- Conducting proper keyword
research is the first step that you need to take in order
to have a great SEO campaign. So how do we actually find
relevant keywords that are worth trying to target? Let's look
at that in today's video. (upbeat music) Even though keyword research
is basically the first step that you should take in an SEO campaign, a lot of people don't do
it, but it's so important. I wanna walk through in this
video why it's so important as well as actually how
to find certain keywords. So what we'll do is we'll
jump over to the computer, and we'll dive on in. So what I'll do is I'll actually
walk you through a few free keyword tools first that
we actually like and that we recommend if you're on an
SEO budget and you're trying to figure out what
keywords you should target. Now honestly, as simple
as this might sound, what we'd recommend before
you even jump on the computer or look at any of these keyword
tools is to actually open up a spreadsheet or even got
pen and paper and a notepad and just brainstorm some
what we call 'seed' keywords. These are the keywords
that you think people would be searching for. Now, if you are in in
office or work with a team or whatever it might be, ask
for their opinion as well. And if you have the opportunity
to talk to other team members that aren't specifically
looking after digital marketing, ask them what
they would search as well. This can really help to
open up and see what kind of keywords might be worth targeting. So in the example that
we're gonna use today, let's say that you have a
business or you look after the digital marketing or
SEO for a business and that business all they look after
is accounting software. So let's actually look at
keywords of how we can find what people are searching
that would be relevant to you. So the first keyword tool
that I'm gonna look at here is the actual Free Keyword
Generator tool from Ahrefs. Now, the way to find this
is just go to ahrefs.com and go to the very, very
bottom of their website and click on "Keyword Generator" tool. Basically what that'll do
then is it'll ask you for, as I mentioned here, your 'seed' keyword, so you type in your kinda
main broader keyword, I suppose you could call it
and very, very important make sure to choose the
correct country as well. The reason for this is
because you'll be told what the search volume is and that
just means how many people are searching that per month. But obviously if you type in, for example, Ireland where I'm from, because
of the population difference alone, the search volume,
as in how many people are searching for that
particular keyword in Ireland will be much smaller and
it will be much bigger in the states. So if you're in the United
States, obviously choose United States, if you're
in the UK, choose UK, or whatever it is, just make
sure that whatever target market that you are going
after make sure that you've selected them
from the dropdown here. It's very important. So you can see here that
I've put in accounting and I've chosen the
United States and I've hit "Find keywords." Basically this is after
giving me a load of keywords for free. So we can actually then have
a look at these and see what might be important to us. So the first one that comes
up is 'wave accounting'. Now, if this is your
business, more than likely they are actually a competitor, so you can cross it off
your list immediately but you can see we have 'accounting', we have 'accounting software',
and 'accounting software' is interesting because I
mentioned that accounting software is what this business actually does. So all we've done is put in
'accounting' and it's come back with 'accounting software' already, so you know straight away
that that's a good keyword to go after. Now, you've also got accounting
equation, accounting jobs, there's some things in here as
I mentioned won't make sense to you, not only that they are
competitor like we have here with wave, but for example,
'reddit accounting', whatever it might be. But if you also offer small
business accounting software like we see here, there's
another very strong keyword that you can go after. So you can see how powerful
these tools are of essentially giving you keywords that are
based on actual historical data of what people are actually searching. So to have this information
is so, so powerful, and you can see it literally
only took a few seconds to obtain this information,
but now you have it, now you know what keywords
people are searching and how frequently with
this volume column here, how frequently they're searching as well. Now at this KD column, that
stands for keyword difficulty. This is more so only related to Ahrefs, it's a metric that they use
at scale of zero to 100, basically, meaning how
difficult would it be or essentially how many
backlinks might you need to rank for this particular keyword. As I mentioned, it's a
scale of zero to 100, but I'll come on to that
more later in the video. The next tool that I recommend
is actually from Google themselves. So to have this information
right from the horse's mouth, so to speak is fantastic as
well and this is another free tool by Google, it's called
Google Keyword Planner. So if you want access to this,
you just need to have a free Google account and all you
need to do is do a search for Google Keyword Planner and
it's more than likely going to be the first result that appears. Now again, what's very,
very important is not only that you enter your seed keyword, now you can actually enter
a few different keywords in here with Google but also
choose your particular target market that you're going after. Again, this makes a very big
difference to what you actually then intend on targeting for
keywords on your website. So we've put in our search
here now for accounting in the United States and
Google themselves have now come back what a lot of different keywords, and you can see here Google
are not only showing you something that has the
word accounting in it, they're showing you relevant
terms that would be important as well. This is why using several
different tools for your keyword research can come in super
handy because they're not all going to give you back
the same information. So you can see we've got
accounting as the seed keyword, but then straight away CPA,
that is a perfect word that you might want to go after. We've also got Sage One
again, they're a competitor, you don't wanna use them,
but personal tax account, something that might be
relevant to you, bookkeeping, bookkeeping, excuse me,
chartered accountant. There's all extremely
strong keywords in here, obviously only include
these on your website if these are things that you offer. So we can keep going through
them here, eh, general ledger, account receivable, CPA near me. You can see that there's
loads and loads of different keywords here, so it's Google
here saying here there's about 160 different keywords that they found. Now you can filter this down even more. You can see that Google are
giving you order options up here as well. This is very, very strong information, and again, this is all free, it only takes a few seconds
to find this information and to actually then go, "Oh,
that makes a lot of sense. That is what somebody would
search if they wanted to find our business." So that makes a lot of sense
to have these keywords here. The next tool that I'd
recommend because it's free is UberSuggest. Now, UberSuggest, very
simple in regards to what the rest of them are as well, so you just type in your
seed keyword and again choose your location. You can see that all of
these tools ask you for your location because it is
extremely important. So if we then just start to scroll down, we get a few other bits
of information as well. Now you'll see that on a free
account like you have here now, to be honest, I'm not even signed in, this isn't an account. I don't need to make any
accounts to have this information here, but it just gives you a
few more bits of information here, like accounting, accounting salary and that might not be relevant to you, accounting near me, I don't
know if that is relevant to you, if you're more so a software company. But you can see here as you
start to go through all this information, how people
are searching for things and how important these
keywords could be to you based on the volume as well. And if I click on "View
all keyword ideas," and again bear in mind, I
have not signed into this. This is not even a free account, this is just free to use for anybody. You don't even need to
give your information, this is amazing. So as we start to go through it here, we saw some of the keywords we saw before and you can see that this
particular version of the tool, it's more so using what's
known as a phrase much. So it's going to include
keywords that are, they include accounting in them. So it's not to be at the start
of the sentence or the term like we have here for
accounting definitions, but tax accounting near me. So you can see it's included
in there somewhere in the mix. So you can see it's using
accounting as a term there, so accounting means or accounting jobs. If that's something you
wanna go after, feel free, Xero, again, they'd be a competitor, so you might not want
to be mentioning them 'cause it doesn't really make sense. accounting book, accounting courses, maybe you offer a course
as well, who knows. But you can see here it's giving
you lots and lots of great information, you can see as
you kind of go further down it says, upgrade or sign up for a trial. But even if you don't, just
to have these first, whatever it might be, thirty keywords here, this is so important,
this is such awesome data that you're getting from
these tools for free. The last tool I wanna show you
that's a free tool in order to find some great keywords
that you might want to go after is actually, it's a
mixture of Google itself and the Keyword Surfer Chrome extension. So what I've done is I've
just typed in accounting again as our seed keyword, I've typed in accounting into
a Google search term here. And even though it shows me
everything on the left here as it usually would, you can
see here that I have a couple of Chrome extensions
installed and these are free. Like again, I'm not
signed into anything here, these are free extensions. So this is called Keywords Explorer, this one here that gives you
kind of graph information. You can see that it actually
looks like over the last few years people have been searching
accounting less and less, but I don't know if that means
they're searching accounting software more or accounting
near me or whatever it might be, but it looks like actually
the term accounting itself has been getting a little less
searches as time has gone on. Now look, I wouldn't take
that as something alarming and to not go after based on that, because you can see here
that it's still an extremely relevant and well searched keyword. But what's also interesting
is this Keyword Surfer as I mentioned is an extension also. So Keyword Surfer, if I
scroll a bit further down, not only does it give me all
of these kinds of keywords here, again accountant, accountants, and that's important there to
those two terms that come up because we typed in accounting
and now it's saying also relevant is accountant
and accountants, plural. So that's interesting and I'll
actually come back to these in a second, but you can see
it's got some other ones here, accounting salary, salary for accountants. Salary seems to be a big one here, but I can click this button
here to go through a few more and you can see it's talking
a lot about salary as well here, accounting jobs,
accounting equation, accounting software,
accounting jobs near me, account software, software accounting. So you can see it's starting
to give you all of these different but relevant keywords
and now these are the ones that you can put into your
spreadsheet or your notepad or whatever might be & either
have a look at them yourself, do a search from like we see
here to see how relevant they might be to you or speak to
your team about the keywords that you've kind of filtered it down to, how they feel that they're relevant, whatever it might be, whatever
kind of works best for you. But now you have all of these keywords. So that kinda covers everything
under the free keyword tools that we mentioned. But what I'll do here is I'll
actually jump into if you were to be having a paid Ahrefs account and a paid Surfer account. Now to be honest, if you're
serious about going after your SEO in regards to
getting better results, we'd highly, highly recommend
that you have at least a starter Ahrefs account and
a starter Surfer account. Now there are paid accounts,
but the extra information that they give you can
save you a lot of time. So let's look at the paid
Ahrefs account to actually see what information we get from them. So you can see here that
I'm in the agency account that we have for Ahrefs, and I've gone to the Keywords
Explorer section here. Now the Keywords Explorer is
going to ask you for your seed keywords here. Now our original seed keyword
was 'accounting' like we have here at the top, however, what we saw from the
Keyword Surfer free Chrome extension was that they were
also talking about 'accountant' and 'accountants'. So I've
just entered these in here. Now there's a couple of other
filters on Ahrefs that make things a bit more
interesting in my opinion. So you can see here that you
can choose from different search engines where you
want the data to come from. So for this example,
we're gonna choose Google, but you can see you've also
got YouTube, Amazon, Bing, so on and so forth. And yet again, please remember
to choose the correct country that you're targeting here. So after I've got all that, what I'm gonna do is I've
clicked onto this here, and what Ahrefs is going to do
is it's going to show me just information for these three keywords, but I wanna see a bit more. So what I've done is I've
clicked on the matching terms report here on the left. Now to be honest, Ahrefs have
changed this around slightly, so by the time you look at this
video it could be different again, but what I'm doing
at the moment is looking at the matching term section here. So you can see here that
there's over a million keywords that Ahrefs seems to think
are relevant to accounting, accountants, and accountant. So 'the accountant', I'm
assuming that's maybe a show or a movie or something like that, because it seems like a bit
of a strange keyword to have there, but like we saw earlier
we got wave accounting, again their a competitor. You can kind of exclude them
to be honest, but theres other interesting ones here, we've
got accounting, accountant, accounting software, the
salary one again, equation, jobs, tax accountant near me
and you can see that you can scroll through all of these and
you get amazing information. But because there's over a
million different keywords here, we really need to filter it
down because there's only a certain amount of keywords
you'll be able to target realistically. So what I'm going to do is
I'm gonna click on the include section here, and I'm gonna
tell it to only show me keywords that include the word 'software'. So that's what I've done
here on this particular page. So you can see everything here,
and it even highlights them which is great, includes software. Now at the start of this video,
we mentioned that the actual business that you operate
in is all about accounting software, so already these
keywords are a lot more relevant to what you do and what
you should rank for. So you can see here that we
go through, there's accounting software, free accounting
software if you offer a free version that might be handy. Like we saw earlier,
small business accounting, best accounting software,
there's loads and loads of great ones here. However, as I mentioned
at the start of the video, there's this keyword
difficulty section here, as I mentioned, that's a
scale essentially of zero to a hundred that Ahrefs make
themselves to say how many backlinks essentially they think
that you would need to rank for that keyword. So obviously the higher that
this goes the more backlinks you're gonna need to earn to
your page to rank for this particular keyword. So you can see here it's
extremely competitive. Now, what's handy enough in
Ahrefs is that they are actually color-coded as well, so you
can see anything that's not too difficult is in a green and
then it goes to your orange and to red. So it actually is very
easy to see straight away. So luckily enough, another
filter we can add with Ahrefs is we can actually set a
particular keyword difficulty. So what I've done in this
example, is I've said, okay, show me keywords that
include the term 'software' but also are no higher than a
keyword difficulty of thirty, and that gives us back
this particular report. So you can see here all of a
sudden things start to be a bit green, so there's a bit more
chance of ranking for these. Now look, you might also see
that for the volume section here, the volume for these, for example, for wave accounting software,
again they're a competitor, so exclude them, but as an example. Instead of going for accounting
software which had a lot more search volume, the
more that you filter down it's gonna have less volume, but what people usually don't
realize is that if that's a particular search term and
someone is so precise with what they're looking for, your
conversion rate will be higher and I'll move on to that
in a moment as well. So what's very interesting
to me that comes up here is now we have keywords such
as church accounting software, we've also got real estate
accounting software, software for accounting
firms, restaurant accounting software, free church accounting software, we saw church was there again,
farm accounting software, manufacturing. So you can see there's all
these different industries that people are in but
they're using their industry when they're searching as well. Now, if you have pages for all of these, with what we call a dedicated landing page that specifically targets
only, for example, real estate accounting
software, or for example, farm accounting software,
whatever it might be, there's more chance that
you're gonna show up because I don't think there's gonna
be a lot of people targeting those particular keywords, however, I will mention
that in just a moment. So you can also see that there's
a lot more filtering that can still be done. So what I'm gonna do next
is I'm gonna actually have a look at the different terms, relevant terms that are
being used for this. So what was very
interesting to me is church. I didn't think anyone would
be searching church software for accountants or
anything like that at all, so to me that's actually very interesting. So I filtered it down even
further to only show something that's related to 'church'
and you can see we've gone from 1.2 million keywords
now to 17 keywords. But again, what's super
interesting here is for church accounting software alone by itself, there is almost 2,000
people searching this. So it's estimated here that
there's about 1,700 people per month in the USA alone
who are searching church accounting software and
look at all the other strong keywords that you could
use as well on that page, you've got free church
accounting software, church accounting software reviews, accounting software for church, that might actually be a
better one to have these two together, eh, small church
accounting software. This is how particular
people are being when they're searching, they're not only
searching church accounting software, but that particular
person or the 60 people per month are actually searching
'small church accounting software'. So you can see here that
we've gone through a bit of a journey here to find these, but the more precise that
we can be with what people are searching, and if we can
create a dedicated landing page all about that, well then there's
a very, very strong chance that we're going to rank for that. So let's move on a bit further
here and actually let's have a look at the term church
accounting software to break it down even more. You can see you're in Ahrefs
and again bear in mind, this is the paid version of Ahrefs. So you can see here the full
breakdown for church accounting software. Now you can see that if you
do have a paid Ahrefs accounts you got some super
interesting information, so not only that you get
to see the global volume. So you can see here that a
lot of people are searching from states, not so much
in the UK and other places, but that helps give you
a further breakdown. So this is another reason
why it's important to know your geographical target as well here, because you could be
thinking that for example, they're gonna be 1,700
people searching for you but if you're in the UK
it's actually only 60, so another reason why
this is so important. But you can see here there's
loads of other keyword ideas here from Ahrefs as well,
so it's just different terms that are matching different questions. Now, questions are an
interesting one because if you're smart enough
with your technical SEO, you can actually include these
questions as Schema Markup so they can actually appear
as further real estate in the search engine
results pages for you. But you can see here there's
lots of other things. There's also a 'people also
talk about' and QuickBooks is there and QuickBooks
is very interesting and I'll mention that in a moment. So if we go and scroll down a little here, we can actually see the SERP
overview and where people have been for the last six months. So you can see that for the
majority of the last six months, the people who have been
ranking in the top for this, they kinda stayed there. There's been a bit of what's
known as Google dancing where people will kind of
go into the Google results and they'll drop out of them
and they'll go back into them. Now there's a few different
reasons why that can happen and we will actually make
a video all about that soon enough also, if you want to see that make sure you are
subscribed to the channel. But if we scroll further down, now what we're going to
do is have a look at what is the search intent.
That's the next part. Now you may have already seen
our video all about searching intent, so I won't go on
too long about it here, but basically what we want to
see is that if we made a page all about church accounting
software, could we rank for it? Do Google think that's
what people want to see? So all we need to do is
actually look at who's ranking in the top 10. Now you can either have
a look at this on Ahrefs, if you have a paid account
or just Google it yourself and have a look on
Google because it's free. So the first thing that
comes up is church accounting software. So these people here, they're obviously gonna be a competitor, and they're ranking, so that
means that straight away there's indication that we
actually could rank for this. Now the next couple or the
next few, should I say, they're more so review sections, they're kind of blogs talking
about different software that is available for church accounting. However, after that we have
another church accounting software, we have a few
more other ones as well. So there's kind of a 50-50
chance in regards to intent in my opinion here that you
can rank for it depending on how well optimized your page is. So the next thing that we
would normally do is, if we've decided now after all our
filtering and having a look at different things, that we think, yeah, actually let's make a
dedicated landing page for 'church accounting software'. What I would recommend to do
then, and this is what we do for all of our clients, is
I'll actually take church accounting software as a
keyword, I'll go over to Surfer which is another great tool that we use and I'll go into the
'Content Editor' section. And what I'll do is I'll
tell Surfer to have a look out there at what other pages are online and to also include what's
known as NLP keywords. that stands for for Natural
Language Processing, basically these are related
terms that Google will want to see on the page. But what that does is it
allows you to create a page from scratch or copy and paste
in the content you already have so you can improve upon
it and it tells you based on the competitors, and you
can change your competitors if they're not exactly suited, so you just click this
little gear icon up here. For example, as I mentioned earlier, some of those were kind
of more blog reviews, we don't really want to
be ranking with them, they're not our competitors. So you can take them out of
the equation here and Surfer's only going to look after
people who are actually your competitors for a landing page like this. But the most interesting part
here is it gives you all these incredible keywords to use here. So it's saying for church
accounting software, as your primary keyword in this
example that you should use it between 11 and 19 times. So in this particular example,
I would make it a H1, and you can also see that there's
other very important keywords here, such as accounts
payable, accounts receivable, pay bills, advanced accounting,
church bookkeeping is one, church management, but a very interesting
one that popped up was 'church management software'. Now, we saw on Ahrefs that
people were also talking about QuickBooks when it came to the term for church accounting software. I mentioned that was
interesting, the reason being is because QuickBooks,
obviously one of the top players in the accounting software industry, we actually see that
QuickBooks are ranking for this and the reason being is
they have a page all about church accounting software. They have a dedicated landing
page all about this topic. Now QuickBooks, obviously
they're very, very smart and clever and they're
one of the bigger players as I mentioned. So they're obviously doing
something right here. So you can see here that
they've used a lot of important keywords, this is in a heading here, but we also saw that Surfer
thinks that we should use 'church management software'. So if we scroll down, one of
the other headings here that QuickBooks have used, it includes 'church management software'. So whoever's doing the SEO
for QuickBooks obviously knows all this and has done the research to have all the correct data. So this is extremely,
extremely interesting, but what's also interesting
about this is you'll see here that this actually goes
to forward slash industry forward slash churches. Now that's interesting because
I wanted to see what other industries are QuickBooks
actually targeting. So I had a look at their
industries page & they have a nice little dropdown here and they've
restaurants, construction, retail, churches, non-profit,
legal, so on and so forth. That's extremely interesting
because at the start of our keyword research, as
we started to filter things through on Ahrefs, we saw
that people were searching restaurant accounting software,
construction accounting software, so on and so forth. So whoever is doing the
information or research and SEO in QuickBooks, they've
obviously seen this and gone, "We need to make pages for these." I can guarantee that they're
getting people going to these pages who are specifically
looking for restaurant accounting software or
church accounting software in the example of this particular page. So that means that that person goes, "I don't just want the
accounting software, I want church accounting software," and they're going through this
and they see all the exact keywords they want to use
such as church management software and it has basically
everything that they want to see. So they're gonna go, "Yeah,
this is the product for me. This is what I'm looking for." So what do you think they're gonna do? They're gonna click "Buy
Now," they're gonna convert. So that's why it's so
important to first of all start with keyword research to
then filter down specifically through your keywords to
something that you can actually offer to customers because
people are searching extremely particular keywords and if
you can create a dedicated landing page all about this sort of stuff, you're more than likely
going to rank for it. So the last thing I'm gonna
show you about this in regards to keyword research, obviously
you wanna include those keywords like we saw on Surfer. You wanna include them, throughout
your content as well, but it's not just your content
where you want to include them, you wanna include them in
other important places as well. So another free tool
actually, this Ahrefs toolbar. If I click on that here and I
actually click on this section here which gives us an on-page report, that's basically going behind
the scenes of this page to see the kind of things Google are looking for. Now, we've talked before about
your title and description which you can see here and
that's important because that's what shows up to somebody
in a Google search result before they ever see your website, your title and description
needs to tell someone why they should click on your website
as opposed to the other people who are ranking on page one. But you can see here,
again, whoever's doing this for QuickBooks, top marks to them. They have included 'church
accounting' at the start, they've included software here, 'accounting software for
churches' they've got two very, very strong keywords in the title alone. That's what someone wants
to see, if someone sees this and that's what they're looking for, they're obviously going to click onto it. And also they've got in
the description as well, church accounting,
different things like that, which means that there's a
chance that it's gonna actually show up as bold in the
Google search results helping them stand out even more. So the last thing that I'll
talk about here and I'll end the video then, because I know
this has been a long video but it's quite important,
is your heading tags. So if I click "Show
more," we can see the rest of the heading tags now showing up here. So you can see here
that for their H1, okay, obviously the most important heading tag, we've mentioned this before, 'church accounting software'
is included in this. They have that term in their
most important heading tag. Again, top marks to whoever's
doing this in QuickBooks, but you can also see for their
smaller heading tags, H2s, H3s, whatever it may be, "we'll
help with church finances", obviously an extremely
relevant term there as well and it's also got a lot
of other important things in the headings as well that
Google would see as relevant or any other kind of search engine, such as 'flexible church
management software' that was the one that
we looked at earlier, That one actually correlates
to this one here like we saw. So you can see here that
even with free tools, 'cause again this toolbar
and all of this information I'm seeing here, this is all
free. So the only paid section is what we looked at, and then for further filtering in Ahrefs and to
actually find those important relevant keywords in Surfer. So you can have a look at
this keyword research for free with the tools we mentioned earlier, but if you're serious about
it, I would highly recommend getting a paid account with
Ahrefs and with Surfer, trust me, it will pay
for itself 10 times over. So what I'll do is I'll
actually end the video there. I know this was a bit of a longer video, but it's such an important
topic that I wanted to walk you through the exact steps that
we actually take for either ourselves when we're
trying to make content or when we're making
content or ranking pages for our clients, whenever it might be, these are the exact steps that we take and this is how we get great results. If you do have any questions
or comments at all, or if there's a particular tip
or trick that you might know that we haven't actually
pointed out in the video today about keyword research,
please leave it all below, we'll do our very best to
reply to each and every single comment. But other than that, hope
you got a bit of value from this video, hopefully
we'll chat again soon. But other than that, enjoy
the rest of your day. Bye.
