So What? SEO keyword analysis basics

Well, hey there. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I am Katie, joined by Chris and John. Um today we are covering SEO keyword analysis basics.

And so, you know, we want to make sure that we're finding that balance between covering the more advanced, but also making sure that we're refreshing on the basic things. Um, you know, you may know SEO, you may have been doing it for a while, but maybe things have changed, and we have taken it upon ourselves to make sure we are sharing with you the latest and greatest. And so I don't know, Chris, where do you want to start with uh SEO today? Let's talk about keyword basics. And one of the things that we see people do wrong a lot is they just start in the SEO tool of their choice, just start typing in keywords, right?

Type in, you know, this and that and this and that. And there's really not any thought given to the strategy of what kind of keywords should you be searching for. So I think that's a really good place to start. Broadly speaking, uh, there's five different kinds of keywords, right? There's five different categories.

Um and so let's go ahead and just uh put this up. This is from uh a talk we just gave uh somewhere. I don't remember which conference it was at. Um it's all a blur. Well played, Chris, well played.

Thank you. You know. The five categories are basically this. There's branded keywords. These are people searching for you by name.

So for us, that would be trust insights, right? People searching for trust insights, or for Katie Robert or John Wall and so on and so forth. These are the most valuable and high intent keywords because someone's looking for you by name. Like they clearly, you know, you don't Google Katie Robert for fun. You Google that because you want to find this person.

You don't Google Trust Insights for fun. You want to find this company. In parallel to that search is the competitive searches. So these are the searches that people type in for your direct competitors. So hopefully, you know, we're we eventually get to be in a league where you know someone's saying, you know, should I choose Accenture or Trust Insights?

Should I choose Deloitte or Trust Insights and so on? Right now, obviously we're not peers, but they offer similar things to what we do. And so somebody's searching for those brands, that's valuable. That's un that's valuable to understand. And you can, in your organic um search, you can sometimes rank for competitors' names if you're optimizing pages for that.

So for example, if we were to put up a services page that said compare trust insights to Accenture Consulting, and then you know you have a little table with two columns, you know, check boxes and X's and stuff. Um you could get a little bit of traction on that kind of content. Um, so that's category two. Those first two are really strong intent. The person who's doing the searching knows what they're looking for, right?

They they've got a solution in mind that's a company of some kind to solve that. Now, they may not be the right companies, but they at least have uh, you know, they're they're pretty far down to that consideration phase, right? The next category is unbranded. So this is the search for the problem that somebody has, but they are not searching for a company by name yet. So this would be someone looking for Google Analytics help, Google Analytics Consulting, or Management Consulting, or change management of some kind, you know, how to do change management.

They someone's searching for they've got a problem. They're searching for ways to solve that problem that aren't necessarily tied to an individual company. Still good intent, right? They still have a sense of of what the solution is, they just need to learn more about it. To the right of that are the adjacent searches.

These are the people searching for the problem itself. So Katie, when if someone is searching for change management agency, what's the problem they're trying to solve? Generally, they're trying to solve some sort of organizational behavior issue. So I would imagine they'd be certain, like, how do I fix my organizational structure? How do I like what is organizational behavior?

Or you know, those kinds of questions. It's more of the research, uh, is what I think of as adjacent. Exactly, exactly right. So these are the more details on the problems of trying to define the problem. And then the fifth category is one we're not going to cover today.

That's novel. That's that's where you're creating a category uh that you own. So the the textbook example there is HubSpot. HubSpot created inbound marketing. They spent 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to to establish this new thing, and they own it for the most part.

Um it's very difficult to compete in that space against them, but um, that is a fifth kind of category. So when you're starting out with your keyword research, you got to figure out which of the cat the the first four categories you want to be researching before you just start typing stuff in willy-nilly. I think often, and we've done this. Uh, you know, we usually start with, well, you know, what do we do? And so I feel like there's a difference between what we do and what we want to be known for um sometimes it's the same a lot of times there's a lot of overlap but it that can be different kinds of things so uh you know we you know if someone is searching you know how do I set up Google Analytics we would want to show up for that so those typically that's where I see people start is I want to be known for Google analytics I want to be known for data science I want to be known for customer support or whatever their core set of services are right so uh let's let's dig into some of this let's start maybe in the unbranded section because I think that's a good place where a lot of people can can get some traction and at least start to understand you know what's out there so what do we want to what do you want to use as a topic to to dig into here I mean let's something that we need to do anyway so we might as well do it here is change management.

All right let's do change management. Now uh you also mentioned things like whoops change management you mentioned organizational behavior are there any other things that off the top of the head you know are are broad terms that in that either in that um unbranded category yeah um you know process development um you know team building uh skills gap uh those are some of the ones that's off the top of my head. Okay. So in the SEO software you're choice, and I'll be honest here, they're all pretty much the same at this stage of of analysis. Um if you use SEMrush, hrefs, Moz, Spyfu, whoever, um, for this level of analysis, it's all pretty much the same thing.

The first thing you do is you just take a look at, you know, do are even the ones that you've selected intelligent uh keywords or or or not. Are they are they good keywords? Um, generally speaking, generally speaking, we like to look at things that have a search volume that that is meaningful, which is usually more than 10 searches a month. Anything on 10 searches a month is probably not going to be helpful, right? Because there's like that one person's gonna be really happy, and that and that's it.

Um the first step would be to start building out like what would this list, you know, what would this uh be? So let's put to a change management list here. I'm just gonna add these words. Now, from here, most tools have a couple of different ways to expand this to grow this. Uh, one of them would be uh looking at phrases that contain our initial uh terms.

So we had have a team building activities that would fit in the category of team building, right? Um virtual team building activities, good uh pandemic organizational citizenship behavior. What's that? I honestly don't know. Neither do I.

So well, it's good. It doesn't sound like it's it's uh a good match. Let's give that a miss for right now. Uh management consulting, change management process, team building exercises, what is change management is a good one. Virtual team building, there's a lot of virtual stuff.

It makes sense because I think a lot of companies relied on that in person uh culture, and now they have to pivot to you know, how do you build a culture when nobody ever meets each other? Change management certification, change management planning, management of organizational behavior, software development process. Five minute team building activities. Yes, because you can solve all of your problems in five minutes or less. If I if I can crack that code, I'll be a bazillionaire.

Yeah, I was gonna say you're gonna buy us all a private uh mountaintop ports. Uh virtual escape room team building. That's interesting. You know, Chris, to your point about you know the low volume uh terms, I think sometimes what that highlights is that you're using jargon that is only meaningful to you. And so, you know, for all I know, I keep using the term change management, and it's not what people think of the way I think of change management.

So an exercise like this is helpful, and I'm like, well, you know, I wasn't thinking solely about team building, but it sounds like that's a lot of what's associated when you think of change management. For sure. I mean, we're talking hundreds, if not thousands of searches uh a month here. And some of these are obviously, you know, specific brands things that would fall in the competitive category. Um, give those a miss for right now.

But yeah, there's a lot of um things in here that indicate uh you know the uh a real need for some of those those uh virtual team building, just general team building stuff. It's a lot of team building. All right. Let's add those in. So these would be the phrases that are directly semantically uh related to our our first set of terms.

So it's important. The second thing that uh most software will do is give you a sort of sense of what are the things that for these terms, pages that also rank for you know a certain set of other terms. This set of searches tends to be a little less focused. For example, McKinsey would be an example, consultant would be an example. BCG, these are all the you know, clearly the competitive terms.

But some of them uh you know it's some of them would be, I think, difficult, yeah, at least in the beginning. So let's go through here. Uh business definition, team building without a space, that's interesting. Consulting firms. Uh let's see, what else we got here?

Consulting for a company, change in organizations. That's actually interesting. Consultancy, business management consultants, business management. So this is to your point, Katie. Some it might not be called change management, it might be called uh management consulting.

Uh what is business? I don't know. Well, great question. All right, so let's see. We've got uh a decent set there.

All right, so we've got about 60-ish odd change management terms uh in the general space. The the next step is to try and do some prioritization. Uh in terms of the metrics that you get with um with these things, you get things like keyword difficulty, which is a zero to 100 scale, of how difficult it would be for you to rank for that term. Zero being, you know, publish a page and it's gonna get found for it immediately. 100 being good luck, you're probably never uh gonna rank for this term in any meaningful sense.

You know, if you're trying to rank for, say, the word Apple, it's gonna be very, very difficult. You know, trying to rank for Google, very difficult to do on Google. Um, and then the volume is the number of searches per month that occurs. So in this case, you know, 43,000 uh people search for consultant a month, 8,300 people search for organizational behavior a month. And these are um some really good starting points for for trying to prioritize the lists.

Now the challenge is that there's the even with 67 terms, that's a lot. Um we probably want to do some prioritization. So the way to do this is to try to narrow down and categorize these different terms. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna load this into uh this keyword list into uh Tableau software. Um you can use Excel, you can use I would actually personally do this at R, but nobody likes looking at typing R code.

Shocker. Shocker, right? Chris, before we get too far down this prioritization, I just want to ask a question that I know comes up quite a bit, and even sometimes I struggle with this a little bit. So, you know, what is the difference, if anything, between a keyword, a phrase, a long tail keyword, you know, like so. If I'm going through and trying to optimize, you know, the target term in my blog post, you know, you have that little box in WordPress that says, you know, what's your target term?

You know, is it supposed to be a full phrase? Like, what is change management? Is that what I'm optimizing for? Should it be, you know, what is, or you know, whatever the phrase is, or should it just be a single word? Like, how does that factor in?

Like, I think that there might be sometimes, and especially on my part, the confusion of what that means, like a long tail keyword, a keyword, a phrase, a full sentence. Think of those things as almost like you know, little Russian dolls. You're seeing those Russian dolls where you open up the dollars side and yeah, the nesting dolls. Petrushka. Yes.

At the center is that core term like change management. It's going to be a very, very difficult term, probably to rank for because it's going to be very high volume, but very high competition, right? And then each layer on top of that, what is, or change management firm near me, or the the answer things how does change management work? The more the longer the phrase gets, the more it is likely to be you know further away from that central term. And so it's going to be easier to rank for those things.

One of the things that you want to think about when we're doing these kinds of exercises is there a way for you to build content around the core term, but maybe optimize for a portion of it, right? So you would write a post like you to your point is what is change management? So you're checking the box on change management, the core term, but you want you know pretty well that you know, just on raw volume only, you're that's gonna be very difficult to rank for. And so some of those other variants, like what is change management, probably be easy to rank for, but you may also, if you are authoritative enough and trustworthy enough and got a lot of inbound links, and you know, the the quality of the content is good, you may start to rank for that core term as well. We've seen that happen with a number of clients where they've built a a larger query as their their focus, and they've benefited from getting some of the volume of the core term as well.

Okay, that makes sense. And so that's actually uh is a very nice segue into like how do we prioritize these things? Well done. Uh so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna I'm gonna put in volume and difficulty here. Um I'm gonna just throw this up as a scatter plot.

And let's go ahead and put our keywords on here. Now, initially, what you're seeing here is on the y-axis, the keyword difficult, zero being easy, you know, 100 being difficult, and then the volume again, zero being none, and you know, 45,000 being the top. The challenge with this um is that these are two very different scales. Um, and so one of the things that we want to do is we want to to rearrange this. So, again, you this is something you can do in pretty much any um software.

I'm gonna reverse the axis first on the difficulty because zero low difficulty is better to me than high difficulty. High difficulty is like I don't really want to compete. Does that make sense? It does. Yeah.

And I'll also go to make it logarithmic. So logarithmic changes the scale, makes it a log function instead of uh a linear function. And so it basically allows smaller terms, smaller uh lower numbers to be more easily seen, uh, especially when you've got a lot of big numbers. So there's that. I've done that on the y-axis.

Now, these terms are easier difficulty, these terms are harder difficulty down here. I'm gonna do the logarithmic part on the x-axis uh here. I'm gonna just make that logarithmic, and again, uh very low volume here, very high volume this way. Now I've got a bit more real estate to work with. We can see just generally.

Um, if I were to I don't know if I could let's put some reference lines on here. So reference line on volume, yeah. Yeah, because you want to have those quadrants because basically what you're creating, Chris, is that two by two matrix. Um, you know, and so in business, the two by two is pretty traditional in terms of um you know, the like the ease and the big money. And so, like you go after the things that are easy, they're gonna get you the most bang for your buck.

And this is that same idea is that you want to go after things that are high volume, low difficulty. Exactly right. So here we have um this quadrant here. I'm using the median, the middle of the data set for each axis uh as the center point down here, these things like this, very high difficulty, relatively low volume, right? These are crap terms, these are virtual team building ideas.

These would be like my my lowest priority because they're they're they're difficult and there's not a lot of volume. Uh, over in this quadrant here, this is um uh better difficulty, like change management jobs or process development. Um, relatively um very low difficulty, you know, not a ton of volume, but this would actually be a really good start. Like you want to talk about process development, Katie. That would be a really good uh starting blog post.

Maybe this one here, management of organizational behavior would be a good topic to write some content around. Uh change management strategy. Now we're starting to get into slightly more difficult stuff here. It's you know, around 28 or so. Um management of change and so on and so forth.

This quadrant down here, high difficulty, high volume would be my a lower priority again, high difficulty. It's not thrilling. This quadrant of here is sort of the golden quadrant, right? So things like product development process, lower difficulty, pretty good volume, organizational behavior itself. It's you know it's starting to get more difficult.

Actually, you know, I'm gonna change this access back to linear. I don't think being logarithmic actually helps for the zero to 100. Yeah, that makes it spread out a lot more easily. Um so management consulting, you're starting to get into pretty difficult territory. But all this stuff up here, like new product development process, um, team building questions, these would be good topics because we can see these are the ones that, like, yeah, they're there's there's a there there, there's there's not as much competition.

This one here, I think is really a big winner. Management of organizational behavior, right? It's it's a little on the lower of the volume side, but there's almost no difficulty for it. Mm-hmm. Interesting.

And so, you know, I in just doing general keyword research, wouldn't have necessarily come to that same conclusion without having some way to prioritize um the volume and the difficulty. Yep. Um what I would suggest doing is maybe you know, you take here's like a volume hundred. There's not there's not a lot of super low volume here. I would in again in any software package of your choice, take that set of initial keywords.

There's 24 of them there, and say, okay, those are gonna be my my starting lineup, right? Because the the difficulty is lower, and there's decent volume on all of them. That's my starting lineup. How do I start creating content around those things? Now, is this the kind of thing where you say, okay, this is my set of keywords, or do then you do you then take these and go back to your keyword research tool and try to find more, you know, similar related terms to these?

Like how many times do you go through that process, or do you just start with this before moving on to try to get additional keywords? It depends. It depends on like what the data tells you. If we got you know a bunch of stuff that was, and not a single thing was like below difficult 70. I'd be like, we need to do some more digging.

We need to maybe expand uh this look for longer tail terms because we're we're not getting anywhere. We've got a whole bunch of stuff that you know is anything above difficulty 50 in general, tend to shy away from because it's it's gonna be a lot of work to build um stuff like that. Um right, but I guess my question is so I have a set of keywords to start with. Do I just go ahead and start with those, or do I take that list, put it back into my keyword research tool, and try to see what else comes up that's related. So I'm not just writing six pieces of content that I'm trying to optimize for management of organizational behavior.

Um yes, you could absolutely do that. Um so if we were to do that, let's take down about 35. So let's do a keep only on that. And then from here, let's do an export our data. Go find where we just save that to.

Always helpful. Okay, so there's our our winning, I guess, starting point. We can take this and now go back into our keyword tool. And as you said, now look at things like matching terms. Um and see if there's anything new here, or uh search suggestions is another uh another one of those options where um it will say like you might also these are things that might also be related.

So change management plan template, for example, is a decent search suggestion, change management process flow. Um actually a lot of these are pretty good. I was gonna say, can you since you're in there? Can you add those to the list? Well, I'm gonna restrict it to anything above basically 100 and above because uh we want that.

So it's 28 additional keywords. Pretty good. Yep. And then let's look at our related terms. So, John, when you're talking with prospects, and you know, we obviously get a lot of questions about help with SEO.

Um, do you feel like this isn't an overly complicated process? But do you feel like going through this kind of process, walking them through this is the trust insights way of how we do keyword research? Are they thinking about it that way, or are they doing a lot of what Chris had talked about of like, let me just plug in like the two or three keywords that I think we want to be uh ranking for and just go from there? Yeah, usually it's they understand the concept, you know, they get the idea of some words are easier than others, and you know, some have more volume than others, but they usually never have any kind of procedure or ability to measure or do the, you know, it's totally just kind of making things up as they go, you know, having a solid procedure here like we do. I mean, hrefs has I mean, only Google has more data than they do so by going through this tool you're getting a more accurate picture than you're ever going to get on any other kind of you know just trolling around for a couple keywords and yeah this is definitely one of those um marketing infrastructure and corporate memory things that we run into all the time that well you know my boss came up with this list or or worse yet like I got handed this list from the last person who did this job and you know that's as far as it goes so it's yeah there's a real dividing line unless they have somebody on staff that really knows SEO and is that's a major part of their uh workflow they just end up having this kind of over an aside project and it's just you know usually in a pitiful state well and you bring up a really good point John and so there's a question then Chris I would ask you is you know so let's say you have that institutional knowledge that leaves with the person who was doing SEO or the person who's doing SEO stays there.

How often should you be revisiting your keyword list? How often should you refresh it? Is it a uh every time you create new content is it a once a month is it an annual thing or does it really depend as usual it depends um there is benefit I think to looking at stuff say maybe at at a minimum quarterly um but anytime you got a big change so for example in April 1 2020 uh everyone should have been looking at their their keyword volume everyone should be looking at their Google trends data and their Google analytics to say totally new world. What's changed? Um, you know what what's different?

And in May, what's different this month, and so on and so forth. And even now, um, you know, we see from what's happening in the world that behaviors continue to change. And so, as part of that, we need to run these kinds of analyses when we when we suspect or when we can prove that customer behavior has somehow materially changed. Um, real uh simple example. If I was in the travel industry, I would be watching the TSA uh checkpoint foot traffic like a hawk.

And when I see you know a significant change in the number of people going through the checkpoints, I know there's a difference happening in travel. And I should probably rerun my keyword lists. If I see Google's mobility data for COVID-19, you know, big changes in the geographic area where I operate. Check your keywords, right? Check your your your topics.

Interesting. The other one, and this is something that I know we all you know, we always say everyone could always do a better job, is when you're talking to customers, and customers are saying, Oh, yeah, you know, we got this going on, and it's things, um, that would be a good time to to look at those changes. When there's if you use predictive analytics, or even if you just have known um periods of time uh throughout the year when changes occur, you should be doing that. So, right now, um, we are just wrapping up budget season for 2022. A lot of our clients have gone through and done their annual budgets and things.

Um, you should know in the time period before that um that there was you know there's some substantial changes uh though in the way people will search. They'll be searching for marketing budget template, right? And um typically October is when people start doing their strategic planning process, which always seems backwards to me. Like, why wouldn't you do your planning before you do the budget? But whatever.

Uh well that's a that's a whole different show. That's a whole different show. But we know that now you're rolling out things like your content marketing strategy, your social media strategy, your annual planning, you know, uh marketing annual planning template, all those things. Um it would be time to refresh those sets of keywords. Right.

Makes sense. So we just re-ran that analysis. Let's go ahead now and attach our new download. Where did it go? Let's do text file, downloads.

And we're gonna repeat the exact same thing. So keyword, difficulty, volume, access, reverse this axis, change our volume now to logarithmic here, slap our keywords on, put reference line one at the median put reference line two the median make the view as big as it can get. And now with a with those changes we made, Katie, you can see this this there's a bit more density, right? Uh now you you do have some stinkers in here, right? You know, uh jobs.

Yeah. Easy but not great, right? How to change management. That's really bad. Difficulty 59 is a hundred people, a hundred searches for it.

Like that's just out the door. Um changing a process, you know, process change. These are ones that you know, good volume, low difficulty, um, management process. Uh well, that's outdoor team. There you go.

Oh, there's there's a couple uh overlapping there. So now you've got a more refined list or uh a list of some greater opportunities. And the thing that I would do next that isn't something you can do, you could do it with like machine learning technology, or in this case, because it's not that much of it. Um you can just do it by hand, would be starting to cluster together the terms that are semantically related. So like all the team building stuff would be like in one bucket, all the change management would be in another bucket, all the management consulting would be a third bucket.

So you can see what are sort of the logical topics within that thing. Yeah, I mean, that's something you know, I could export this back into Excel and just put them all on different columns or different tabs or whatever. Um, which I think makes sense because that then helps me, you know. So sort of the third point is okay, now that I have all these keywords, what the heck do I do about it? And I think you're absolutely right.

First off is starting to cluster them together into topics so that I can start to plan out okay, these are the kinds of things that I need to be writing about. Exactly. Now, if you want to do this just in a spreadsheet and you don't want to use visualization software at all, that's fine. There's actually a way to do that that is um mathematically sound. Uh that we actually some folks do um just as a matter of exercise.

So I'm gonna delete all the columns that we aren't using. Just gonna focus on difficulty and volume. What you can do, uh let's make this a little bit bigger so we can see what we're doing here, is we can essentially weight these uh the volume by the difficulty. So uh if a term has very high difficulty, the chances of us getting any volume out of it are relatively low. So we'll let's call this weighted volume, and we're gonna make this we're gonna take our volume and multiply it times uh let's see, uh so I want this to be 100 minus the difficulty, and then that's uh divided by 100.

I did that right. So logically, I'm probably I'm not gonna get 44 43,000 searches for a consultant, right? It's such a high volume term with a lot of difficulty that the likelihood of me getting earning the volume is you know relatively low. So if I'm going to take this column here and reshuffle, now I've got these terms where those terms where there's a lot of um there's not as much uh volume, but there's lower difficulties. Um I can start to prioritize some of those searches as well.

So team building or key performance indicators falls down pretty far just because it's got such a high difficulty number that the likelihood of me getting even more than a fraction of this is pretty low. This is not as good. I like doing it with a scatter plot better, um, but it is a way to do it just inside of Excel. So if I let's say I you know copy this formula, what am I looking for then? Because if you scroll back up to the top, Chris, it if you scroll back up to the top of your list, please.

Yes, I am. Oh, okay. Um, you know, what you're saying is don't go after consultant, don't go after SDLC, because those are terms that already based. Yeah, you would because it's still even with the discounting, it's it's you've got still valuable a lot of volume. Yeah.

Okay. And and this is where again, like the Russian doll thing. Now you would take something like um SDLC. I would take that into a tool like Answer the Public, for example, and and see what we can do with it. What's the deal with this?

Do they just scrape for questions? Is that all this is? They they linguistically take uh you know one or two phrases and essentially sort of do a mix and match and then very quickly check keyword volumes to see how it matches up. So in this case, um, can SDLC be agile? Uh who presents the SCDLC model?

How does it work? And so on and so forth. So this is sort of like you know conceptual map of different ways to ask questions about the topic that you can then write content about. That's right. Okay.

All right. Have you not seen this before, John? Yeah, no, no, I've never played with this. Oh well then uh you didn't read my latest newsletter opener, John, where I cover this, Jonathan. Last week of the quarter, baby.

No, I I would rather you be selling things. Yes, exactly. We can always catch up on newsletters. This this is one of the tools that I've referenced in terms of you know uh how to think about uh creating useful content, so where you get your content ideas from. And it's literally answering answering the questions that people are asking.

And so, you know, doing your keyword research, uh, looking at uh tools like answer the public, looking at Reddit, looking at Quora to see what kinds of questions people are asking about those topics using your social listening tools. Um and those are all I would think the next steps once you have your keyword list well, what do people want to know about this thing? Because it's not enough to just say, I'm gonna write down what change management is. Someone's already done that a million times, clearly from the keyword volume. So what are the specific questions that people are asking?

You know, how do I affect change management? Uh one of the questions I saw recently was like, you know, how do I make change change management happen when I don't have any authority in my company? And so those are really good specific questions that we would want to make sure we have answers for that are available to people. Yep. So the here's which change match components, what what change management is and stuff.

Now here's um your your pro move that folks don't do. You take that export from answer the public, put that back into your keyword explorer. Now you can you can score the questions by volume. They're gonna be lower volume uh for sure, because they're but now um you see it says we couldn't find 169 keywords, but now you've got those longer searches, those longer suggestions that you can use for as a starting point for a lot of of those um questions are modifier R is change management a competency and so on and so forth and so forth. So now you can say, okay, well, what are these terms I should be maybe writing content about?

What's change match, which change management model is best? Um so you can prioritize that questions list and clean it up a little bit. And you know, it's interesting too because what we haven't covered, and maybe this is uh a different show, is the way in which people interact with uh search engines has changed drastically because it's not just people sitting in front of a computer and typing in change management, it's hey Google, tell what's change management, and they're speaking in more complete sentences when they're asking questions to these smart devices, even to my phone. Hey Google, what's the weather going to be like in Detroit today versus Detroit weather? Right.

Exactly. So again, that Russian doll approach can really help because you can now say, okay, change management's my thing. What phrase would somebody be looking to speak into a device or ask, you know, through voice translation. What is the best change management template? Where do I get started with change management?

And those are the things that I would assume would be questions, and obviously I would confirm that through my research. And so it sounds like Chris, what you've been able to do in 38 minutes is give me a whole lot of homework of content that I now need to go create based on our keyword research and questions that people are asking about these keywords. We have the other thing to think about is I guess the the mirror side of this would be taking this same set of keywords and comparing it to the data in Scott Search Console to see do any of your pages rank for anything in these lists, right? And if the answer is no, then clearly uh you know it's it's green fields. You can write whatever you want.

But if you are if you have a more established blog or a podcast like marketing over coffee that's been around for 15 years, probably one or more posts in your back catalog match one of the terms you care about. And so the question would be how do you elevate that? How do you take that um and and and bring it forward? The other thing that you can do, and be careful with this because for less experienced uh content practitioners, it's it is uh an easy path to the dark side, um, namely plagiarism. Um you can also look at the the ranking content uh for a given term and see just language-wise what uh what are the relevant things that that you know show up.

So here, all management is change management, an HPR article, change management models, eight proven examples. You can see these are very relevant um pieces of content and get a sense thematically for what does well. That makes sense, but yes, uh word of caution, do not just then directly copy and paste this and slap your name on it because you will likely 100% get in trouble. Yes, especially HBR articles, so you can't be the John's business review article. And you do not want Harvard lawyers coming after you.

No, thank you. I don't want any lawyers coming after me, to be quite honest. Yes, but Harvard lawyers, yeah, no. Yeah. All right.

So it's, I mean, so what we've covered, you know, in SEO keyword analysis basics is there's a lot of different kinds of keywords. And yes, it's great to rank for yourself, but unless people know exactly who you are and what you're doing, you should probably spend some time focusing on those uh unbranded keywords, the thing the types of things you do, uh, the services, the questions that you answer, the things you want to be known for, and really digging into the keyword analysis, the volume and the difficulty, because if you just wake up one morning and say, I want to be known for water bottles. Okay, I'm gonna start writing about water bottles. Well, the chances are you're probably not gonna be known for that thing because there's a million other companies that already own or already rank for that term. So, what else can you do that's semantically related to water bottles?

And so doing that research up front, as we say, do your requirements, do all of that planning up front saves you headache down the line where you have to then start to backtrack and undo the things that you've done and do them again. Exactly. And we have not even touched upon the second half of this process, which is you need to go and get links to your content. Once you've got it out there, you know, publish it and they will come. Does not work even in organic search.

You need to get attention and traffic to it. So maybe that's another show. I think that that's a future episode for sure. All right. Well, I guess uh for now that'll do it for this week.

If you got questions, you know, come hit us up in Analytics for Marketers and stuff. We'll have a link for that in a second. But thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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