Meredith's Husband: 0:32

Hey, this is Meredith husband, I've got some SEO advice for you. But I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use keywords part two keywords, part two keywords, part two. So we just talked about keyword cannibalization, what it is, yep. Why we don't want to do that. No, what we want to do instead, yes. And we left off with what now we need to go choose our keywords. Yeah. So how to do it. So if I were to ask you, I'm going to try. So the common problem here, so let's so people say they know their keyword. So if I were to ask you, what do you what's, what's your primary keyword? We're just gonna, I'm just gonna help illustrate. So just whatever how little

Meredith: 1:21

we know. Absolutely Happy, happy to oblige. I would say family photography,

Meredith's Husband: 1:27

Brooklyn. Okay. How many people search for family photographer, the Brooklyn versus family portraits versus children's photography versus kids photography versus all these other variations? Oh, well, I don't know. Exactly. Well know that unless you do keyword research. So don't assume that, you know, because when you do keyword research, it's going to help you figure out three really important things. Number one, what are people searching for? What are the terms? Are people searching for family portraits? Are they searching for family, photographers, photography, pictures, whatever. And then how often, how many times the volume, we call this the volume, so there's a monthly volume, a volume might be, you know, they go down, the typical volume would be anywhere between 100 and a couple 100 searches per month for us for a decent keyword. Now, when you are doing keyword research, and you see those numbers, the numbers are not ultimately the most important. Like if a keyword has a search volume of 50, it's not important to think, oh, that exactly 50 people search for that keyword every month and this other keyword 100 people search for that keyword every month, that's just the most recent, the number is not important. What is important is the relationship between those two numbers. So the keyword that has 100, and the key is twice as popular is the keyword that has 50. Right? So that makes sense. Yeah.

Meredith: 2:53

How do you how do you find this out?

Meredith's Husband: 2:56

In a key with a keyword tool that I'm going to talk about?

Meredith: 2:59

Because I didn't? Yeah, okay, so we're gonna find out how to compare it, etc. And do all this.

Meredith's Husband: 3:05

This is the info, this is the information that we want to get. This is why we are doing keyword research, we want to know, the relative volume, the popularity of different keywords, it doesn't matter if q if one keyword is 100, and the other is 50. Or if one keyword is 1000. And the other is 500. In both those cases, you know which one is more popular, right? One is twice as much as popular as the other one. That's the important information here, when we are doing keyword research.

Meredith: 3:33

And then figuring out how to do that we rarely scan the third

Meredith's Husband: 3:37

most important thing that we want to know is the level of competition. How many people are trying to get that keyword, some keywords are extremely easy to optimize for because nobody is trying to optimize for them. And other keywords are extremely difficult, right? For example, if you wanted to optimize your site for pink, banana Berry, grapefruit popsicles, yeah, it would probably be pretty easy to get to page one, because I don't think those exist. Well, time will tell. Yes. If you wanted to get to page one for iPhone cases, guess what? A lot of people are trying to do that. It can be very. So we in when we're doing keyword research, our objective, our objective, our objective, our keyword objective when we're doing research, is we want to find one keywords that are relevant, obviously, that have to do with us keywords that have a decent search volume, meaning there are some people looking for them. And also keywords that are not massively competitive. Those are that's the kind of that's those are the three sliding fluid filters on your keywords. You want to try to find keywords that you know, maximize. You know what you can do with these three? Yeah, so so so let's talk about your book. So let's talk about how to do that. Yeah, how do you do it? Okay. So the first step, surprisingly, is not is actually going to be to not do any of those. Right. The first thing that you want to do is we want to get what I would call the low hanging fruit, the low hanging keyword fruit.

Meredith: 5:14

Blueberries.

Meredith's Husband: 5:16

Could be Yes, I know berries are on the very low. They're very low, very low. So what does this mean? This is where you can there's a couple different tools you can use for this This is where you use Google Search Console, which I've talked about in the past

Meredith: 5:27

Google Search Console, con SEO,

Meredith's Husband: 5:32

sole console. Okay, excellent. And then there is another tool inside of SEMrush, which I believe you can use with the free version of SEMrush. I recommend using both of these, it's called the organic research tool. And what this does, is you just type in well with us Google Search Console, you just log in, you don't have to type in the name of your domain on SEMrush, you would type in the name of your domain. And both of these tools are going to go through and it's going to tell you, they're going to tell you all the keywords that you rank for on page on page one, and not on page one, all the way up to like page 10. Which can be really great, because they will show you like for I'm going to use your site as an example. I did this just a couple of weeks ago. And I found you rank on page two for Grace sessions. Remember when I asked you how, yeah, so getting a keyword to page one, from page two is a whole lot easier than getting a keyword to page one from page 10? Right? See what I mean? Yeah, if you have if you have a if you have a keyword that's ranked at position number 11, that's number one on page two, that could very easily just by moving one spot, get onto page one, and all of a sudden, you go from getting no traffic, right keyword keywords on page two don't get any traffic, and then all of a sudden you're getting traffic if you're on page one, that's just moving one spot,

Meredith: 6:56

and how does it know what your keywords are?

Meredith's Husband: 7:00

So you put in so with Google Search Console it Google knows whenever your site is displayed, even if your if somebody does a search and your site, say is at number 78 in the rankings, which is like page eight? Yeah. Google is going to know that you don't know that. But Google has all that information. So when you go to Google Search Console, it's going to give you all of you it's going to say this is how many times you had an impression for this keyword, your average ranking was 27. That means you're on like page three, right? So that means you need to that's a keyword. That's a good example of something that you could move up, right? So you want to pick those words. And the same thing when you when you do SEMrush SEMrush, is sem rush, just build a database of some very similar stuff. And they will say, a little bit a little more specific. And where you rank, they'll say for this keyword, you're currently ranked at position 56, or 11, or five. So as you go through this list, you want to pick out like, like I said, the keywords that are relevant, the ones that are going to, you know, that you would imagine your potential clients are searching for, right, number one, because that will not always happen. When you use these tools. Keep in mind, you could you're going on, it's almost undeniable that you're going to find keywords that you're like, What Why do I rank for that? Yeah.

Meredith: 8:24

Grace, because grace is a name I made up.

Meredith's Husband: 8:27

Grace sessions. Well, you use the term Grace sessions, and you didn't make it up. There are other people people are searching for it.

Meredith: 8:32

Oh, because they were Joy sessions. That's what it means is the end of life here. Yes.

Meredith's Husband: 8:38

Right. Well, people are searching for Grace sessions. Maybe they have something else in mind. But

Meredith: 8:43

I think it's it. And you have links to everything below.

Meredith's Husband: 8:47

I have links to the Google Search Console and SEM rush. Yes. Just. So you want, you want to make sure that you're picking out relevant keywords, because they're not all relevant. I had a client once that they had a ton of content, lots and lots of blogs. And when I did this for them, I found that they ranked on, they were ranked like page one for some characters from a video game. random character names from a video game. And lo and behold, they had some one of their blogs from years ago. So one of their authors was a gamer. And he mentioned this character in a video game. And I guess no other blogs talked about this. So they got to page one. A lot of people actually searched for it too. But in this case, this was not a relevant keyword. They don't care about having that. So it's not then what do you do about that? Just ignore it. You don't have to do anything. Yeah. So when you're going through these lists, you'll they'll there'll be big lists, they could be big lists. In this case, there were 7000 keywords. Yours will not be that big. But maybe one in 10 might be relevant, maybe even fewer. So this is not something where you're going to go to and you're going to see a list of a whole bunch of really valuable keywords. This is something where we're picking the low hanging fruit there might there might there might not be if there is it's a great opportunity if there isn't no big deal. Okay, but you do want to check this first. Okay.

Meredith: 10:08

These are what you just mentioned how to check it.

Meredith's Husband: 10:11

Yeah, Google Search Console, and SEM rush organic research. These are what I would call easy wins.

Meredith: 10:19

easy wins. I like those.

Meredith's Husband: 10:22

Okay, so when you have those key Words that then that's how we're going to start what you might think of as our more traditional keyword research. We're going to take those keywords and then we're going to start to type in things that we're going to begin with those keywords. But we're also going to start entering the keywords that we just think we should rank for. Okay? Right. There's a few different tools for this. And this, to be honest, this is a little bit art and a little bit science. Keyword Research is something where you're just going to kind of take a little bit of time to practice right there. I have a colleague of mine, who we've both we've been doing SEO at roughly the same amount of time, about 20 years, I think we're both really good. We both do really do a good job with keyword research. We go about it totally differently. But we in the end, we come to the same thing. So I'm going to tell you some tools you can use. Yeah. There is no exact right or wrong way to do this. So good to know. Yeah. Number one, I would say, when you're doing keyword research, you should know that all the information you're going to be looking at is ultimately coming from Google. There's only one, there's only one true source of this information, the tool that you use, the difference is going to be how they pull that information out and how they show it to you and how they let you manipulate it. Oh, if you if you have it, now, I use SEMrush. I like sem rush a lot. There are other tools. A lot of people feel like sem Rush is not that user friendly. And I would agree there are other tools that look friendlier, and they just have they know they have a friendlier interface, so to speak. If you pick a tool that you like, keep using it, the most important thing is don't mix and match don't go back and forth between one tool and another. Because they could you know if SEMrush says, Hey, this keyword has 100 searches in this. And another tool says it has 300 That's good. That's information that conflicts with each you know, you don't want to use that it's not it's not helpful, just gonna be very confusing. But as long as the relationship between keywords is the same, so SEMrush says this keyword is twice as popular as this. The other tool is also probably going to say that even though the numbers might be different, you say, why are the numbers different? Because there's different ways you can define search volume, it can be a broad match, it can be an exact match, it can be a phrase match, and those numbers are different. But the relationship should be the same. And then what we want to go for is we want to get the more we want to look for the more popular keywords, right? This is why we don't want to get hung up on it's 150 searches per month. Because if we do with another keyword research tool, it might not be it might be 250 or 50.

Meredith: 12:59

Or we think they're just, they're fluffing it up, so to speak, just so you'll use their product

Meredith's Husband: 13:04

some time sometimes could be Yeah, it depends. I mean, sometimes if you are, if you're researching keywords with very small volume, it helps to fluff it up a little bit, because then it gives you more information to compare a little better about yourself. Yeah, in general, just stick with one tool. I know, Google has its own tool, you can go directly to Google, Google's keyword planner, which personally I think is terrible. It's I hate it. It's very difficult to use. Another one that I hear about all the time is Uber Suggest, Uber, Uber, like Uber, like the car service, Uber Suggest is another one that people seem to use Uber suggests I I'm not a user, I'm not a fan, but I think they try to emulate SEMrush To be honest, so they're gonna probably

Meredith: 14:36

just more user friendly.

Meredith's Husband: 14:38

It is it's simpler. Yeah, it's a very faces, very pared down version of of SEMrush. There you go. Another one that I like to use for blogging is called Answer the public. Answering this public. Yeah, answer the public. If you just type a question in to this tool, it'll come back, it'll give you a whole bunch of questions that people type that people type into Google. Really, it's, it's great for picking a blog topic. Now it doesn't, it doesn't help as much in that it gives you like keyword volume and level of competition. And it doesn't track your rankings. It just tells okay, what are people asking? Like it can really spark ideas for blog topics.

Meredith: 15:19

Sure. Or party games.

Meredith's Husband: 15:23

I don't follow that. Okay, so. So just be sure you pick a tool. Okay. Stick with it for your keyword research. Yeah. If you hate if you like it. So I still like I said, I love SEMrush I think it's a great tool. Right? If if you hate it, it doesn't matter. If you have the best tool in the world, you're not going to use it if you hate Right, right. So, so don't pick a tool you don't like because it's the best and then hate yourself because you're not using it. If you if there's if you if you like doing something, you're more apt to do it. So this is true pick until you like same with going to the gym. That is exactly true.

Meredith: 16:00

I know cuz you said it

Meredith's Husband: 16:03

sometimes Okay, so I'm going to talk about sem rush. And what we do within sem rush to do this. So okay, and so much, there's a few different features, they're all I'm going to talk about them like they're separate tools, but they're really very well linked. So don't think about it like it's a whole bunch of tools you have to use. It's just kind of steps in how you do this. So the first one, they have a Position Tracker. So this is ultimately where your keywords are going to end up and where you're going to track them. And Google, you want to this is kind of the last step, but you want to set this up first. So you so we have a place where we can dump our keywords. So we can put all of our final keywords. So you want to set up Position Tracker, and tend to begin just putting your brand name, you don't need to populate it with anything, you set it up, it's going to need at least one keyword just put in if I were you, I just made us dinner photography, enter. That's it, then we can leave Position Tracker alone, and go to what we call the keyword overview. Keyword overview, yes, keyword overview as another link. And when you log into SEMrush, it's going to be a little section on the side, it's going to be called like keyword research. There's going to be a link for each of these the position tracking the keyword overview, the keyword magic tool and the keyword manager. So let's go through these. So the first one, yeah, the magic tool is where the magic happens, as we know that. So the keyword overview is just a good place to start to type in a keyword and just kind of familiarize yourself with okay, this is a popular keyword and some related, it'll give you some questions, it's just a good place to start and sort of narrow down in your mind what it is you're looking for. And you want to get your feet wet. Yeah. And when you click on a keyword, it will it'll drill down a little bit. And then when one as you find keywords that you that you have potential, right, so they are they're relevant, they have some search volume. And at this point, I wouldn't worry too much about competition. But just as we're picking up potential keywords, are they relevant? Are they popular? Do they have some volume? Yes. Take those keywords, put them into the keyword magic tool that did do the magic tool. And the magic tool will say okay, this is exactly how many this how many people search for this. This is how difficult this keyword is. These are all the these are some related searches some variations, so you can start to see oh is children's? Is it children photography, or children's photography, or photographer or photography, you know, things like that. So you're going to start to see, oh, Pete, the trends are this, this keyword is more popular than that one. So this is going to help start to define your list. As you as you find the keywords that seem more appropriate for you that you want to target, you want to take those and you can go on list and you can literally just put a check, put a checkmark in the little box next to it. And then you're going to click a button that says add to my keyword manager. Oh, and your keyword manager is like is going to be like kind of your keyword sandbox, so to speak, all the all the potential keywords are going to end up here. It's gonna be very sandy, very sandy, all Sandy, dirty.

Meredith: 19:07

Bring that walk that crap everywhere. follow you.

Meredith's Husband: 19:11

And then And then so then once you do that, you're going to have a list of I think your keyword manager can be up to 1000 keywords, I think if you're using Oh, we could use that. I would all the time. Okay. All the time. In fact, 1000 is not enough. For some clients. However, for website like yours is probably going to be fine. If you're using the paid version of SEMrush. It's probably it might be limited to like 100 or something, which for a small business small local business owner who who does basically one thing, photography, that would be fine. One, but but you don't actually want to go through and track 100 different keywords every month. So the last step here and choosing your keywords is to go through the keyword manager and figure out okay, for so for children's photography, yeah, there might be eight or 10 or 50 different versions of that keyword. Which one? Do you want to target the most? Oh, okay. So you start to pick and you take that one? And then you put that in your

Meredith: 20:13

position? Oh, sorry, no, no. What? So

Meredith's Husband: 20:16

in the in the Position Tracker, your final keyword bucket? And with if you're using the free version of SEMrush, you only get 10 of these? Oh, not a lot. That is not one it's that's kind of probably the major limitation of the free version of SEMrush. Yeah, fair enough. But even that if you if you choose these keywords kind of wisely, and then start to track them over time, you'll get a good indication of is your site doing better or worse? Right. Okay. So I have clients where yeah, I'm tracking I'm actually tracking almost 1000 different keywords. But when I report to the client to be honest, I just track on the on the top doesn't a nice day, tell them the trends, okay, because your keywords are a lot of times they're they're all going to be moving up a little bit or they're all going to be moving down and an important thing. I don't have no idea what that means. That means going up is that vacillating up and down? Yes, then isolation is thing sounds pretty dirty, but whatever.

Meredith: 21:15

That's Vaseline. All right. It's not dirty. It's just petroleum. vacillating.

Meredith's Husband: 21:23

So. So this can sometimes even be boiled down to a single number. If we're tracking 700 keywords, we just want to know, the average keyword ranking, how much does that change every every week, or every month? And a lot of times, it's like, it's up or down, your average keyword ranking might be 74.6. And that's because it's tracking keywords that are on page one, and also keywords that are on page 10. And the average, we just want the average to be moving up. Okay. So and this, to be honest, this is this is a good point. A lot of people when they start SEO, they have in their head, the goal of my SEO is to get this keyword to number one on Google. Right? And I will tell you, that never happens. Yeah, that hasn't happened for like 10 years, really. And why is that? It's just not really possible anymore, you used to be able to target single keywords like that. But the way you would do that just not really valid SEO anymore. What you do want, and what ends up happening is, after you have successful SEO efforts, after some period of time, you're gonna be getting more leads from your organic traffic, you're gonna be getting more organic traffic and more leads from that traffic. So you're gonna be making more money from your organic traffic. So you're getting a return on your SEO, but I guarantee you, you're not going to be number one for that one keyword that you want. Okay? It makes it a different trade off. It makes it a difficult sale to clients when they say, Well, you know, what are you trying to do? I need to be number one for this. And me knowing Okay, well, that's not going to happen. But at the end of this, you're going to be happy, because you're gonna be making more money from your from Google. But you're but this is not going to happen.

Meredith: 22:58

Do you think there are people who say, Oh, it'll happen? Sure.

Meredith's Husband: 23:01

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it used to be even worse, it used to be people would guarantee Oh, you'll be guaranteed in three weeks or you know, three weeks. Yeah, or three months or two months or whatever. If anybody guarantees you anything, if an SEO person says I guarantee whatever they follow that that sentence with whatever they end that sentence, don't trust that person.

Meredith: 23:23

Didn't you just say I guarantee a couple of minutes ago?

Meredith's Husband: 23:26

Oh, then nevermind. What I what I mean is, if I guarantee if somebody says I guarantee this is what you're going to see in Google, you're gonna see this keyword in this spot, right keyword on page one, you just don't have nobody. Nobody can guarantee that. Fair enough. I guarantee you, nobody can guarantee.

Meredith: 23:49

Fair enough. And you have this all written down. Do this, do that. Do this do that. Or do we just have to listen to the podcast?

Meredith's Husband: 23:55

Just hopefully you're reading it down as you listen. Yeah. I am going to put something on the site where it where he's like little mini course I'm going to walk through these steps. Oh, that's great. Yeah, that'd be hell. It's not it's not ready yet. But hopefully, by the end of next episode, it will be there. So you can do it, you can get a little, a little demo of how you would do this. That's great sem rush.

Meredith: 24:18

Yeah, cuz I need to visualize it, I need to see it rather than.

Meredith's Husband: 24:23

So once. The final step of this part is to take your keywords, and then we're going to map them to your website, what all that means is, hey, this keyword I want, I want the keyword children's photography to be on my children's photography page. My pets photography to be on my pets photography page. So clever, stuff like that. And that's just choosing choosing which page you want to choosing how you want to optimize each page on your website. And then, next week, in the next session, we're going to talk about then what you do. Yeah, those pages. Very good. Okay. So now, remember to remember from today, do pick a tool and stick with it, pick it till it doesn't have to be sem rush. But once you pick a tool and you like it and you start to work with it, stick with it. Don't switch back and forth, stick with it. And do listen to the next episode

Meredith: 25:20

to listen to the next episode. Bye.

Meredith's Husband: 25:30

Okay, I hope that helped. I hope that helped your website, hope that helped your business. I hope that helped give you a little bit of confidence that SEO is not this convoluted, cryptic, crazy thing that nobody can understand. If you did like it and you found it helpful. Please share it with a couple of your colleagues. Tell them what you like or more importantly, tell me what you liked. Let me know interview leave a review on Apple. Tell me what parts you like. And I'll try to do more of those parts. Again. Thanks for listening.