- A subscriber to my weekly
Dogear newsletter wrote in this. She said, "If I could ask you anything it'd be how to mix copywriting and SEO in a way that makes your
audience wanna keep reading while pleasing the Google gods?" Oh, those SEO gods. One of the most common
questions that I get is, how do I mix SEO writing
with juicy, helpful content that's voicey, fun, and
even playful to read? Sometimes that SEO strategy
can feel a little bit robotic when you're using these keywords that are said the way you probably wouldn't normally say things. This is a great question. I'm gonna jump into it in today's video. Now, while it's unrealistic
to actually land in that number one spot
for every single keyword that you're going for, you can realistically land
on pages one, two, or three. So if you've ever struggled before with writing content and
blogs that bubbles up and does land on pages, one,
two, or three of Google, or heck, you don't even
know what keywords to use, well, you are in the right place. Because by the end of this
video you're gonna know exactly how to figure out keywords for
your blog and your website. And you're gonna be able to
write great SEO-driven content with a better blogging strategy. Also stay tuned till the
end, I'm gonna hold your feet to the fire and give
you a little challenge that you can implement today
that will help you get on track to a better SEO strategy. Hey there, if we have not met yet, my name is Ashlyn Carter
and I have helped thousands of creators and creative entrepreneurs like you make more money with their words. But as a conversion copywriter
and a launch strategist because not knowing what to
say, even in your SEO content and SEO copywriting
should not be the thing that's holding you back from making sales. The last thing I want is for you to get frustrated going for some keyword that you're never going to
realistically write for. So let's go through these
three tips plus one bonus one to find those keywords
and write a better blog. Click like if this is
exactly what you need today. Also click subscribe if you
want to get the next video in this series. The next video is going
to be specifically writing that SEO copy on your website itself. So those landing pages that are living and breathing 24/7. Today's video's gonna focus more on the blog content itself. Okay, so the first thing you wanna do when you have this blog topic in mind that you're going to write about, or if you're gonna create
an auxiliary blog piece of content for a YouTube episode or a podcast that you have, number one, we're gonna make this list and then flesh it out
with related keywords. Okay, so in last week's video,
I'll link it down below, I got you started at this minute mark here with creating a word salad of sorts of different types of keywords
that you should be going for. So in this first step, we
are going to flesh that out just a little bit more. Essentially, what other
facets of those subjects should we be considering or phrasing with more of a long tail keyword, which is a just fancy way to say a keyword that's more than one actual word. Now again, this process
will work for figuring out your keywords that you
want your overall website to rank for, which is what I'll talk about in next week's video. But right now we're gonna
apply it to a blog posts or a piece of pillar content specifically. First I think it'd be helpful if I show you a quick screenshot of what my blog content
outline looks like. Now, again, I talk a
lot about pillar pieces of content, hero content. So when I say blog, this is in addition to a YouTube video that I'm
turning out every single week. But what you can see
here is a basic outline, and this is where I
start every single week. So I duplicate this
inside the correct folder, inside our Google file structure. And this keyword section
right here is the one that I'm talking about trying to fill in. So to fill that in, I
primarily love three tools the most of all, there
are Keywords Everywhere, Ubersuggest and Semrush. Google's Keyword Planner
Isn't too shabby either, but those other three
tend to be my favorites. So, I know there are so many
keyword tools out there. So just find what you love and use it. I've tried tons of different
ones over the years and these are the ones
that I just keep favorited because they were easiest. All right, I'm gonna
start with my favorite, Keywords Everywhere. So this is functioning as a Chrome plugin. I'm here on the website, I had clicked install for Chrome. It's already up here, as
you can see with this icon. So let's come over to a Google tab and what you're gonna be able to see, I just ran a search for
a brand photographer. And so there's a couple of
ways that we can come up with some other keyword
ideas that we could use. I'm pretending for the
sake of this example that I am a brand photographer and maybe I'm launching a
course on brand photography and how to be a brand photographer. So I'm just gonna see some ideas. One place we can start
before we even worry about Keywords Everywhere,
Ubersuggest is just seeing what Google recommends. If you scroll down to the bottom, you probably already knew this, you can see all these related searches, other things that people
are searching for. So that's interesting,
but what I really like is being able to see a little
bit more data and information thanks to Keywords Everywhere. And Ubersuggest, which also here it is, this U that also functions
as a Chrome plugin. So they're free, just install them. And even with the
basics, not even worrying about the paid plans, you can get a lot of
aggregate information. So I'm gonna talk about these numbers. This is a Keywords Everywhere
thing right up here. In just a moment, but right now let's look at the word specifically. So Keywords Everywhere is
gonna give me this list of other words that I
could use also down here. And I'm going to talk about numbers, because this is a lot, right? This is a lot, and this
can help be narrowed down based off of the actual number of people that are searching every month. But I just wanted you to see how many different words
you can come up with in different phrases
and you can play around. That's not really specific. So let's see, personal brand photography. I'll maybe try that, let's see. As you change this,
these metrics over here on the side are going to change as well. Here's some great keyword phrases. These are gonna be some good ideas that you can use in blog posts and beyond. So that is the first way
that I wanted to show you to find some keywords by
using Keywords Everywhere and Ubersuggest plug-ins. All right, tool number three that I like to play around in is called Semrush. And I have done more of
an in-depth deep dive. I'll link the YouTube that I did to that, where you can kind of see in these tabs, and I have the paid version of this. I would recommend if you do
a lot of content creation, I think the paid version is worth it. Again, at the end of this
video I'm gonna show you my, like the Ninja reason. I think it is worth it. But what I wanna do specifically is come over here to where it
says keyword overview. And I went ahead and typed in kind of the same keyword
that we were looking for. So you can see that this is
gonna pull the same sorts of information as well. So again, like I said,
there's so many tools that kind of do the same things and offer different variations. I know this one can look
a little bit overwhelming. So just pick the one, try
one, try maybe two together. And then if you're really getting into it, add a third that you can do
your keyword research too. So I spend about probably 15 minutes prior to writing a blog,
looking for different ways that I can find all of these keywords and pulling them together. And now let's go ahead and
talk about the numbers, which is up next. Okay, so now your small word
salad of initial keyword ideas you have turned into a gigantic
word salad, which is fun. And hey, you're just
trying to write a blog that serves your people and helps rank. Well friend, that is why we're
gonna narrow that list down and see how we can trim it based on volume and size of searches. So step two, we're gonna select the words with a volume that you
can actually rank for. Okay, you've probably
heard someone say before, "That is a really competitive keyword, but what do they actually mean?" Well this, it's a short way of saying how many people are searching
for this every single month. Think of it like market share. There could be so many
thousands and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people searching for that one thing, or it
could be a smaller group, and that still matters. That's still probably worth
going for that market share. That's still X amount of
people you could gobble up and leave into your content. So let's go back to the computer, because within those three
tools I wanna show you how to be aware of search volume
or just pay attention to it as you go through and
organize the keywords based on the volume so you can kind of tell where you want to shoot your
arrow and have a target range. Okay, let's see how we can narrow down that ginormous list of
words that you made, because that's just, it's
stressful when it's that big to me and I wouldn't actually
know what to go after. So here's my magic number
that I'm gonna give you. I like to aim for a number of
monthly searches right here with this Keywords Everywhere. I like this number to be
over 200 and under 5,000. And that is me personally,
what I like to go for. I just wanna tell you how I do it. That tells me if there's
under 5,000 searches a month. I think I can play in that sandbox. I think I can go for that. If it is over a 100, over 200, that signals to me that enough
people are looking for it, that I wanna spend my time
creating content about it. So if we look over here,
that's what these numbers mean. This first one is volume,
that's search volume. So all of these, like this estimates about 30 people, 20 people-ish
a month are searching for these specific phrases. I mean, just, to me that's
not worth creating a bunch of content for, but if I
can see that number tick up and then you can also, when
you have Keywords Everywhere, you'll be able to see, you
can click and it'll drop down those same numbers for this. This line right here, this is Ubersuggest that's gonna give you
some more information about the domain
authority of that website. Look, and it tells you a little bit too which is really helpful. Let's do brand photography
course and see what happens. Just to play around a little bit and see what other things come up. Oh, wow, see, that's like super low. So if you are maybe wanting to teach this brand photography course, like there's not a lot of
people searching for it, which is a good thing, but also to crack from an
SEO standpoint, I would, you're gonna have to put
different bait in the water then trying to build a
blog post around this. You know what I mean? So, because there's not that
many people searching for it. So how can we zoom backwards? Let's look over at Semrush one more time so we can see those numbers
are in here as well. Here it is, volume. So you can see those, and like I said, I'm gonna play around
with trying to hit again. Like this is probably, this one is great. I like to hit that over
200 yet under 5,000. This one would be a great
one as well to go after as I hope that shows you a little bit, like some of these I wouldn't
even worry about writing down. Actually most of them, I would
not worry about writing down because what I'm gonna be concerned with are these big units. I would probably, looking at this, I would go, I would add brand photography and personal branding
photography to my list, not worry about the rest of these. And I would do some
other research up here, like different ways to phrase
it, keyword variations, and see if I can find more words that are in these kinds of numbers. Now you can do your thing here. I know some people are real spreadsheety, I actually am, but I don't
have a big spreadsheet of all of this pulled together. I know what I wanna rank
for with my website. So when I'm working on a specific blog, I just am kind of doing
this volume ranking while I'm trying to
find the right keywords, and I know the range that
I'm trying to stay between. So those are the words
that I'm gonna pull over and put in this blog and content outline. A good rule of thumb is
to really pay attention to those long tail
keywords, those phrases, and maybe try to go after
those, because again, they may not have the biggest
search volume in the world, but that's a good thing. You don't wanna play the game with some of those websites and brands. And if there's enough people
phrasing it a certain way, see if you can, again, like I said, gobble up that part of the market. Let me give you an example
using a student of mine. Her name is Leah and she's a calligrapher, if hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of thousands of people are searching for the phrase wedding calligrapher but considerably fewer are searching for that phrase within her area. Well then what do you think we want to try to rank for with her website? Okay, So we've done this keyword research. The research portion is done. You can go back here in step three. Now we're just gonna actually write. So two things here. If you watched last week's
video where I was talking about the Google algorithm updates that are coming down the pipeline, then what's so exciting is
that content is still King. And if you write content that
is just, chef's kiss, so good, it's gonna have a great
chance of doing well. So really try to serve your people and offer up good quality content. I always say, I want my blogs, my emails, everything to be worth the time at least that it took to click over and get into the content
and read up on it. Now I've covered by
blog post, our workflow, and formula right here. I will also link it below, but to do a quick recap, here we go. I'm gonna turn that camera around. Essentially, when I'm moving
into that writing portion of the phase, I am not thinking
at all about SEO keywords. I'm writing in my voice, my
style, how I like to teach, how I like to talk to people. I am not worrying one
iota about anything having to do with the keyword. And pause, here is that challenge for you. I want you to screenshot
this formula that I have. This is the research portion that I do before I make a YouTube
video, before I write a blog, anytime, even sometimes some lives. Before I go into creating the content I want to make sure
that I have like a chef with their me's on plus,
I've got everything in front of me and all
these different little tools that I could use to enhance this content. And again, like I said,
make it worth that click. I showed this to some
copywriting for creative students on a call last week and they
thought it was so helpful. So I'm gonna show it to you as well. No matter what type of content you create, I think that this research
outline will be helpful. And truly once I have that, moving into the blog writing
portion kind of writes itself. And again, like I said,
it is my voice, my style, my personality coming out as I write. Which brings me to step number four. Now I'm gonna go back in
and soup it up for SEO. My A number one ride or die
go-to tool here is Yoast. I typically pick one primary
keyword, one secondary keyword out of that list that I'm
really trying to rank for, to use in the title, in
the meta description, and so on and so forth. But the rest of those words I am gonna try to weave into the content. So I'm gonna go back up into the content of the blog that I've drafted and see where I can
plug in different words. One thing I may try to start doing in 2021 is having at least around 7-ish additional keywords in this blog. Neil Patel one time said,
"The number of keywords, there's not a magic keyword, just as many are actually
relevant to the post." And those are the three
big steps I told you at the top that I was
gonna give you a bonus tip, and here it is. The last piece of the
puzzle would be to track it. And for that I love Semrush. It is a paid tool, but
to me it's worth it. Again, I've been blogging
multiple times a week since 2016 at this point. I don't wanna have a big spreadsheet or trying to be keeping up with where different keywords are falling or where my content is ranking. So I just lean on this
tool to do it for me and sends me a weekly email
with where I'm ranking for what. If you love this concept
of writing quality content and copy that is ready for SEO
but it is not overly gimmicky or schmoozy or robotic, and instead infused with
voice and personality, then I would invite you to
check out my brand voice guide. This is a freebie 10 page printable guide that you can download today. It's full of prompts to help you zero in on your brand's voice,
tone, terminology, and tempo so you can begin to have a
working doc in your business. That's a North Star or a
mood board for the words that you're gonna use
to market your business. I will link it below, so
grab it while you still can. Now you know how to
write a better SEO blog, but what about how to prep
your entire SEO strategy? Well, I got last week's video, again, part one of this three
part series teed up for you. If you liked this video,
help me out by clicking that like button, hit subscribe if you don't wanna miss part three, and then comment below with any questions that you may have or just the word helpful if this actually served you
and helped you out today. As always, thanks so much for watching. Here's to working from a place
of more rest, less hustle, and I'll see you in the next video.
