UPDATE: 3 Great Tips Video shot that clarifies some of the updates:
Original Content:
Hi! David Hood here, the Dallas SEO Geek.
WHAT YOUR MARKET IS DOING
In this video, I’m going to talk about how to find what your market is searching for and whether or not they’re actually searching for you, and exactly where to find it. It’s really strange how many people I see up there who’ve gotten posts from SEO companies or from internet marketing companies. Whoever who’s done the research on the search phrases, it’s what people are looking for. It’s called keyword research. And if you don’t do that, it’s like starting on a voyage without a map. I’m going to drive to this place but I have no idea where it is. But I’m just going to start driving. That’s the analogy. You’re never going to get there.
Also what they’ll do is they’ll say “Hey, I’ll rank you on the first page,” and that sounds great. But really, they’re ranking you for things that nobody is searching for or your business name which maybe people are searching that you should but you should not support anyways. They’re easy without any SEO. So it’s important to know what people are searching for. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark.
So there’s a really easy tool for that. It will make it very easy for you to do at least a little bit of basic keyword research. I’m going to go in and I’m going to look at it with you and show you how my kind of thought process and what I do to use it. If you sign in, you don’t have to put in the Captcha. You’ll probably see a Captcha here when you first come here. But if you sign in to a Google account, you don’t have to do that. It’s important to do that because you get a little bit of extra information as well. I’m going to do something that I’ve never looked at before and I’m just showing you my own thought process and walk you through it right here. I’m sure that it’s not going to be perfect but you’ll see what I think about as suppose to the pre-playing thing where I just show you just the clean parts. I’m going to show you everything about it.
SEARCH PHRASES – BROAD/EXACT
Let’s do follow this Dallas Lawn Care. What I want to do is actually I want to click keyword ideas and not the ad group ideas. I just don’t like it. Alright, what you’ve got here is there are different match types in defaults and broad. Frankly, I do not like the broad a whole lot. It’s useful but what the broad is, anything related to Dallas Lawn Care, any sort of search phrases will be included in these numbers. But that’s not really what you want. What I like the most is the most conservative number which is exact. What this is, is how many people are typing in this exact search phrase? Maybe some close variations but generally, these are exact search phrases. 170 times a month? Alright, that’s more reasonable to expect if you were ranked just for the search phrase. Now admittedly, if you ranked number 1 for this search phrase, you’re probably going to rank well for a lot of these other search phrases. But, let’s just say you ranked just number one for this one. You can expect to get about 35% to 40% of this traffic. You can calculate how much traffic I get. What’s the conversion rate on my site? Boom! You can know how valuable it is to use. Keyword research is extremely valuable.
I do look at the broad right at the beginning but then I’m going into the suggestions, I take off the broad because it muddies the data. If you have “Lawn Care Dallas” and “Dallas Lawn Care,” and then numbers overlap heavily, what’s the point? There’s no point in pulling individual work for that. Here’s another thing. You go down here in Lawn Care. I’m not really going to try and write for that. Do I care about someone who’s looking for Lawn Care in Seattle? No! What you can do over here in Dallas. In your include terms, what this does is it will only give me stuff that has Dallas. Let’s see. Let’s find something else. What we also want to do is just do cities. There are Dallas area cities, I don’t want that. You can also exclude terms so now, it’s not going to show that Dallas area cities. It’s not up there anymore.
There’s some other stuff in here that we don’t want but home. I don’t want to really exclude that because it might be Home Lawn Care so I might be searching that. I don’t know. What we’ve got right here are100 neighbors. That’s not bad. What I’m going to do is I’m going to export this data to excel. Hopefully, have excel because this makes the whole process a lot easier, and for some reason, sometimes it duplicates whatever you gave it. That’s the thing I typed in so it’s there double. So I’m just going to loop this line.
COMPETITION
What we have is this Competition. I find this to be very useless. The coin of the tool is to show is for people who are bidding on their ads. If I do Dallas Lawn Care, these ads right here. That’s what’s the point of this tool is for. But that’s not really what we’re looking for usually and sometimes that’s nice. Sometimes there are opportunities there but usually not anymore. It used to be a lot more. Let’s go back here. I eliminate this column and then Global. Sometimes you want Global but usually, I eliminate it. I mean who cares? If someone is searching Dallas Lawn Care and they’re in Europe, why would they be a customer and it’s very unlikely. I like to look at the conservative numbers.
MONTHLY SEARCHES
These are monthly searches. 170 people are typing in Dallas Lawn Care. Here’s what I’m also going to do. Google has this sort of by what they call “relevance.” They think that certain things are more relevant than others. Not searched by how I like to look at it which is I have the most searches. I press ALT+D+F+F. It creates what’s called an auto filter which allows me to manipulate this in sort and organize this data. I’m going to sort from largest to smallest here. For some reason, I care about those. Companies in Dallas. Who cares? We’re going to delete that. Dallas can? Let’s delete that. IT support Dallas, delete that. Community service. In-home care Dallas. I don’t know why I keep saving IT. There’s a lot of IT. Maybe it’s not perfect here but there’s still quite a bit here – landscaping Dallas, free service Dallas, Dallas lawn care. These are a lot of search phrases.
If I highlight this, hopefully, my mug isn’t the way. 4,000 exact searches, that’s a lot! Not all of those are probably relevant but I think a lot of them are. Obviously – Best companies in Dallas but still if you just look at these top points that we’ve looked at, there are still 1,900 searches a month. That’s a lot of people that you can potentially be exposed to.
You don’t want to be going after lawn care services Dallas because your main search phrase is 0, really? That’s the way the business is won? All these 0’s because it’s in here that shows less than ten. You can see Dallas tx lawn care but here it shows one and that’s because all of the people are searching in one or maybe two times a month, maybe even less than once a month. But like every other month, you’re going to search for it.
Let’s say you know what you’re doing and you make a guess “lawn care services Dallas.” You think “Alright we’re going to go after that.” It’s going to be in our title. It’s going to be all over our page but only one person is searching in a month. You didn’t really do your homework right from the start. You spend all this money and all this time, months and months of time and money and you’re number one for that search phrase. But that’s not what people are searching which is the timing and the traffic. What you want to do is you want to go out to be someone on these top ones right here.
COST PER CLICK
There’s one other thing that we didn’t look at. I used to have that default part of the setting to not change it every time. It’s the cost per click. You go and read down this data. Sometimes, I like to look for costs per click opportunities. Sometimes there’s expensive cost per click stuff. Dallas Landscaping Maintenance Service is something that nobody is searching that. I already filtered the list quite a bit.
There’s another little trick that’s called the Vlookup. All of these columns on three and for some reason, you have to do false. It’s third in columns. Looking at the third column and pulling the data from that other sheet. I’m going to copy and paste that. Now, the cost per click data is in here. We can see that someone entered tree service Dallas. Wow! That’s a really high one. Let’s see if we can find one that gets searched a lot. Sod Dallas, a lot of people are searching are bidding on that. That might be something that you can give an eye converting site and it might be worth it. It’s important to look at.
MULTIPLE CITIES
Sometimes, what we’ll also do is if we look at it across multiple cities and I’ll put it all in a table that enables you to sum up the searches for Dallas and compare them. A lot of times, if I’m looking at this and you can see the sum again is 4,000. I’m probably thinking on that. The fact is, that’s more than the broad names of the publishing stuff in there or the broadest.
Sometimes the broadest doesn’t even include advertising. It hides a lot of this data and 30% of the searches have never been searched before. People are searching for brand new things and then there’s a ton of searches that don’t get searched very often. It’s a large percentage of the searches. That’s why you’re not going to be able to find everything but if you optimize for these top ones then you’re going to win those other ones that people are searching for pretty naturally if you do your SEO right.
COMPETITION VIDEO, TITLE PHRASE, OFF-PAGE SEO
There are a few other things that you want to do. I want to look at the competition that’s outside the scope of this video. At some point, I’ll create a competition video and hopefully take a look at that. After that, what will you do with this data? You look at the competition then you would pick things that you would go right for. Let’s say this Dallas Lawn Care. There’s some really good something that’s our target market. The competition is that bad and I really want to go after it.
You go and this is what affects your SEO campaign. You make sure you put this phrase in your title. If this is your number one phrase, put this phrase in the title of your homepage. Maybe put a variation in some of these other phrases. You don’t want to just stuff a bunch of these phrases in your homepage title. But you want it in there, then you put it in a text. Make sure that the text is on your homepage and on some of your other pages. A lot of times, what you could do is link back to your homepage from your other pages with that text that people put on. You don’t want to overdo that.
If you go even further to what’s called off-page SEO which is getting people linked to you. Then these are the search phrases that you would want to target. Again, if you haven’t done this then you don’t know what your target. You don’t know what attracts. You don’t know what to see if you’re ranked 4th. You’re just shooting randomly and hoping you hit something there.
Not only that, sometimes it will be going to help you understand your market better. You will realize “Wow! I didn’t realize there were this many people interested in this.” This is a unique thing with internet marketing. You can actually see exactly what your market is doing. I was counting much on the cost to do this kind of research. We pay 1,000s, 10,000 sometimes even 100,000 of dollars. In this, you can do it in fifteen minutes and figure out what your market is doing. So if you have any questions, let me know. If you want me to look at your keywords, your search phrases, what your market is doing, feel free to give me a call at 469-438-8153. Have a great day.