Going deep on keyword research in a sea of data

ADVANCED KEYWORD
RESEARCH
Advanced Keyword Research @jonoalderson

Jono Alderson
Head of Insight @

people search
*with keywords

people search
*with intent

Good SEO is about good
intent-alignment

Consumer intent
Business intent
Competitor intent
Understand the marketplace

strengths, weaknesses, opportunities
changing & emerging trends
create, or inform, strategy

So…
good, comprehensive,
effective keyword research
underpins good strategy

But the process is broken


Stakeholders often confuse
keyword research processes with
defining a 'ranking wishlist'

“ Top 10 ‘golden’ keywords.
100 commercial priority terms.
Primary, secondary. Attack, defend.
This quarter’s tactical opportunities. ”
Easy to report on, to understand, to
challenge.

This is a
TRAP.

You don’t know
what you don’t
know.

There is
money left on
the table.

It breeds
bad behaviour.

This happens because…

1.
Lack of education,
experience or alternatives

2.
Lack of tech, tools or
processes to utilise more
sophisticated approaches

3.
The primary responsibility of senior
stakeholders to be in control, to
object, to push back

And so…
“Keyword research” rarely
resembles research

How do we fix this?

• Get all the keywords in the market
• Categorise and classify by everything
• Slice and dice to identify the opportunity
• Get the buy in
• Monitor the results

Getting all the keywords

“Young Drivers Insurance”
6.6k monthly
searches

But what about all of the...
[variants, plurals, stems, synonyms, typos]

Combine multiple sources.
And then keep going.

Step one.

Oh. Look.
266
“young drivers insurance” keywords...

65k monthly searches

£318k media value

And the site in #2…

13% of market
8k visits per month
£41k media value

Hanging off a page with 121
words
…Which has no links
…and no shares
…on a tiny website

One off?

“one day car insurance”
12k

But also…

“1 day car insurance”
6.6k

“day car insurance”
2.4k

“car insurance for a day”
1.9k

“daily car insurance”
1.6k

Etc.

71k monthly searches
...and the biggest brands have
<10% market share

!!!

Stop thinking about
individual keywords!

Start thinking about…
Topics, intent and need
groups

Some of the world’s biggest
brands, doing the most
sophisticated marketing only
track a few thousand keywords

But this is only step one.

about stumbling across a
hidden gem; it’s about
already having found and
classified them all, and
tactically picking
opportunities

Categorise and classify
everything by everything

1. Group by topic
2. Find behavioral clues
3. Add real-world context

Horizontal classification

What can I infer about
visitor intent?

http://www.slideshare.net/carmenmardiros/getting-to-the-people-behind-the-keywords-16581811

Where are my
competitors ranking?
…or outranking me?

Where am I being
outranked by, say, media
– or highly commercial
content?

When is this OK?

Where do I have
executional advantage?

All of this is quite
resource-intensive.

And it’s big
(The mobile phone industry has ~ 150,000
keywords!)

And it changes…
Keywords, and topics, come and go.

You’ve got the 30,000ft view
…but you’ve lost all agility.

What if you could make
this MUCH easier?

We’ve built a tool!
http://tools.jonoalderson.com/term-tagger/

Now eyeball all of it.

Export / Import / Pivot
Recombine and assess

Identify the opportunity

Use SEMrush, Linkdex, or your
favourite platform (and a whole
lot of Excel) to explore.

“Phrases relating to our core
strengths, where visitors are early in
their buying cycle, where we don’t
have highly performing content”
Identify gaps which can be easily filled

“Topic groups where we’ve got top 10
rankings, where are competitors are
weak, and where consumers are
actively researching with questions”
Use existing strengths to win
consumers

“Types of language which indicates
high purchase intent, where we’re
outranked by competitors who don’t
rank for longer-tail queries”
Disrupt/intercept competitor buying
cycles

Track & react over time
Refine your understanding of ‘the market’

Get the buy-in

It’s really easy to improve
performance for a group
of keywords which
everybody else is
ignoring, just by creating
content.

Start small, aim big

(But aim high enough to
get a result)

150 words
0 links
0 likes
ROI ???

22 likes
1 comment
0 links
ROI ???

Pick an easy win.
Deploy proof-of-concept
tactics for small, un-competitive
niches

Define success in terms
of improved intent-alignment

Survey on satisfaction
and task-completion rate

bit.ly/15Qsaop

Secure more budget and
support to try a small,
commercially valuable
niche

Making this strategic

http://slidesha.re/1vqvsIy

Process
historical
performance
Model to
compensate for
seasonality
Normalise
outliers
Plan activity to
generate results
Predict impact
Set targets, get
buy-in

Wrapping up

Explore, evaluate and
track more keywords

Categorise and classify in
order to start thinking
about topics

Identify tactical
opportunities to
demonstrate
effectiveness

Build capitalising on
small scale, tactical
opportunities into a wider
strategy

Going deep on keyword research in a sea of data

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