope that after seeing this webinar, you guys will be all set to do keyword research on your own in order to skyrocket the organic traffic of your website.
Alright then, let's get started. Well, there are tons of websites created every day. Many people just put some, you know, keywords on them and wait for a miracle to happen. Yeah, most of the time, nothing will happen. And those websites won’t probably get a single click from organic search. And that's why you should do keyword research, if you don't want to end up like that.
Keywords are basically the gateway that leads people to your website. In other words, to your business. It's not only about SEO. I would say that keyword research is a business thing, because you'll find information about your niche, about what people search for, and who your competitors are. Take the three [of them] and you have the basic pillars of business success, right?
Yeah, well, from the technical point of view, keywords are any words or phrases we use to type into search engines to find information on the internet. So yeah, that's pretty straight [forward].
Well, now let's answer the questions why, how and when to do keyword research. As I already mentioned, keyword research is one of the most important tasks if you want to reach people with your website. So basically, that's why you should do it. How to do it? Well, we are about to find out in the next [few] minutes. But no worries. It's not rocket science, and when to do keyword research? Basically, anytime you are creating a new website, or starting with a new niche or optimizing your existing content, so it's like you can do it every time—
03:19
Matthew: So it’s never too late to do keyword research.
03:25
Maros: Exactly.
Matthew: Great.
Maros: Alright. Well, before we dig into how to do keyword research, I'd like to stress the fact that SEO keeps changing. And this is caused mostly by Google, and their algorithm updates. Their goal is to show the best possible results. And that directly affects how we do keyword research. While, let's say 20 years ago, it was mostly about putting the keywords everywhere and as many times as possible.
Nowadays, it doesn't work just like that. Now you have to focus on quality content, cover the search intent and that exactly means doing these three steps:
Finding keywords
Analyzing them
Using them on your website
And today we are going to cover all three.
So how to find the keywords or where to find the keywords. It's really connected to knowing your niche. I always say that when you know your niche, you’ll have great initial keyword ideas. Let me show you a quick example.
Let's say you have a blog about hiking. I think that you don't need to be a genius to know that one of the keywords you want to rank for is like “hiking” or “hiking trails” or something similar. But the problem [with] such keywords, we call them short-tail or fat head keywords, is their high competition. You know, many websites want to rank for the website, for the keyword, sorry.
But if you dig deeper, you'll find out that keywords such as “best watch for hiking” or “best hiking shoes” and you know these long keywords are super relevant keywords for your audience. And that brings me to the next example. As you can see here it's an example for the keyword “shoes.”
So let's say you have an affiliate website about shoes, most probably you won't be able to rank for the keyword “shoes.” And if you would, the search intent behind this keyword is a bit different. As you can see, the ranking websites are local stores selling shoes, and of course many eCommerce websites say selling shoes. So if you have an affiliate website about shoes, no that's not the right keyword for you.
So to sum up, there's a clear difference between those one word search terms such as “shoes” and so-called long-tail keywords. Typical long-tail keywords such as “the best running shoes for kids”, as you can see on the chart. Typical long-tail keywords usually consist of three or more words. It has a lower search volume, but usually also lower competition.
That means that it’s more specific and then leads to higher engagement. So the conversion rates of those keywords are usually higher. Why? Why am I saying this? Long-tail keywords represent an ideal start for your website, if you can rank for the most competitive terms with the highest search volumes.
So, but yeah, don't forget, when you optimize for long-tail keywords, you will rank for many other related long-tail keywords. So at the end of the day, their overall potential is higher. A very important thing I want to mention here is that you don't have to focus only on long-tails. If you find the short-tail, one word search term that is relevant and you can rank for it, then don't hesitate a second. Just go for it but we'll talk about it later.
07:50
Matthew: Okay, so it doesn't mean just because you choose one specific keyword for a page on your site, it doesn't mean that it won't rank for other keywords. But because this is a keyword that you chose as your focus keyword, so in this case, “best running shoes for kids”, it could still rank for “running shoes” and “shoes.” But no matter who's searching for those, the main keyword that we're trying to rank number one for is “best running shoes for kids.”
Maros: Exactly.
Matthew: Fantastic. And can you choose—how many keywords should you choose, when you're choosing to focus on specific keywords?
08:30
Maros: Well, usually, you have like one focus keyword, but it really depends on the type of the page. Like let's say if you write a blog, that will be about “best running shoes for kids”, then this will be your focus keyword. But if you optimize the content very well and your website is optimized well, then Google or even other search engines will understand that your content is relevant to even more keywords. So you should display for those keywords too.
09:06
Matthew: Okay, so what happens—this is a great question from Fabian, “What happens when two pages on your site focus on the exact same keywords?”
09:15
Maros: Yeah, well, that's a mistake. You should avoid it. There's a term for this. I guess, it's keyword cannibalization. So yeah, pick one and redirect the second to the first. As always, make sure that you target one keyword only with one landing page.
09:41
Matthew: Alright, great. Thank you.
09:47
Maros: Alright, then now the question is, where to dig deeper, where to find those keywords? There are many options to find great keyword ideas. You shouldn't stick only to keyword tools or or Google Keyword Planner. There are many other ways to find great keyword ideas.
One of them is Google search. I mean, in Google search, if you know how to use it, you can find tons of great ideas. It has Google Autocomplete, as you can see on the pictures. Then you have the People Also Ask section searches related to, and so on. So really, Google search is a great place.
And then of course, your Google Search Search Console is full of great data.
Competitors, do not forget about competitors. It's also a great idea. And then yeah, specific stuff, such as Reddit or Quora, or other forums that are related to your niche, to the market.
And, of course, YouTube or Amazon, if you have an affiliate website, usually you are selling stuff, you are pointing to Amazon to get the commission. Well, Amazon is basically a big search engine. Likewise, YouTube is a video search engine so yeah, you will find tons of keywords [with] these tools.
11:15
Matthew: Amazon is great. Also, for eCommerce websites, if your site is built around an intent to sell. Amazon is a place it's the search engine for finding—people go to Amazon because they want to buy something. So if you're selling something, Amazon's a great place.
All these tools that you mentioned. They're all free. That's surprising. So I mean, I know Mangools is a great product, but it does cost money. Do I need to have expensive tools like Mangools to do keyword research?
11:50
Maros: Well, you know, you'll find a lot of ideas, even with the free options. But to be able to analyze those keywords, like to see their search volumes, keyword difficulty and other data. I guess it's worth the money to invest to buy tools. You know, there are tons of keyword research tools starting from a few dollars to really expensive ones. Try them and find out what fits your needs. But yeah, I definitely would recommend investing this money because [it] will return.
12:30
Matthew: For sure. But definitely, at least at the beginning, starting out and using these different places to generate ideas is fantastic. And it doesn't cost a cent.
Maros: Exactly.
Matthew: Great.
12:48
Maros: Alright. Cool. Now we are getting to the next part, which is dedicated to how to analyze the keywords. So if we have already found keyword ideas, the next step is to analyze them. I'll be honest, I've [written] a couple of keyword research guides saying that there are three most important aspects of keyword research.
And then my teammate Vlado came up with The Tripod Rule in one of his guides. And I think that's the best way to describe how keyword analysis works. Anyways, you'll find many guides written by Vlad on our blog. And by the way, he is with us today on the live chat, ready to answer your questions together with guys from our Support team. So give them Hell, seriously. No, I'm just joking. But yeah, they will answer everything you need.
So, The Tripod Rule. What's The Tripod Rule? The ideal keyword must be popular, so it has high enough monthly searches. Then it has to be rankable. That means it has a reasonable keyword difficulty for a website. And relevant—that means the search intent matches your content.
Why a tripod? Because, you know, it stands steady only if all the three legs have good ground. So a quick example. If you have a keyword that has a high search volume and low difficulty, but it's not relevant to your content, Google will not show your page for the keyword.
Likewise, if the difficulty is low, and the keyword may be irrelevant, but there's no search volume, you will get no traffic so it's kind of useless. And if the search volume and the relevance are okay, but the difficulty is too high. You won't be able to outrank your competitors. So basically, at the end of the day, you won’t show [in] the highest positions. So that's why it's called The Tripod Rule. Cool. If there are no questions [on] this, I would like to go through everything that I just said in a real live example.
15:23
Matthew: Before—actually, I do have a good question that a few people have asked, “What do you mean by difficulty in terms of keywords?”
15:30
Maros: Sure. That's a good question. We'll get to that. It's like—really in two minutes. So we'll show you that on a real example. Alright, well, let's say we have a coffee blog, and we plan to write a new blog post. Yeah, when I was finding out what to include in this case study, I was really working with a lot of stuff, with a lot of keywords. But I'll be honest, I love coffee. Guilty as charged. So that's basically why I chose this topic.
So yeah, if you write about coffee, you'll probably know that there are many coffee recipes, and one of them is v60 coffee recipe. So let's say we are going to write a blog post that will be about brewing an amazing cup of this type of coffee. Alright, to do this, we'll just take the keyword and type it into KW Finder.
16:38
Matthew: KW Finder is part of Mangools, it's part of your system?
16:41
Maros: Yep. Exactly. Mangools is a suite of five SEO tools, and KW Finder is included. Good.
16:53
Matthew: Wow, that's a lot of information.
16:57
Maros: Yeah, we'll go one-by-one. And of course, we'll answer the question about the keyword difficulty. I just get this, it's best to show it as an example. Alright, then.
Alright, so on the left part of the screen, we can see related keywords that are connected to our main keyword. Then we start to do it—the v60 coffee recipe. We'll start with the search, which is the average monthly search volume. So it's the first leg of our tripod rule. And then we have the KD, which stands for the keyword difficulty. Keyword difficulty will tell you how hard it is to rank for this keyword [in] the highest positions, on the first search engine results page.
So that's basically what keyword difficulty stands for. In KW Finder, we have it from a scale—from zero to 100. So yeah, the lower it is, it is easier to rank for that keyword, the higher it is, it will take a lot more work to get to it. Cool, when it comes to the right part of the screen, we'll get [to] it later. So let's focus on the last part.
As I already mentioned, we have a lot of keywords here. It can be hundreds. Sometimes it can be just a few. It really depends on the keyword you start with. And yeah, but let's be honest, no one wants to see keywords with low search volumes and high keyword difficulties, right?
To narrow down our research, we can use various filters. That means that we can filter the results as we want. We can set a lot of parameters. But I don't recommend [using] all of them at once because there [are] too many. And you can accidentally skip keyword ideas you might be interested in later.
So for now, we want to see only keywords that have like a low difficulty, 30 is low. I will show you why. And of course we want to include the main term, right? The v60. So yeah, we click on the set filter. And yeah, now we have a bunch of keywords. That should be our target.
19:46
Matthew: Like if I'm a new site, and I'm just starting out, targeting a keyword difficulty below 30 would be a good place to start?
19:54
Maros: Yeah, everything below 30 is really easy or possible. But you know, do not take the keyword difficulty as the only metric. If it's easy to rank for, it doesn't matter that you will just write a mediocre blog post and you will rank for it. You know, it's not that easy. There are many, many other aspects, your website has to be really well optimized from the on-page SEO point of view, you know, technical stuff, the website should be up and running, no errors. And of course, the content should be in-depth. Really quality one. And yeah, last but not least, you will always need quality backlinks. So keyword research is just a part of it. But keyword difficulty always gives you a great hint [to] whether this keyword is a is a go for it or or don't go for it at all, you know?
20:55
Matthew: Yeah, I think—and if I can add one thing, I think people like you just said, people kind of like to overthink the keywords a lot and say that, you know, they're so focused on which specific keywords to include. But ultimately, it's important that you're creating valuable high- quality content that people want to read, that you or your business are an expert on. So if you're going to write an article about a v60 coffee recipe, make sure it's the best, highest-quality v60 coffee article out there, because if it has everything that your potential customers are looking for in the article. It doesn't matter exactly which keywords you use. If it's creating value for your ultimate reader, they're going to click through and they're going to—you're going to see that page rise. But this is a great way to see what are people really interested in when they look for v 60 coffee. What types of keywords are they looking for? And that and that way you can create the best content.
22:01
Maros: Yeah, exactly. Even you know, at the end of the day, if you write a post that has a low quality or your product landing page has a low quality, then it's not about the keyword difficulty anymore, you know, so it won’t help just like that.
Yeah. Okay, cool. Now we have the filtered results. And the keyword we started with—”the v60 coffee recipe.” As you can see, its search volume is around 200. And the keyword difficulty is 30, which is kind of good, but you know, slightly above 200 searches per month is not that good.
But what we can do here is to sort the results by their search volume. Once we do this, we can see a really intense, interesting keyword. Yeah, the first one, “v60 recipe”, we have almost 2000 searches per month, and the keyword difficulty is even lower, it is only 27.
So it's like kind of a green zone for this. And now, I guess we can move to the right part of the screen to find out detailed information about the keyword difficulty, and also about the search volume. This will help us to double check whether we covered the first two legs of our Tripod Rule correctly.
Just to recap, our keyword has solid search volumes, almost 2000 and the keyword difficulty is easy, 27 out of 100. If you're not sure about what score of keyword difficulty is high or low, just click on the icon and you'll see the ranges which is high, which is you know, super-low but the tags are colored so it should be pretty easy to spot the right difficulty for you, even without reading the actual number.
Alright, when it comes to popularity, the search volume. I think that it's always great to check long-term data. You know, we have data from like five years ago, and this will help you to find out any seasonality or long-term popularity of those keywords. And if the keyword you are about to pick is a trending topic. In this case, it looks like it's a trending topic, so good for us.
When it comes to seasonal keywords, I guess a typical example is the Christmas period, or any other holidays when there are specific terms searched in this period. But I guess there are many keywords that have their own seasons. So that's why I would recommend to check these charts. So you can prepare your content right on time.
25:33
Matthew: So we've covered the difficulty part of the tripod. We’ve passed this—keywords passed the test. We've covered the popularity. Now, how do you understand if this keyword is relevant? How do you get to that part?
25:49
Maros: Yeah, well, that's actually the third leg of our tripod. But to find out whether the keyword is really relevant, we have to check the results of the search, so-called SERP results. I’d say that the SERP analysis is kind of a final part of keyword research. And you should never skip it.
Firstly, you can better evaluate the keyword difficulty by looking at the authority of ranking websites.
And secondly, it helps you to discover the search intent behind the keyword. So you can say whether the keywords [are] truly relevant to your content or not. Since I don't want to overwhelm you with too many metrics, I'll focus only on the relevancy.
Basically, the only way to find out is to check the actual search results, as I already mentioned. And you have two options for that, you can go directly to Google search and type the keyword into the search form and check the results one by one. Or you can benefit from tools that include these results. You can see the results in the SERP overview over here in KW Finder. But if you click on this button, Analyze SERP. It will open [the] SERP Checker in a new window. And it's basically a tool that is designed for SERP analysis.
27:30
Matthew: SERP. If people don't understand what that stands for—it is the search engine results page. That's the page after you search for a term on Google. And you click enter. It's the page that shows all the results.
27:41
Maros: Yeah, good thing that you mentioned it, sorry, I forgot to explain the abbreviation. Alright, then, yeah, as you can see, the results. It's kind of transformed the results from the KW Finder over here to the SERP Checker.
So on the left part, it's basically our SERP. And over here, you can see the URLs of the ranking websites, and of course, the titles. This is a great hint to find out whether we are targeting relevant keywords or not.
On top of that, you can check loads of metrics to evaluate the website's authority and popularity. But as I already mentioned, I don't want to overwhelm you with too many metrics at once. So I'll just focus on the relevancy now.
And when I mentioned that, you can either go to Google search directly or use tools such as SERP Checker, I mentioned this. When you click on the Snapshots tab, you'll actually see the SERP. It's like this, these are the results for the keyword.
So yeah, to do the analysis here, all we need to do is take a look on the ranking website. As we can see, the first website is definitely about a v60 recipe, right? The second website, yeah, we have five v60 recipes by some baristas, I guess.
Then, we have videos. Yeah, those videos are all v60 recipes. And then we have other webs—. Yeah, yeah, I think yeah, exactly. All those websites are about v60 recipes. So I'd say that we picked the right keyword.
29:51
Matthew: Your blog post on v60 recipe. This is a great keyword to target because it looks like all the other articles are talking about the same subject.
30:05
Maros: Exactly. Well, it can happen, it could even happen that the results over here will be totally different. Let's say, I don't know, an eCommerce website selling gadgets to prepare the v60, it can happen. If this is the case, then go back to KW Finder, try another keyword and do this again and again until you find the right keywords with the right search intent for your type of content.
Yeah, well, when doing SERP analysis, there's one more thing I wanted to mention. As you can see, besides the usual website, usual results, you can see some other stuff such as YouTube videos, then we have People Also Ask and so on.
These so-called SERP features [appear] pretty often. I bet that you can see them every day when googling something, you know, product carousels, Google Ads, Featured Snippets, Maps and so on, I could continue for minutes. There are many of these things.
Why am I talking about this? It's because they kind of influence how people behave in the search results. In other words, they have a slight impact on how people behave. So you can check this little metric on the top, which kind of measures the impact of those SERP features on the organic search results.
If there's a Featured Snippet on the top, I guess the websites below will not get that many clicks, as if it wasn't there, right? So what I'm trying to say is that—don't look at those SERP features as threats.
They are opportunities for you to make your content even better and more appealing and possibly get even more organic traffic. In our case, including a video is basically a must, you know, can you imagine creating a blog post an article when you are talking about some recipe and you will not include the video. I guess not. Yeah.
32:33
Matthew: I was just going to ask that, because there's a video snippet showing, does that mean, I should make a video? And of course, I mean, it makes sense. If that shows up in the search, that means that Google has understood that people who search this term are probably wanting to watch videos on this. So if you can adapt the blog post to a video later on, that'll help.
And before we continue, someone asks, are we going to show how to implement these keywords into a blog post? Yes, once we finished walking through the product, I'm gonna take a look at Maros's blog and we're gonna implement it on a Wix site. So hold on just a minute, and we'll get there soon. Great.
33:17
Maros: Okay, yeah, actually, one more thing, when you create a great video and put it on YouTube, there is even a chance that you will rank with the video in the search results too. So it can really happen that your blog post will be somewhere over here and also your video so you can get like more visits, more clicks at the end of the day.
Alright, then, well, that's it, we got all three legs of The Tripod Rule covered. Our keyword has a solid search volume, a low keyword difficulty and it's relevant. Alright, once we are done with the research, there's one one thing I recommend doing—we should always keep track of our research.
That means that we should save our keywords into some kind of a list. We can do this directly in KW Finder, just when we click on this little star next to the keyword. Yeah, this keyword is for our blog post—v60 recipe blog post. The keyword list is saved. You can go back to the keywords anytime. Yeah, well this will help you to keep your research organized. I would say that creating a separate list for each blog post you're going to write or each landing page or each product page is a great idea. It will just keep things organized.
And yeah, well, when you have everything set and optimized, don't forget to track the positions— organic keyword positions of your website. So called rank tracking. There are many tools for this. You can even use SERP Watcher when you just click on the track keywords and it will do the job for you.
Cool. And one last thing for me before Matthew is [on] the stage. If you don't know where to start with the keyword research, like at all—which keywords to start with. It's always a great idea to find out what works for your competitors. In this case, just go back to the SERP overview and KW Finder. Pick one of the ranking websites, these are our competitors. Just click on the three dot menu and choose the option Show Keywords. These will actually load up the best keywords these websites already rank for in Google search.
Of course, our keyword, “v60 recipe” is included. This is just another great source of inspiration for your keywords. So feel free to play with it. We have a ten-day free trial. And as far as I know, there will be a special offer sent out to all of you in the follow-up email, right? So that's all from me. But don't go anywhere. Matthew is going to show you as he has already told you. He’ll show you how to use the results of the keyword research we just did on a real website. Matthew, the stage is yours.
36:57
Matthew: Alright, so I'm going to take over. But before I do, I can see on this list, a few people have asked, “Do I need to pick just one keyword for this blog post?” And yes, while one keyword should be your focus keyword, you can use a lot of these keywords throughout the content of your blog posts, like I wrote down just now, “v60 brewing guide”, “v60 coffee”, “v60 pour over.”
While they may rank for those keywords, eventually, it will help Google to understand that there's a link to your site. And even though we have v60 recipes, our focus keyword, what we'll do is use those other ones throughout the content. So let me show you what I mean.
So I'm going to share my screen. Alright, and you should be able to see that I created a blog for Maros—The Artisan Coffee Blog. And I have a post here that we started writing, that we went over the keyword research for today. And I'm going to edit it. So let's go to our dashboard. And you can see here when I click on Blog, I'll go to my Published Posts. And I'll go right into the posts here. And you can see I've started writing the content a bit. But now that we have done our keyword research, I want to optimize this content a bit.
So our main focus keyword is v60 recipe, right? So, I'm actually going to change the title of this article to V60 Recipe, because the title is the most important part. And the main places you should use your focus keyword are in your title, which automatically is tagged as your H1, your first heading in the blog. And then I'm going to go over here into the SEO panel. Okay. And the SEO panel allows us to edit the URL slug, which is the last part of the URL of the blog posts.
So same thing here, what I'm going to do is—I'm going to change my URL to v60 recipe. And be sure if you're going to change a live link to do a redirect to make sure that Google, if anybody goes to the old link, they'll end up at the new link. You can click to learn more about that. And also the SEO title and SEO description.
So by default, Wix Blogs will automatically take the title of your blog post and add it as the SEO title and SEO description. You'll see it'll take a lot of the text from the actual post. And that's just to make sure that there's always content there if you forget or you don't have time to optimize each and every blog post. Or if you don't prioritize, and you only choose specific ones.
That means that there will always be something for Google to read because it's not a good signal if you just have this empty. But we should optimize this text. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to do “v60 recipe.” And I'm actually going to add just the name of the site. Maros, artisan, coffee. And you can see there's a little preview of how it looks at the top. And then, I'm not going to do this now, but I'm going to edit the SEO description. And I'm going make sure that I use the phrase “v60 recipe” as part of the context, and I'll also use some of the other keywords.
40:41
Matthew: “This is the best brewing guide for pour-over v60 coffee.” Now, I'm doing my best not to put as much “v60” as possible, because I don't want to do keyword stuffing. I don't want to overuse this keyword. But you can see I'm over the character limit. But just we had a really nice— there we go, you should best practice is to do a lot more. But just because we don't have a lot of time left, I'm going to leave that as is for now.
And, another great thing to use is—to provide a little structure, you can use the headings, you can use your heading two and heading threes to tell Google that these are the sections of your posts that provide a little more context. So we can add more relevant keywords as well to our headers.
But another great thing to do is to add at the bottom some hashtags, it's a great way also to signify that there's importance to these words. So I made all the changes, I'm going to update my post, and that's it. That's a great way to use our keywords and blog posts. And what I'm going to do is show you another quick tool here in our Marketing and SEO section.
And in the SEO Tools, we have our SEO Patterns, which is a great way to apply a pattern to all of your different SEO titles and descriptions depending on the page type. So in this case, because we're talking about blogs, I'm going to keep doing that. And I'm going to go into the Blog Post Patterns.
And what you can see here is Search engine and social media. That's where I'm going to go in and edit that. Now you can see here, I had to add the name of the site manually. But if I want to make sure that every blog post has the name of our site across all the SEO descriptions, I can just do that here. So I'm going to add the line like I did before. And then I'm going to click add a variable. And then we'll take the site name. And make sure that it's the site name. In this case, I didn't update the site name here, but that's what it will pull. So make sure we update the name, and then Save. And now if I have a blog with hundreds of blog posts, all my pages will be updated properly with the host name and the site name in the SEO title.
You can do the same thing for SEO descriptions. This is a really powerful tool and it saves a lot of time. So I am going to pass it back. I think we have some time for a few more questions. If you want to take over the screen again, Maros.
Let's see if we can answer some questions live in the chat. I think this is a question that comes up a lot, especially in Wix we have our SEO Wiz which, as part of the process, you have to choose three keywords.
And I think a lot of times people think that that's the only keyword that you can choose, those are the three keywords that you have to stick with for the whole site. Is that true? Do I have to just pick three keywords and I'm done? Or should I have multiple keywords for my site and different pages?
44:25
Maros: Well, yeah, I mean, the ideal scenario is to have like, one focus keyword for one landing page. So if you have more landing pages, make sure that or blog posts in this case, make sure that each of them targets different keywords. So at the end of the day, like, it's like a tree of content. So you know, you have to have pillar content. Like, let's say if we are talking about like guides, you will have like one ultimate guide that targets, I mean, like a main keyword, such as “coffee recipes”, let's say. And then you can have like tons of other blog posts, talking about the specific recipes, targeting those specific long-tail keywords.
45:19
Matthew: Okay, so the process of using The Tripod Rule, we should use for all of our pages, and every single every time separately. Wow, great. It's fantastic. So I know we talked about blogs in this—we used the main case study of a blog. But can this process work for all types of pages? Like, if I have a store, for example? How would I apply this to my product pages?
45:47
Maros: Well, basically, it's the same, the only difference is that when you have like thousands of product pages, there are some kind of automatic tools that will fill up the title tags and those meta descriptions. But in this case, you are targeting the product keywords, you know, transactional keywords.
So always make sure that the search intent behind those keywords is that people [are] using this keyword in Google or any other search engine—they want to buy the goods so you have… Yeah, well, basically, it's the same, you have to check the relevancy, you have to check the search volume. I mean, if you have a great-selling product that nobody looks for, nobody searches for—I mean, it can be kind of useless. You know, unless it's analyzed, it's something you know, we don't know about, and it's gonna be the next huge thing.
46:51
Matthew: I see a lot of people are saying that there's a lot of work to do. And yeah, it is a bit of a time investment. How long does it usually take? So someone does keyword research and optimizes, you know, and I saw somebody mentioned that it took them a few weeks, you know. Initially they did optimization, and their ranking went down, and then it went back up again, over a few weeks. How long does it take to actually see results from this keyword research effort?
47:19
Maros: Well, if I would say any exact exact time period, I would be lying. It really depends on the state of your website, there is also the so-called Google Sandbox, which means that Google tries to understand your content, tries to find out whether your website is trustworthy, that you can use this time to optimize your website as best as possible.
But as I said, like SEO is not only about keyword research, you know, there’s on-page factors, off-page factors, you know, link building, but keyword research itself, it doesn't have to take, you know, weeks or days. You can do keyword research for one blog post in a few hours. The longer part—is to create great content, you know, unique content, in-depth content that will rank. So yeah, but telling an exact time—no, this will be a lie.
But you know, keyword research pays off. SEO is a long-term process. So it's like, yeah, you can overcome or fool it by doing Google Ads, if you know, for product pages or eCommerce, it's normal. I mean, the difficulty from an SEO point of view is insane. But when you are writing blogs and this kind of stuff, it will eventually pay off.
49:01
Matthew: Yes, and it's true. It's so true keyword, SEO is, is a marathon it's not a sprint, it's an ongoing effort. It takes a lot of time. It's a lot of investment. And it is free, technically. But it's not like you're running search ads.
Someone asked, “Should I do search ads as well as keyword research?” I think they both have their own different reasoning. Search ads are great because like you see, they show up right away at the top. But it's like running water, opening your sink. When you turn on the water and you turn on your campaigns and you're paying Google, the traffic will flow and you'll get traffic to your site, really fast. But the minute you stop paying the traffic stops.
So with SEO, while it does take a bit more time to climb the rankings and eventually get to number one. It's really hard to move away from the first page, it's over time, it'll be a great investment for you and for your site. And that will ultimately result in more purchases, more visitors to your site that will, maybe more leads depending on what your site is about. So it's really great. And let me see if there's anything else that we want to cover. I think that's it.
Thank you so much again Maros for coming. I think everybody learned a lot. It was really interesting, and we hope that we will collaborate again in the future.
50:38
Maros: Well, thanks a lot for having me. It was a lot of fun. And yeah, I think I think we should make something more of this.
50:47
Matthew: Definitely. Alright. Well, thank you very much, everybody, and we will see you at the next SEO webinar. Have a great day, evening, wherever you are in the world.