Kieran Rogers (5:49)

Yeah, you've just got to start. I think the, one of the challenges is the vast amounts of keyword phrases that you'll uncover and unfortunately the tools don't make it any easier, do they just throw more and more at you. I've always known that I get a bit greedy when I'm doing keyword research and so I'll cram together hundreds and hundreds of phrases, but I've learned to leave them overnight. Once you've done the keyword research, park it overnight, come back to it the following day with fresh eyes and then try and fine tune it to what's actually going to make a difference. This is the crucial thing, I think, I think for years, I mean, we've been guilty of this, we've gone after traffic rather than like you have to take a step back and go, what's the point of all this traffic if none of it converts, you know, and we've, we've had some quite interesting case studies, haven't we, where, you know, something happens and a particular tiny blog has blown up and become thousands. And you get into this trap when you're looking at year on year results and you're boasting about how much organic traffic that we've achieved 32% increase on this time last year. That's brilliant. No, not really. It could be a, could be a 3,000% increase in this time last year. But if you haven't got any extra sales, what is the point? And actually it's taken me, this is shocking. I should be ashamed. It's probably taking me 15 years to realize, realize the full extent of this. Like, because for years I just loved traffic and of course it's going to do some good somewhere. Right.

Daniel Rolls (7:27)

Well, let me show you, Let me give you a perfect example of that, something I'm doing at the moment. We ranked number one for the term highest paid YouTubers. Right?

Kieran Rogers (7:36)

Right. Yeah.

Daniel Rolls (7:37)

Not that we are the highest paid YouTubers, but that we've got a ranking of the highest paid YouTubers. Little bit of detail around it and it drives 15% of our entire website traffic on it. It's tens of thousands of visits every month that it drives through. And I've, you know, you go, we've got this much organic traffic every month. And then you look at how many of those people actually convert eventually that, you know, I'm not saying they might come to the website. They might come again. They might come again. They might come again. It is as close to zero.

Kieran Rogers (8:03)

Yeah.

Daniel Rolls (8:04)

As could be really. I mean, you know, there might be one person every three months, whatever it might be, that actually ends up converting. But the argument in your head is, well, high volume, but it can be a very, very low conversion rate. But that's okay. But it's like how low, how low does that conversion rate need to be? So my point with this is maybe start with a search term that seems reasonable. I wouldn't worry about the volume too much. But like, is that how your audience would search is probably more important. So it depends where you are in the funnel. First of all, at the bottom of the funnel, where it's your product or service offering, you need to try and rank for the phrases of how people would search for your product. Right. So if you are an online learning platform, you might have to put digital marketing courses, online, digital marketing training, all those kind of things. Now we rank number one for digital marketing elearning, but Let me assure you, very, very few people search that. There's like 300 people on the planet every month that I think actually search for it. So there's a balance here and this balance is always to be had between the volume versus the intent versus the level of competition that you're facing for that particular phrase. And that Venn diagram is a tough.

Louise Crossley (9:13)

One because this is just as much about knowing what keywords to avoid as it is about knowing what keywords to use.

Kieran Rogers (9:20)

Oh, never a truer word, sadly. Yeah, 100% agree with that.

Daniel Rolls (9:25)

Give me an example.

Louise Crossley (9:26)

We were talking in an episode recently. I think it might have been the one with me and you, Daniel, where even like Google snippets like AI overviews, doing the research on those keywords and knowing where those AI overviews pop up to the point where your content's just being pushed further down the page and you know that you can't actually compete there, you might know that that's an area to avoid.

Daniel Rolls (9:48)

Yeah, I definitely feel like the thing is, if you look at what's ranking number one, two and three and they're all on like Wikipedia, google.com, and you know, whatever it might be and you go we're not going to. But it's not going to compete. And if that's the case, let's go elsewhere. And I it's this balance between saying do we want to rank number one for this high volume search term or do we want to rank for these five relatively lower volume search terms? But actually we've got a chance of ranking for those. But then what's the level of user intent behind them? And I, I'll tell you the sweet spot at the top of the funnel which takes you towards the middle. I can rank for highest paid YouTubers because people might be interested in how much money YouTubers earn. And I could argue, well those people might want to become YouTubers themselves, but someone another best practice thing might be you know how to get GA4 certification. Well, I can tell you someone that's interested in GA4 certification wants to know about that particular thing, but they're also the type of person that's interested in educating themselves around digital marketing related topics. So whilst I might give them something that will take them away from my website, they might come back in the future and trust me a bit more. And actually if I look at the data, that person is more likely to come back and convert in the future. So that top and middle of the funnel piece is where you've really got to decide where is it worth spending the effort? But the other piece that comes into this is if you create something that gets loads and loads of people kind of searching for it and finding it, you end up with loads of links and those links can actually make the rest of your content more visible. And this is where we start getting to. This is the nuance of this keyword research process. Now, there's loads of people out there that have different processes for this. But the thing is, what you're trying to do is, is square off a load of things here that are kind of overlapping with one another as well. And it's very much a test and learn. One little tip, though, that is useful is what Kieran spoke about when we spoke recently was just about if you go to Google Analytics and you go to those search console reports, you can now see your most popular landing pages. But you can also see how many key events have happened on anyone that landed on that page, I. E. If this page is hugely important and it's driving all these visits, do any of them go on to actually convert? And you can start to get a bit of a feel of like, is it the right type of thing that's having an impact? You could also build a funnel report. Is a way of doing it is to say anyone that landed on this page and then on another visit ended up converting. So you could use a bit of attribution modeling in there and you can go through and do that as well to understand does it actually make a difference. But what I've found is there's a lot of vanity pages that are getting loads of traffic, which I think are great. I'm then going to go and say, are they converting? But also I'm going to look in my search console to see have those pages got many links.

Kieran Rogers (12:19)

See, I'm not so convinced they are great. Because you know what, all they do is they inflate your traffic numbers and they dilute your conversion rates and you.

Daniel Rolls (12:28)

Don'T necessarily have your do well or not.

Kieran Rogers (12:29)

No, this is the thing. So I actually, I've come to the opinion that I've never. Yeah. Quite recently I was looking at a page and we were looking at year on year results and I could see that one of my blogs had dropped like 40% of the traffic that it was having. I'm like, oh, this is disaster. And it was like, yeah, but is it really? Because none of it converted anyway, actually, do you know what, I should just get rid of that page. It's pointless. And suddenly what I started doing was Digging into what actually converts, what are the phrases, what's the content that's actually converting people and how can we make that better?

Daniel Rolls (13:04)

And this is top middle of the funnel. Whereabouts in the funnel is this?

Kieran Rogers (13:07)

Well so I look at a lot of. This is kind of. It can be anywhere really as long as it's really this is why your first step like identify your target Personas. Like and I like to think about the purchase journey. What problems are people trying to solve? Okay. What content could I do that's literally around that problem? Right. Let's go out there and let's give them some content. It's really helpful for that. I saw it's a really interesting analytics that I was delving into for a friend. Is she working for. It's out in the States and she's working for like a beauty cosmetics company and they had, they shared with me the search console data and I could see that 50% of their traffic was coming off of just like a one hit Wanda blog. They got really lucky. Someone had written a blog about how you can use banana peel as an alternative for Botox. And I won't go into what you do with a banana peel because I don't know how legit it is but it was quite interesting. And apparently people were doing this and this was responsible for like 50% of their traffic.

Daniel Rolls (14:09)

Right.

Kieran Rogers (14:10)

And it's like that is not really aligned if you're into beauty products. And like it sort of is. But why like is any of this. So first thing, is any of this traffic converting? No, it wasn't like it was just totally wrong for what they were doing because they did actually do Botox and they've got this blog and and actually was throwing the numbers out massively.

Daniel Rolls (14:32)

Right. So do you know what? If there's one mistake I've made over the years that I'm now correcting with Target Internet was not do it well doing too much top of funnel stuff and not doing up mid funnel stuff.

Kieran Rogers (14:41)

Yeah.

Daniel Rolls (14:42)

So for just to give people context for that, bottom of the funnel will be digital marketing training dish marketing courses. Okay. Top of the funnel would be digital marketing best practice related stuff. So that would be all stuff around. You know what, how do different age groups use social media that we rank number one for as well in the middle it's like what are the best digital marketing certifications? What are the digital marketing skills in demand? All that. We spent a lot less time relatively on that stuff. And actually what you realize that is those people that come in the door are the People that are likely to be interested in the product or service.

Kieran Rogers (15:14)

Yeah.

Daniel Rolls (15:14)

But again, we've got a little bit distracted by volume and by. And once you've got search traffic, this is the thing, once you've got organic traffic, you fixate on it. Because I've got to look at the Google algorithm, got to make sure we're going up, don't lose out on that stuff. And to, you know, does it matter? Is that effort worth spending? And that's back to my did I move the needle today? Thing. It's like, have I actually done something that's really driving the business outcome? Because, yeah, there's so many things we can do. Marketers can be busy all day, every day creating content, optimizing for content, but actually is it leading to what you need it to do? So I think that's important.

Kieran Rogers (15:45)

I think you're right. I think the sweet spot is in the middle of the funnel, because you stand a better chance in the middle of the funnel of finding a niche topic that's got reasonable volumes around it that you can succeed with that. Ideally, I'd want to create some killer content that's like one step away from a sale. But, you know, that's quite hard. That is quite hard to do because everybody's gone after that. But one of the things I do use when I'm looking at my keywords is you get those lovely like Google competition scores from Google Ads. They're really useful. Like, if it's point, not 0.1 to 0.3, you probably, like, you need it to be somewhere in the middle, really. And actually then it's down to your idea. Finding the keywords is one thing. Okay, we've got a whole bunch of people searching for this. Then you've got to kind of translate that into. Or what's the thing I could produce that's going to be the killer convincing thing.

Daniel Rolls (16:39)

But that's the Google algorithm thing. Recently with eat, which is that does this serve the user purpose? As in, if you want to rank for that phrase and you create some content, is it actually serving what they want?

Kieran Rogers (16:48)

Yeah.

Daniel Rolls (16:49)

Or is it serving what you want?

Kieran Rogers (16:50)

It should be aligned with what they want. Hands down. For years I was selling career training courses for the yachting industry, right. So you could come and come to our academy and you could, you could train to become a yacht master in like 16, 17 weeks. Hugely popular. But the one thing that we did was we created a whole bunch of content around careers in the otting industry. Because actually I suddenly realized, having studied my Target audience. What they want is a career. They don't want blood, sweat and tears. 17 week course that costs thousands. That's like, that's the negative. So don't push that. Like, let's produce a career guide. And that's what we did. And we literally wiped the floor with the competition. Like the organization doubled in size, doubled in turnover in like about an 18 month period. It was amazing. But that's the power of doing this. You have to literally walk in your customer's shoes. And I suppose there's an element of that where we're thinking about, okay, how do we relate these keywords to the content? And you've sort of got to do that whilst you're doing this keyword research process. Like Louise, that's sort of the filter, isn't it, that you're working out. What do we keep and what don't we keep?

Louise Crossley (17:58)

Yeah, and this also isn't just about ranking in Google anymore because we know that the way people are searching has changes. We've done episodes before about, you know, AEO making sure that you're answering people's questions because that's the way that people are speaking now and you want to be featured in those snippets. There's a lot more to just think about than doing the keyword research to rank number one on Google.

Daniel Rolls (18:18)

Yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, yeah, we talk about the fact that actually people are searching in social media as much as anything else and it's actually working out how you apply these keywords, those places. So let's take this into a bit of a step by step then. So you go through, you look at those stages, the user journey, and then you go through and say, okay, what are these phrases at the right stage of the journey that are going to resonate with my target audience that I believe that I can rank for that I believe have the right intent behind them and you aren't too competitive. Then I would say you want to go through and say, okay, we've got this kind of topic area or these kind of key phrases. Look at the connected phrases then as well. So you've identified the core kind of phrases and themes. You then are going to go through and look at the related phrases. Because one of the things that I've picked up on is that you try and rank for a particular word or phrase, you build some content about, you do a great job, you're probably missing out on loads. And that's where tools like Content Raptor can be really useful, where they go in and we'll put the link into the show notes. I think we've got a special offer for it as well where it will look at your search console and it will say if you added these three or four phrases you're going to actually pick up a lot of traffic off of things that you're already ranking for. So you can then cluster them together as well. And then there's a, there's a level of gap analysis as well is to say, well okay, where, where are we missing out in our user journey? Are there bits where we're just not getting people or we haven't got the right words and phrases in place as well? But then I think what becomes interesting is that you then do the phrase and hook and this comes back to Kieran's point of like when you think about the phrases you need to think about the content and phrase and hook is that for the title, whether it is a page for SEO or it is a podcast or it's a YouTube video or maybe something you put in social media. You want to include the phrase that people are searching for thinking about but you want a reason to hook them in. So you know how to get Google anti certification and five free resources. Your phrase, you've got your hook on.

Kieran Rogers (20:08)

There again, that could be as simple as best Best SEO tools for and sort of sat on the fence a little bit about time. But like best SEO tools for 2025 but you add in a timescale and suddenly that that comes with a sting in its tail because as in September.

Daniel Rolls (20:25)

That year, people are going to be looking for the year ahead.

Kieran Rogers (20:27)

Yeah, they do, they do. But these are the. There's all sorts of little super boost words that you can add in that make it make a difference. One of the things I love to do is when you're doing your competitor research and you can use tools to see what their what content they've got and what keywords they're ranking for. And very often you can pick up quite a few of these especially if you're doing three or four different competitors because remember you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Other people have been here been here first and actually some of the tools that give you some quite useful insights into gosh, that ranks really well and actually that's probably bringing in a great deal of traffic.

Daniel Rolls (21:03)

Yeah, competitors app is building on that. We've got a 50% off a three month for that. We'll put that into the show notes and then for free actually ubersuggest will actually go through and give you some suggested keywords and it will give you some ideas for content that other people are creating as well. So that's worth looking at. Again, they'll all be in the show notes targetinternet.com forward/podcast to get those as well. So the key thing here is that you could go and search keyword research process and there you'll find as many different processes as there are different phrases, which is why I think it makes a really interesting question for the one I'm teaching. But just a little tip with this as well. Keywords everywhere, the tool that we should have shares in because we promote it so much. They have got a new thing that if you've got the paid for version and bear in mind it's $2.25 a month. It now says when you search for a keyword, run SEO report and it offers you six different SEO reports. So get user search intent, analyze content type cluster keywords, analyze titles to search engine results pages, check rankability for search engine results pages and suggest anchor edits. And what it's basically going to do is take those search results, put those into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, depending which one you're using. But it's got this really detailed prompt and it does this really clever thing of taking that prompt, pulling in the results from Google and then getting the generative AI tools to analyze that stuff as well. So what you're getting for $2.25 a month is basically a load of pretty advanced search reports. You normally have to go to Semrush or something like that. Not that you shouldn't go to Semrush, but if you want to get it for 2.25amonth, that that's a good way of doing it as well. So I would come back to a couple of things. Think about what Lou said. It's search everywhere. Now. We are searching in social and it also works for things like email, subject lines, YouTube titles, all those kind of things as well. Think about what Kieran has said. Don't get obsessed with volume, don't get so tied into your results organic search that you're so desperate to keep it. But actually a lot of that stuff might not be converting for you anyway. And then look at that more toward the middle or the middle of the bottom of the funnel because actually that's the stuff that's likely to have a huge impact. It's great having really big top of funnel stuff, but it's not the be all and end all also look at.

Louise Crossley (23:15)

Content pruning or like trying to focus on some of maybe the dead weight that you've got on your website. And just because it's not ranking now doesn't mean if you don't do some like fresher keyword research and pay more attention to it that it won't. It just might need a bit more attention.

Unknown Speaker (23:28)

Yeah, I keep coming back to that.

Daniel Rolls (23:30)

Neil Patel stat that was talking about the ratio of time between creating new content and updating the stuff that you've got and for existing website to a decent amount of traffic, maybe like 10,000 visits a month. Actually more than 50% of your time should be spent updating what you've got because that that's going to have a bigger impact. So we will put all this stuff into the show notes. Don't forget we have got an upcoming SEO keyword research update session which is our free one hour sessions. Newsletter subscribers get access to those so targetinternet. Com newsletter get signed up, we'll get access to those and we will speak to you again on the digital marketing podcast. For more episodes resources to leave a review or to get in contact go to targetinternet.

Unknown Speaker (24:09)

Com podcast.