You Ask, I Answer: Long Tail Keyword Search Volume?

In today's episode, Maris asks, how do you assess from a keyword research perspective how many monthly searches is enough? Some of the terms we want to rank for have really low search volume, but how many is too many and how many is just right? This is a really interesting question because it relies upon understanding how search engines work today. In the old days, you just went after the biggest keywords as best as you could because that's where all the traffic was. And over time, some SEO folks did figure that if you uh just you know went after a bunch of long tail stuff, you could aggregate all that traffic together.

But what's changed really in the last two to three years is Google's ability, Google in particular, but this also holds true mostly for Bing uh as well, is that they're getting away from just keywords into topics, into clustered terms that are semantically related. So in the example uh in the rest of the question, the the target was meal kits. Well, what are the things that are that are semantically and topically related to meal kits that you would want to use that demonstrate the ability, your your authority to speak on such a thing? So there's a couple of different ways that you can go after this. One is to take the root term meal kit, and then using the SEO tool of your choice, find all the words and phrases that incorporate that phrase or those terms or those words or semantically related words like meal kit, meal prep, uh pre-made meal, uh home delivery meal, uh home delivery meal kit.

How much does a meal kit cost? Uh there are a number of question tools that uh will do things like that. You know, uh what are the best meal kits? Uh meal kit reviews, uh mealkit uh service near me, you name it. And that's that's where a lot of the the general SEO community has gotten to.

With where you want to go, the level you want to kick this up to is to use a machine learning technique called vectorization, and all of the pages and terms that your competitors rank for. So again, using the competitive SEO tool of your choice RF, SEMrush, spy food, Moz, whoever you want to pay money to. The data is the raw data is gonna be about the same. Buzz Sumo would be a good example. Um RF's content uh scanner, whatever.

Go to your competitor's site, put their competitor's site in the tool, extract all the pages that they rank for. And what you'll need to do is extract the actual text from those pages, and some of the SEO tools will do this for you, extract the text for you, and you're gonna feed that into a system that will establish mathematical relationships with every word and phrase on that page. And you're gonna do this for all of your competitors that you compete with and that you aspire to compete with. So blue apron, green chef, red cookie. I don't know.

I have no I don't use meal kits, I have no idea who the actually is in that space. Um when you have this massive corpus, then you're gonna use those mathematical relationships, type in the word meal kit and say, Okay, now show me what in all these competitors is semantically related, because you're gonna pick up things that you wouldn't think of naturally with just the term meal kit and its phrase. So, for example, uh, if you did this, you might see like chicken comes up a lot, right? Is it is closely related, it appears in close proximity in this mathematical model to the word meal kit, uh, asparagus, maybe, uh, frying, um, discount, coupon. But what you're doing is you're reverse engineering search rankings, your reverse engineering search rankings using the exact same technology that uh the search engines themselves use.

So you'll find all those things that all those related terms, and you're gonna create content around those terms, even if it doesn't use the word meal kit anywhere in the term. That linguistic relationship is what search engines that use the same technology are starting to infer if you talk about these things, you are an authority on meal kits, right? So it's a very very fun uh exercise to do to do this type of advanced competitive analysis and see what is in the universe of words and phrases around the term meal kit. Find that, build out your content based on that, then you want to kick up an even bigger notch. Uh, feed those terms back into your SEO tool, get the rankings for traffic on those, uh, build your content in order of the ranking, and then even use predictive analytics to forecast when should we be blogging about chicken catchatory uh meal kits or chicken catchatory prep, uh, or easy chicken catchatory dinner idea, whatever the thing is.

That's how you take apart this question. It's not a question of how many monthly searches is enough, it is a question of are you checking the box on everything that the search engine sees as linguistic real related to competitive sites that you want to take market share away from and you may want to even think about once you know those terms repeat the same exercise for those top terms and go out to like recipe sites for ideas and content that your competitors haven't figured out yet. Right? So fun question Maris great question. Uh as always please leave comments in the comments box below and subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter and I'll talk to you soon.

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