How to Do Keyword Research: Go Beyond Search Volume

Key Takeaways

today we're kicking off a brand new keyword research series and boom you're invited stay tuned what's up guys it's Sam o here with HRF the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic research your competitors and dominate your niche and today we're kicking off a brand new keyword research tutorial series using our keywords Explorer tool and I'm super excited for this tutorial now in this video we're gonna cover quite a few things a lot of people don't know they don't think of or they don't fully understand when it comes to keyword research so let's dive right in so I'm inside a chest keywords Explorer tool and I'm gonna search for the keyword phrase how to grill steak and here you can change the country but I'll leave it to find data from US searches and right away you'll see some deep metrics on this search court the first part that stands out is the keyword difficulty metric now this score gives you an estimate of how competitive the top ten results in Google are for a given keyword based on the average number of referring domains they have now this is the only metric we use for keyword difficulty so you shouldn't treat this number as the answer to know which keywords to target it's just a proxy to link popularity of the search results there are a lot of variables to gauging keyword difficulty so I'll be doing a full tutorial on how to analyze whether you can actually rank for a keyword in the third video in this series next you can see that this phrase averages 11,000 monthly searches and this big number here is based on the country that you selected in the last step now over here you can see the global search volumes as well as the breakdown of searches by country which is ordered from the most to least monthly searches so for this particular query about 90% of searches come from the US but before we continue what the heck is search volume anyway so in short search volume represents the average number of monthly searches on Google for a given query so technically if the same person searched for the same keyword a million times then the keyword volume would go up too so you can see how this metric can be easily manipulated and isn't exactly the most reliable one so the only source for Google search volumes unlikely always will be from Google themselves but there is also an additional source called clickstream data so here at HS we use both of these sources to make sure search volume estimates are accurate and most importantly updated with fresh data every single month and this is the exact reason why we add the extra source of data to our search metrics now if we jump back to the global search volumes it's pretty clear that this query is way more popular in the US and then there's a tiny bit of traffic everywhere else but other times you'll see the opposite effect where a keyword is significantly more popular in other countries so for example if I type in rugby you'll see that this query is the most popular in France the UK and then the u.s. so this is a good way to decipher whether or not your keyword is worth targeting for your business so if you find that search volumes are low where your target audiences then it may not be the best keyword to target all right back to grilling steak if we look at the search volume for the original country we selected then you'll see this cool graph where you can see different search volumes by month so you'll see that people are grilling less in the winter months and more in the summer which tells us a little bit about keyword intent now I know it seems like common sense but things like this they often get overlooked during people's keyword selection process so this graph is really helpful and often the first place where my eyes gravitate when I'm doing my keyword research here's why if we look up the word Christmas and look at the search volume you'll see that there are over 800,000 monthly searches well not really search volumes are rounded averages so if you look at this graph here you'll see a trend where people start searching for this keyword in November and December but the rest of the year pretty much crickets now look at the results for the search query presidential election there's a huge spike during the time the event was happening and then crickets the number promises you six hundred and fifteen thousand monthly searches next month but the trend shows that you'll get a few million visitors only during the time of the election which happens every four years we have a great post on the HRF blog on this topic which I'll leave a link to in the description alright so next we have this very important section which is called cliques and this number reflects the total number of cliques that actually happen on the search results page and this often tells us whether a searcher clicks on multiple results or maybe none at all and again this tells us a lot about keyword intent which just it can't be ignored now with this example and actually most how to search quarries the clicks are normally close to the actual search volume and I'm going to show you two drastically different search queries to better illustrate my point so I'll open up a new instance of keywords Explorer and for the first search query I'll type in time in New York and for the second I'll type in chicken soup recipes next I'll click on the metrics tab now take a look at these results even though the query time in New York has a hundred thousand more monthly searches than chicken soup recipes the latter gets more clicks now how is that even possible the best way to illustrate this is to put yourself in the driver's seat if we google time in New York and you see this result has the reason for your search Quarry been solved yeah it obviously has this is a fact-based query and you don't need more answers than what Google already gives you now let's pretend that you want to make chicken soup so you type in chicken soup recipes in Google now there's a featured snippet here from Google but can you tell me if the reason for your search query has been solved no way even if all of the directions were here you'd probably want to compare all the recipes maybe you'll click on one of these results and be like darn I don't have celery so you'll look for other recipes or maybe you're some kind of chicken soup connoisseur and you only eat five-star broth so you'll look at reviews now if we look at this comparison again you'll also notice this metric here called RR which stands for return rate now return rate is a relative number that gives you an idea of how often people perform the same search over the course of a month now this doesn't mean that people search for time in New York X % or X times more than chicken soup recipes I know it sounds confusing but what you can take away from this is that people search for time in New York more often another example of a quarry that people search for in Google again and again and again is Facebook which has the highest return rate so you'll see that it has a return rate of 3.7 in the United States and obviously this doesn't mean that people only search for this term three or four times in Google but it helps you understand how others search compared to this baseline also in the clicks section you can judge the commercial value of the keyword phrase so here you can see that it has a cost per click of a dollar 20 but what's more interesting is the percentage of clicks that go to paid versus organic and you can see that paid search only gets about 2 percent of the clicks while organic takes the rest and if you compare this with a keyword car insurance you'll see something completely different the CPC is $40 per click and 38 percent of the clicks go to advertisers and it makes sense if we Google the search query then you'll see that the entire fold of the Google search results are plastered with ads one last example I want to show you is something like the keyword phrase medical school you can see that the entire fold is plastered with the ads but check out the data and eight drops only 2% of clicks go to paid ads now the thing that this boils down to again is keyword intent if you're looking into medical schools you might be looking for a list of schools school ratings or you might want to know more information like how many years is medical school now there's so many possibilities with a query like this that it shows that paying for this keyword term it might not produce the results you'd expect here you can find the same cool graphs that will show you the separation between paid and organic clicks so for certain queries you might find that advertisers are more active during seasonal months like in the snake example now with the AdWords CPC figures it's worth mentioning that we don't update it that frequently so treat these as approximate values and if you need the freshest data then go to the source Adwords now as far as I know CPC can change pretty much every hour and they'll still be estimations since AdWords runs as an auction but the main takeaway from all of these examples is to focus on search queries that will generate clicks you because even if there's a high search volume but no one ever clicks it then what's the point of targeting that keyword right alright this next part here is super cool so originally when I was doing my research for this video the keyword phrase that I entered naturally was how to barbecue steak and if you look at the search volume it only has 350 searches per month in the United States which doesn't even compare to the 11,000 searches for how to grill steak looking at the global volume you can see that the country with the most searches is Canada so I guess barbecuing is a Canadian thing which I would have never known so if you look down here you'll see that the parent topic is different it's actually the one I've been showing you this whole time how to grow steak and the parent topic it tries to determine if you can rank for your target keyword while targeting a more general topic on your page instead so the way we do this is by looking at the number one ranking page for your keyword and then look for the most popular keyword that brings that page the most clicks so if I had a site on barbecuing that I would know that I can target the phrase how to grill steak to reach a much larger global audience now I want you to pay close attention here you can see that this parent topic has 11,000 monthly searches but the traffic potential is 77,000 now how is that even possible let's go back to the original keywords Explorer results and we're gonna quickly look at the metrics on the top 10 Google rankings for this keyword phrase but first I'm gonna click the Update button here to get some fresh search results because the ones you'll see by default are cached from this date that's displayed next to the Update button now if I scroll down to the bottom of the page you'll see the top 10 SERPs in a bunch of cool metrics which will go deep into in another video now the first two results are from a featured snippet and some related questions but look at this one here from foodnetwork.com this one page is generating over 76,000 monthly search visitors from all of the search queries that it ranks for and if you look to the column next to it you'll see that it's because they rank for over 4,000 search queries this tells us that the topic has a lot of similar law tail quarries for which Google is showing this search result so if you wanted to get similar results you could create a comprehensive resource get some quality backlinks and rank for all sorts of relevant queries isn't that awesome you can see the total search traffic of all the top ranking pages so you can start targeting topics and not just single keywords there's also something crazy you can do with the top 10 search results feature so I'm gonna open up another tab with keywords Explorer and I'm gonna type in something absolutely ridiculous I'll type in what is spider-man's web thingy then I'll run the search and as expected the search volume is not available since it's not exactly a natural quarry that many people would search for but if we scroll down to the top 10 SERPs you can see that there are a bunch of different top keywords we could target and potentially rank for the target query what is spider-man's web thing now this one here spider-man's web has 4400 monthly searches with traffic potential of 802 and this one from Wikipedia has potential of around 3,200 then there's spider-man's web shooter which has a search volume of 5200 with traffic potential of around a thousand so in this case I'd probably choose spider-man's web but since search volumes are a bit arbitrary I'd have to do more research before settling on this topic now the key takeaway here is to focus on traffic potential of a topic rather than targeting a single keyword based on search volume alone which I feel like I've really drilled down on here and as you and I we continue to go through the series you're gonna find that shifting your focus to this traffic centered keyword research process paired with some crafty tactics will pay dividends and in the next video in this series I'm going to show you how to find thousands of keywords with a bunch of cool hacks that will build onto everything that you just learned make sure to subscribe and let me know in the comments what you think of this traffic centered approach to keyword research so I'll see you in part 2