​Keyword Research in 2016: Going Beyond Guesswork

Posted by Dr-Pete

When we do keyword research, we tend to focus on discovery. We take a short list of keywords we think matter, brainstorm wildly, paste the resulting list into a dozen tools, paste the results back into Excel, and measure our success by how often our spreadsheet crashes. Then, we throw it all away when our tax attorney client tells us he only cares about ranking #1 for "taylor swift downloads," because he heard that gets a lot of traffic.

Maybe I'm exaggerating. Keyword discovery is a critical process, but what we’re left with at the end is a long and often rambling list to prioritize, and typically we prioritize either by our own gut feelings or by the black box of AdWords global volume. What if there were a better way?

When we were building Keyword Explorer, we wanted to solve the deeper problem — how do we pick the best keywords to start with, given the complexity of Google SERPs and our competition in modern SEO? Which keywords really balance potential traffic with ROI?

Over the course of many months, we created four metrics:

1. Keyword Difficulty (V2)
2. Keyword Opportunity
3. Importance (user-defined)
4. Keyword Potential

Today, I want to explain the philosophy of these metrics, some of the math behind them, and how you can use these ideas to reinvent your approach to keyword research. Stepping outside of our product, I'm going to try and translate these metrics into questions that are relevant to anyone, regardless of which tools you use.

1. How difficult is the keyword to rank for?

All else being equal, we’d rather rank #1 on a keyword that gets a ton of traffic. In the real world, though, all else is rarely equal. High-volume keywords are often highly competitive, which translates directly into more ranking difficulty. More difficulty means more time and/or more money.

A few years ago, we developed a Keyword Difficulty metric based on our authority metrics (Domain Authority and Page Authority). Page Authority (PA) is a constantly evolving metric that is designed to correlate with a page’s ability to rank on Google, based in large part on the page’s link profile. Keyword Difficulty (V1) used Page Authority in the middle-top of SERPs (the median PA, more or less) for a given keyword to approximate how hard that keyword would be to rank on.

Our updated Keyword Difficulty (V2) score uses a more complex, click-through rate (CTR) weighted model of Page Authority across the first page of a SERP, reflecting more of the competitive landscape, and adapts to today’s irregular organic result counts. V2 also does a better job of filling in gaps when PA metrics are missing for one or more results. Finally, V2 scales scores to fill more of the 0–100 range and provide better granularity.

If you want to cheat and build your own proxy for Keyword Difficulty, I'm going to risk a few sales and let you in on a secret. Install the MozBar SEO toolbar (it's free), run your Google search, and grab the PA from result #4:

Why #4? That's a rough approximation of the median difficulty of the page, slightly adjusted for the prevalence of SERPs with less than 10 results. You can pull similar data (although in a couple more steps) from Open Site Explorer (also free). Again, it's a rough approximation, and Keyword Difficulty V2 adds quite a bit, but it's a start. You've got one more column in your spreadsheet.

2. How much organic opportunity is there?

The days of 10 blue links are gone, and today’s SERPs are a complicated mix of paid results, organic results, vertical results, and Knowledge Graph features. Traditional keyword research assumes a mythical page of nothing but blue links and 100% click-through potential.

Let's look at a modern SERP, a result for the brand "Forever 21" in Portland, Oregon:

While there are many potential opportunities on this page, the only traditional SEO opportunities that a company other than Forever 21 can realistically compete on are the three in green. The first position is naturally dominated by the brand, the two rows of site-links beneath it each occupy one row of organic results, there are two verticals (Twitter and News), a local pack, and the three results at the bottom are a pack of In-depth Articles and not subject to the same algorithm as core organic results. Plus, there's a Knowledge Panel on the right that has the potential to draw away clicks.

From a traditional SEO standpoint, there is very little organic opportunity available on this page. Our Keyword Opportunity metric attempts to measure this phenomenon. It starts with the assumption of 100% CTR (that's idealized, of course, but it makes the scale go from 0–100), and then begins subtracting clicks based on non-organic features, including ads. Ads and Knowledge Graph features take away clicks and re-shift the CTR curve. Verticals occupy an organic position and remove the CTR of that position, etc. If the #1 position has site-links, we assume that position has "dominant intent" (to use Google's vernacular) and probably isn't in play.

The Keyword Opportunity model gets complicated and it necessarily makes many assumptions, but the goal is to subtract out all of the non-organic elements and try to figure out what's left. We hope to enhance and evolve this model as time goes by and we gather more data about how features impact CTR.

You don't have to use Keyword Explorer or build your own, equally complicated model, but I think it's very important to look at SERPs in a browser as a real searcher and understand the available opportunity. Even if you do keyword research by hand, give that opportunity a score (1–5 is a good start). Some of the most attractive, highest-volume keywords also have the least available opportunity.

3. How important is the keyword to you?

We've all got stories about clueless clients, but their experience does matter and some keywords have more business relevance than others. The trick is not to let it become too subjective. Put a number against it. Make your client, boss, or team prioritize. Everything can't be a 10, so create a column and force them to pick a value. Quantify your intuition and put it to work.

In Keyword Explorer, we wanted to allow customers to adjust keywords up and down to reflect insights and intuitions our models may not have. Importance is essentially a multiplier, and it ranges from 1–10. We default Importance to a value of 3. That may seem like an unusual choice, but it allows you to easily shift a keyword by roughly a factor of 3 in either direction (1 = 1/3X, 9 = 3X). It also gives you a bit more granularity for upward adjustments than downward. Our assumption is that most people will tend to focus importance adjustments on critical keywords that are essential to their business.

4. Which keywords have the most potential?

So now you've got a mountain of data, which is great in theory but a bit overwhelming for many of us in reality. We thought it was important that people have the raw metrics — many of you are advanced SEOs and want to slice-and-dice the data into your own models. However, we also thought it was important to provide guidance and help make sense of it all. Perhaps the toughest question at the end of the keyword research process is "Where do I start?"

Counting keyword Volume, we have the following metrics (or variables):

• Volume (V)
• Keyword Difficulty (KD)
• Keyword Opportunity (KO)
• Importance (I)

Keyword Potential (KP) combines all of these metrics, creating a weighted score (also 0–100). Volume is a real number that carries meaning by itself. You can think of both Keyword Difficulty and Keyword Opportunity as multipliers. Higher Difficulty reduces Potential, while higher Opportunity increases Potential. Likewise, Importance is a direct multiplier. Our formula for Keyword Potential looks something like this:

KP = sqrt(V) * (1 - KD / 100) * (KO / 100) * I

We use the square root of Volume so that high-volume keywords don't automatically overwhelm all of the other metrics, but very high-volume keywords still naturally carry a lot of potential. The resulting value is re-scaled in Keyword Explorer to a 0–100 score, but that math gets a bit tricky and is somewhat unique to our own internal metrics and the ranges of data we historically encounter.

Even if you do keyword research by hand or in a semi-automated fashion, there are many ways to adapt this basic concept and create a useful meta-metric. Obviously, one metric can never convey all of the complexity of rich data, but it's important to remember that this is not an either/or situation. You can use a meta-metric for sorting and prioritization, while still keeping all of its original components for deeper insights.

Richer metrics for a richer world

No metrics are perfect, but the Google landscape is richer and more complex than ever, and it's important that our metrics and tactics evolve as SERPs evolve. Whether or not you use Keyword Explorer, keyword research is still a fundamental building block of a strong SEO campaign, and that research has to reflect modern SEO realities. Understanding the interplay of volume, difficulty, opportunity, and your own intuition of importance is an important next step, and those concepts extend far beyond any single product. If you end up adapting any of these ideas, I'd love to hear about it. Extra credit for Excel spreadsheets, especially ones that crash my computer.

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Here’s How to Create a Product Page That Converts

Posted by MoosaHemani

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

[Estimated read time: 13 minutes]

An effective e-commerce product page captures the audience’s attention and compels them to convert to paying customers.

Many e-commerce businesses believe a product page is all about high-resolution images with detailed descriptions for each product.

Although these are important areas that need to be considered, thinking that they are the only elements needed to win the game for you is overly simplistic.

In this post, I'll discuss the elements that make a product page captivating for visitors. I'll discuss in detail the things you should consider doing on your product pages so that they stand out from the competition.

Product URLs must be a priority

Let me start out with something that's critical to get right, yet is often neglected: optimizing product URLs. Unfortunately, I know dozens of e-commerce stores that don't consider the URL to be part of a product page at all, much less one of the most important parts.

Well, guys, they're wrong. Ignoring this vital fact can seriously impede your click-through-rate (CTR), especially in terms of organic searches.

Remember, there are literally thousands of choices for a visitor once she decides to buy a product online. She will go for options that she's satisfied with. Let’s suppose a user runs a Google search and sees this in the results:

Note: I've purposely hidden the titles and descriptions so you can focus on the URLs.

Now, try and understand the psychology of a potential customer who has multiple available choices online. Look closely at the two URLs given above. Which one would you click if you were looking to buy men's shirts?

Naturally, the first one — it's clear that upon clicking the link, you will directly land on the men's clothing section of an e-commerce site. The second URL, on the other hand, look like it will take you to a brand page — which may or may not offer the shirts you're looking for. (The second URL doesn't make it clear whether they're selling shirts for men or women.)

Takeaway: SEO-friendly URLs aren't simply important because they'll give you better rankings in search engines; they also answer basic questions pertaining to the buyer's awareness stage.

A URL must give a clear indication of where the user will land once he clicks it; therefore, it must be relevant to the search query.

Think carefully about product titles

Your titles should be SEO-friendly, but there's a very fine line between SEO-friendly titles and overly optimized title tags.

Catchy and attractive titles can significantly increase the number of clicks.

Let’s suppose you're searching for "business plan consultant" and all you see is a title loaded with different keywords that basically mean the same thing. Now compare this to another page that has the correct keywords to please potential buyers and search engines. Which page title would you click?

The reason why I'd choose the first one is that its message is clear, and it's completely relevant to what I'm searching for.

So, if the product page is stuffed with all the possible keywords that the audience could possibly search for, you're actually decreasing your chances of being clicked.

Takeaway: Titles are important for search engines, but they're equally important for your target audience. Make sure the title for your product page is well thought out, relevant, and delivers the complete message in 65 characters or less.

Always use high-resolution images

A website's image section is one of the most important sections of a product page, as it's sure to capture the attention of visitors (provided that it is well-constructed).

The clearer your product image, the more interest you can arouse in your visitors. A visitor is bound to look for the image of a product in order to make sure that it is, indeed, what he wants to spend his money on.

When it comes to images on product pages, you should consider the following few things:

Image size

When I say high-resolution, I don’t just mean the image quality, but also the image size. The image should be of a size that lets users easily see the product details and understand what it would look like when they receive it at their doorstep.

Images that are either too small or too large (in a way that doesn’t fit the screen) can negatively impact user experience, thereby leading them to leave the page.

The best thing to do is to use images of the same size and allow website visitors to zoom in to take a closer look at the details.

I like how Sophie & Trey present the images on their product page. They display two images of the same product side-by-side, and a visitor can get a closer look at the product by hovering the cursor over a specific area of the page.

Multiple angles

If you want users to buy your products, then you have to encourage them to make a purchasing decision by giving them all the product details they need to do that. Normal images are two-dimensional. If you take photos of your products from multiple angles, however, you can give your potential customers a more realistic of how your products look in person by presenting them virtually as three-dimensional images.

For electronic products like cell phones, laptops or tablets, it's important to show visitors multiple angles so they can understand how long or wide a product is, how it looks up close, and how it will look and feel in their hand.

If you have a fashion brand, then try showing the same dress of models with different looks. This will make it easier for the visitor to imagine how she will look in the dress she is looking at if you purchased it from your site.

Takeaway: When you optimize your product pages, make sure the product images are high-quality and available in different angles. This will allow visitors to not only see what your products look like, but virtually get a sense for how they feel as well, thereby increasing the likelihood that they'll convert into paying customers.

Product videos

This one is simple, and becoming increasingly important in the world of e-commerce. Like it or not, videos can work wonders for fast sales.

You don’t have to trust my words. Listen to the head of search at ao.com, who has tried it on her website and reaped the rewards of success:

"Video gives us the opportunity to wow our customers and this, in turn, delivers results. We have tested and proven that when someone watches our video reviews they’re 120.5% more likely to buy, spend 157.2% longer on the site, and spend 9.1% more per order. So my focus this quarter is to increase customers watching video. Simple."

There are some common questions about video that come to mind, especially if you're looking at e-commerce from a technical point of view. For example, what's the best method to add videos? Should we use a CDN, upload videos on YouTube and embed the links on our website, or something else?

This guide will help you answer those questions and more.

Takeaway: Including product videos on your product pages is a trump card that leads to better conversions. If you're skeptical, invest in videos for a bit and see if your conversions improve. If so, create a budget for making high-quality product videos on an ongoing basis.

Get creative with product descriptions

The product page description is important from two aspects. First, it helps you with SEO. With unique, quality, and keyword-centric product descriptions, your chances of ranking for product-related keywords via search engines will be higher. Second, well-written product descriptions can engage visitors and encourage them to convert into paying customers.

If you have a website with thousands of products, the common challenge is to write unique and high-quality product descriptions. While overcoming this challenge can be frustrating, you need to do it or you'll risk losing out on considerable amounts of potential traffic (and paying customers).

Even if your target audience can read hundreds of words in the description section, my advice is to show only 60 to 80 words, and hide the rest under "more."

Takeaway: Following are a few of the things you need to keep in mind when creating product descriptions for your e-commerce website:

• You have to create unique and engaging product descriptions that allow users to convert into paying customers.
• Do not copy product descriptions from manufacturers' websites, as doing this will kill your conversion rates.
• Either invest time on creating product descriptions for each of the products, or hire talented people on a freelance project basis to help you with it. Make sure to keep the quality in check.

These are the few ideas to keep in mind while creating product descriptions that are not only SEO-friendly but also enhance user experience.

Provide quantity and color selection options

From personal experience, I can tell you that I bounce from product pages if options for color selection or purchasable product quantities are either unavailable or difficult to find. I know people who actually pay higher prices to other manufacturers/retailers that have this option available.

The whole idea is to make it easy for the user to find and buy multiple products at the same time, instead of forcing him to come back and buy again.

Also, if you have a product that is available in different colors, it's better to create it as one product with the option to choose three different colors instead of three different products.

Takeaway: The ideal product page means little to no frustration for the visitors.

User reviews can work wonders for your business

There are two different mindsets in the e-commerce industry as it regards reviews.

One view is that there shouldn’t be a review section on the product page, as most people don’t really leave reviews, and an empty review page is unappealing.

On the other hand, some believe there should be a user review page, as it will provide some extra unique content to the page.

I don’t think either of the above is the correct method of implementing user reviews.

I'm a strong advocate of using a strategy like the following for reviews:

• Send an email to all your happy customers and offer them a 10–20% discount if they're willing to leave a genuine comment on your product page about their purchase.
• Another idea is to gamify reviews in a way that would encourage buyers to leave reviews on the different product pages on your website in a way that benefits them.

Takeaway: User reviews are very important as they strongly impact visitors' buying decisions, but implementing them with yet another plugin could be a mistake. The idea is to deploy a smart strategy and adjust it as needed.

Don't forget your social sharing buttons

Having prominent and easy-to-use social sharing buttons on your product pages encourages users to share products with their social circles. This will not only increase your numbers, but the returning social traffic from this activity can bring in more conversions for your website.

Takeaway: Encourage visitors to share your products within their social circles by rewarding them with freebies every now and then.

Be smart with the "add to cart" button

This is the most important element of the page from the perspective of conversion optimization. The "add to cart" button must be easy to find; otherwise, you'll risk losing potential customers.

The fashion brand Lulu's websites provides us with another excellent example of how the "add to bag" button can be effectively used to drive sales on product pages. The main color theme of the website is black, but if you focus on the add to bag button, you'll notice it stands out because it's pink.

Takeaway: The "add to cart" button needs to stand out from the overall color scheme of the page so the user can easily identify it and proceed towards the checkout.

Cross sell and upsell

You can always add elements on your product page that will help you cross-sell and upsell stuff to get the most out of a customer.

This is a great example of cross-selling by Nordstrom. I don’t think their placement is outstanding at the moment, but when you're implementing this on your product page you can do some testing to see what works best for your audience.

Takeaway: Consider showing related products together with the product that the user intends to buy (cross-selling) or selling related products as a package (upselling).

An e-commerce website is incomplete without live chat

The numbers speak for themselves.

If you're a business that supplies products to several countries, try using live chat software that supports multiple languages to help you build better relations with overseas clients.

Takeaway: Do I really need live chat software on my website? An e-commerce business should quit pondering this question and start investing in live chat.

Pricing

This one is a personal favorite. There's no serious e-commerce website on earth that won't add the price on the product page or will make it hard to find. So, why are we even talking about this in the first place?

That's because as a business you should remain mindful of a few things when including pricing on product pages:

• Make prices clear and easy to read.
• There are different pricing strategies you can try. I wrote a detailed article on the subject a while ago and you can read it here: 4 Pricing Strategies for SaaS Startups to Increase Conversion Rate (applicable to e-commerce, as well).
• Experiment with adjusting pricing according to the scarcity principle and you'll see an overall improvement in conversion rates.

In the above example, the company is using the "magic of the number nine" technique on their website.

Takeaways: Keep the prices on your product page simple, clear, and readable. Try different pricing tactics that work within your industry, such as the "number nine technique", the "discount on bulk order" offer, and the "scarcity principle."

Be trustworthy

The buying cycle starts with a single question and moves forward when it gets answered.

While the potential customer is on the product page deciding whether or not they should buy the product, the most important question running through their mind is "Why should I trust this company?"

At Workplace Depot, we use this trust signal throughout the website (including the product pages) which is why our conversions over the months have only grown.

Having a trust signal on the product page is important, but where to put it is tricky and can only be assessed via A/B testing.

Try placing the trust signals on different parts of the page and test it against the data to see which place works well with your target audience.

Takeaway: Quality trust signals are important and need to be included throughout your e-commerce website in order to increase overall business conversions.

Page load time

I always advise my e-commerce clients to go with a minimalistic design because less clutter allows websites to load quickly. Slow page loads will kill your SEO and dramatically decrease your conversions.

This infographic by Kissmetrics nails it perfectly:

Takeaway: In e-commerce, every second counts. Make your product pages clean and light. Visitors don't have patience for slow websites.

Mobile

If your product pages are not mobile-friendly, you're likely losing fifty percent of your prospective customers.

The same factors above apply for mobile, but remember: folks are even more distracted on mobile devices, so using concise, clear messaging with large, easy-to-read fonts is your best bet.

Conclusion

Product pages are often neglected as businesses focus on optimizing their e-commerce sites for long-tail keywords at the expense of the user.

Don't make this mistake.

Focus instead on optimizing your product pages by keeping user experience at the forefront of all your actions, and you'll very likely be rewarded with higher conversions.

If you think I've missed something, please let me know by adding it in the comments section.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

This man’s Stone Cold Steve Austin impersonation ended painfully

LONDON — There s a lesson here. If you ever get the urge to pour two cans of beer into your face and then attempt a backflip, make sure there s nobody around to film the outcome. SEE ALSO: Groomsman s backflip fail will ruin your wedding dreams The guy in the video below was either feeling very [ ]
http://www.gregmikesell.com/fun-stuff/this-mans-stone-cold-steve-austin-impersonation-ended-painfully

This man's Stone Cold Steve Austin impersonation ended painfully

LONDON — There's a lesson here. If you ever get the urge to pour two cans of beer into your face and then attempt a backflip, make sure there's nobody around to film the outcome. SEE ALSO: Groomsman's backflip fail will ruin your weddi...
http://www.gregmikesell.com/fun-stuff/this-mans-stone-cold-steve-austin-impersonation-ended-painfully

How Digital PR Can Turn the Tide for Startups

Learn about the challenges faced by startups and how digital PR services can help startups. Know how to choose the best Digital PR agency for your startup.
http://www.prmention.com/blog/how-digital-pr-can-turn-the-tide-for-startups/

Downtown Austin Will Be Home To Car-Free Luxury Residential Tower | CleanTechnica

Developers in Austin, TX, are looking to build a 30-story mixed-use building in the heart of busy downtown without adding any additional parking. The building, called The Avenue, will not contain a parking garage or any other on-site parking, and is being billed as the first “truly car-free luxury development in downtown Austin.”
http://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/04/downtown-austin-will-home-car-free-luxury-residential-tower/

A Step-by-Step Process for Discovering and Prioritizing the Best Keywords - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Keyword research, when done right, is a fairly complex process. Uncovering new keywords and appraising their value should involve a robust toolkit, a multitude of different sources, and a great deal of thoughtfulness.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares a strategic and straightforward 4-step process (including a passel of tools to check out) for discovering and prioritizing the best keywords for your SEO campaigns.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about keyword research and a step-by-step process to choose and prioritize the best possible keywords that we can for your SEO campaigns.

So let's get started with...

Step one: Use multiple sources to get keyword suggestions

The first thing that a lot of folks do is they only use a single source. They go to AdWords for example, or maybe they'll go to Suggest. Or possibly they'll start with SEMrush, which has an awesome corpus and database, but it's sort of based on a single source. My strong suggestion is a lot of the sources have only one type of data in them and you want to combine them.

The five or six that I really like are, first off, AdWords is a great source. They're, generally speaking, commercially focused terms. AdWords knows that people want to buy those keywords for pay-per-click search, and so they try and include commercial terms that people are actually going to convert on. They hide a lot of stuff that frankly Google feels like is not going to get people the conversions they're looking for, because the problem is if you buy the wrong keywords, you don't blame yourself for poor keyword targeting, you blame Google for sending you bad traffic. So AdWords has hidden some of those things. They'll show them to you if you type them directly in, but not otherwise.

Suggest, you can go to Google Suggest and in fact, Google related searches — which are at the bottom of the search versus the top in the bar as you type — those both give variance and/or searches that people who search for this also performed.

Then you'll see there are a lot of tools out there. SEMrush is by far the most popular one — and, in my opinion, a really, really good one, too — for a keyword to rankings graph. Essentially what this is saying is, "Here are keywords that the pages that rank for the keyword you gave us also rank for," or same thing at the domain level. It's creating and mapping those things so that you can get broader terms than you ordinarily would have with just these other methods. That's pretty cool.

Another one that's very, very cool and very sophisticated, that some SEOs are doing, is topic modeling-based keywords. This is essentially saying, "Hey, show me terms and phrases that co-occur on lots of documents, high quality documents hopefully, with the term or phrase that I'm targeting." You can find those through tools like AlchemyAPI. It's a little challenging to use, but there you go.

Bunch of tools, SEMrush and AdWords. You can use Google Search for a bunch of these. Ubersuggest to get some of those suggestions. KeywordTool.io actually has a number of these inside it. SpyFu is similar to SEMrush. AlchemyAPI helps you with topic modeling.

Then — somewhat self-promotionally, and I apologize for that — but Keyword Explorer, which Moz just launched this week and which we're pretty excited about. I was actually the product architect for that. So I'm feeling quite excited and very proud of my team. Keyword Explorer, shamelessly, has all of these in there. I think our topic modeling is actually a little better than AlchemyAPI's. I think our keyword to rankings graph is almost as good, maybe in some cases better, maybe in some cases not as good as what SEMrush has. We also get suggestion-related, real time, and then we obviously have a big corpus that we've got from AdWords too.

Step two: Select keywords that match multiple types of search intent

I've done my keyword suggestions. I've got all of these. Now, I need to pick which keywords from these suggestion lists am I actually going to try targeting. To do that, it's not really a tool-based thing, although you certainly could use something like a Google Doc or Excel, or a Google Spreadsheet, or you could do it right inside some of these tools. KeywordTool.io and Keyword Explorer both have like an "Add this to my list" type of feature. AdWords does too.

But what I want to do is match multiple types of search or intent based on your content and keyword goals. So this has little to do with what the keywords actually say and more to do with, "What am I trying to accomplish with my SEO and with my content?"

For example, let's say I'm an online coffee bean roaster and seller. Maybe I'm independent. I have a location, but I also want to sell my beans and my grounds and accessories online, which is awesome. There are some keywords that are going to match with my goal of direct conversion. People are likely looking for this because they want to buy it, and I want to be in front of them when they're looking to buy it. Those are the keywords like "coffee beans online," "buy coffee beans," "coffee accessories," "stovetop espresso machine," getting more specific.

Then, I'm also looking at doing some strategic content to target folks early in the buying stage, like before they actually think, "Oh, I'm going to buy from them." I just want them to have an association with us. I want anyone who's interested in coffee — coffee aficionados, researchers, people who are passionate about the topic — to find me and have an association with my brand. In order to do that, I might target keywords like "flavors of coffee beans," "best independent coffee roasters in the US," "home barista resources."

People aren't going to convert on these keywords. "Best home coffee techniques." I'm trying to learn. I'm trying to get help. I'm trying to get content, not necessarily buy directly.

Then I might in my content strategy have some idea that, "Hey, I also want to target coffee influencers." People who are influential in this world. It could be journalists and bloggers, people who write for magazines, and folks who are very popular on Twitter or Facebook or have popular Instagram accounts. I want them to be aware of us.

So I might go after things like "barista competitions." Barista competitions, if I have a big list of those, well, lots of baristas and folks who run coffee shops are going to be looking for that. I can influence them, get in their head, get them to know my brand. "Coffee shop awards," same thing.

"Worldwide coffee bean wholesale cost comparison," aha, this is going to the suppliers and the coffee bean buyers around the world and looking at price trends and tracking. That's some of that data that a lot of those folks might have. Probably a small audience, but very influential people.

"How to open a new coffee shop," aha, now I'm targeting coffee entrepreneurs who are also potential influencers for me.

These lists won't apply to all of your efforts. Your efforts are going to be determined by your specific strategic goals, but you should make keyword lists and match those up to all the keywords you see here so that you know what types of things you're trying to do with those keywords. I would encourage you, if you're doing this, to make a different list for each one of those.

Step three: Collect keyword metrics and sort/filter/prioritize them based on goals

This is where we have to get very, very data-driven, because I want to do is I want to take all the keywords in each of the lists that I have and I want to get the metrics for them so I can prioritize properly. So what I've done here is I've taken a list of keywords. I have: my volume, how much are they searched for; difficulty, how hard will it be to rank in the organic results; click-through rate opportunity, meaning what other features are in the search results — images, news boxes, ads, videos up at the top, instant answers, knowledge graph on the right-hand side that's going to draw clicks away from my potential to get searchers to click on my result.

I need click-through rate opportunity in my scoring. Otherwise, I might be biased to keywords that look great but in fact get very little click-through rate.

Importance, this is essentially my personal priority, and it's something where it's not a metric that comes from anywhere else. I use it internally. I know, for example, that "coffee beans online" is a very, very important keyword because it directly relates to what I'm selling. It's the first thing I'm offering, so I'm going to put it at a 10 out of 10, versus maybe "how to open a coffee shop," which looked at some content marketing that I might do in the future, but it's not a high priority right now for me from an importance standpoint.

Then all of these metrics, so it's like this metric combined with this metric combined with this metric should give me some form of potential. I want to come up with an algorithm. You could come up with your own, or you could use one of the tools. Tools like KeywordTool.io and Keyword Explorer have an algorithm that combines these types of scores to give you a consistent one for potential. The idea is I want high volume, low difficulty, strong click-through rate opportunity, and high importance. That should give me a good potential score. Then, hopefully what I can do is just sort by this potential metric, and now I get my prioritized list of keywords.

If you don't take this data-driven approach, you can wind up just in a world of hurt where you're targeting the wrong keywords and not being as intelligent as you could be. You can do this with something like AdWords and then an export to Excel or to Google Spreadsheets. You can do this with a tool like WordStream, who does a great job of it particularly for paid search, and you can leverage some of that for organic too. Like I said, KeywordTool.io. Obviously, Excel and Google Spreadsheets. Then Keyword Explorer does this right inside the tool as well.

Step four: Determine keyword targeting & new content creation needs & priorities.

Now what I want to do is I want to determine my keyword targeting and my new content creation needs and the priority of those processes.

So after I look at this, I might refactor a few things and say, "Wow, you know what. That is pretty strong. Even though I set it as a low importance, I'm kind of interested. I'm more interested in this 'how to open a coffee shop' than I was previously, based on the metrics that I saw there, the opportunity I think I've got."

So here's my prioritized list.

• (A) I'm going to start by optimizing my homepage for "coffee beans online." I've decided that's the best keyword that I can possibly target on there. That's what I'm going after.
• (B) I want to create a new coffee accessories page. Maybe I didn't have one before. I see that that's a high opportunity and high potential keyword. I want it. I need to create a new page. Now, I also need to go get inventory relationships established with all my accessory providers so that I can actually ship folks that stuff.
• (C) I've decided that I really like that "how to open a coffee shop," and I want to create a guide. That's going to be one of my key content marketing pieces and, therefore, I'm going to go interview 10 successful coffee entrepreneurs, folks who've opened some successful shops. Then I'm going to assemble some content, build a survey, target 500 coffee shops in the U.S. — maybe that I already have relationships with or that I don't — so that I can get a survey of data back. I'll outreach to each one individually, or I'll have my SEO content person do that. Now, I'm going to create that guide based on the feedback that I get from there. Now, it's data-driven, and I have a bunch of people who are likely to help support it because they've contributed to it.
• (D) Finally, I might say, "Hey, I really like that 'best independent coffee roaster.' That keyword looks real strong to me. I want to target that one too." That's also going to go into my content marketing efforts, so I'm going to establish some criteria for that one. I'm going to do some research, and I'm going to send out awards to the winners after we pick those through whatever process we decide.

This is a phenomenal way to go through keyword research and keyword targeting to get the content and the optimization priorities that you need for SEO. I think if you choose the right data and the right tools, you use multiple sources, you intelligently build the right kinds of lists, you use metrics to prioritize, are data-driven rather than just pure intuition, and you prioritize your work based on this, you can have phenomenal success.

All right, everyone, look forward to your feedback and comments. Certainly, if you haven't given Keyword Explorer a spin yet, I'd encourage you to do so. I think it's pretty cool, but obviously, there are lots of good competitors out there too, and you can check them out as well.

Hope to see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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