Module 20: SEO Basics with Shante Schroeder

Welcome back, guys. William Wood here. We've got our next amazing guest. Who's ready to hear something awesome? All right.

That's right. It's going to be absolutely fantastic. We're going to be talking about how to get people to want to buy your products and services using keyword research. Who has a problem finding buyers? Be honest.

Come on, raise your hand. Who would like more buyers? So what we're going to be sharing with you next is literally going to help revolutionize your ability to get the right people to view your content. And Shantae Schrader is going to be presenting this material. Let's give a huge round of applause for Shantae.

Shantae is all the way out here from Utah. Shantae is a former broadcast journalist and a digital marketing and communications specialist. She has a master's degree in public relations from the Newhouse School of Public Communications in New York. She was named one of Newhouse's top 25 young alumni to watch. She's a Stevie winner for Women of the Year at the 2015 American Business Awards and recently named Utah Business Magazine's 30 Women to Watch.

She's worked for international sports broadcasting, built brands for Fortune 500 companies, was an expat in Israel for a year, walked the red carpet at the Academy Awards and Emmys, volunteered in the favelas of Brazil, driven combines and other equally slow farm vehicles. She's been the face and personality for brands and products and launched many award-winning digital marketing campaigns, all with a consistent effort to explore the world and generally make her parents nervous. She currently is the Director of Growth at 97th Floor, a Utah-based digital marketing agency awarded the Agency of the Year at the 2014 and 2016 American Business Awards. Her client work includes Adobe, Citrix, Dell, ESPN, Time Warner Cable, OC Tanner and Zog and also now Kala 2 Video. So we're excited here to have her and everyone, give her a huge round of applause.

Thank you, Will. So today, this is one of my favorite things to talk about because it serves so many purposes and it's the seed for everything that you do after. So does everyone know what a keyword is? I mean, raise your hand if you know what a keyword is. We live in a day and age where we live by keywords, you know, we've all typed it into this thing called the browser.

Now here, I'm going to get a little technical on you but I promise this serves a purpose. This is the search demand curve and this is something that I look at a daily basis. I'm always trying to gather data in order to then go get tried and true wins. There's a lot of opportunity online and I love interacting with people and I love serving up content and information that will ultimately drive what I would call a buyer versus a browser. You'll probably always be bringing in browsers but wouldn't it be better to just know how to target and bring in more buyers?

This is what the keyword research is going to do for you. So on this search demand curve, we have a lot of top keywords that on a monthly basis will have huge volumes. That means huge volumes of people are searching for those keywords on a monthly basis, millions. For an example, Nike shoes, it gets millions of search volume on a monthly basis. We call this, and get ready for some awesome names, we call this a fathead keyword.

Is anyone familiar with fathead keywords or heard that term before? Okay, well it gets better. Those keywords that tend to be a little bit longer have maybe lower search volume but kind of fall in the middle of the search demand curve. These are called chunky middle keyword terms, naturally, but you can see these are longer keyword terms. And then towards the end, these have lower search volume but they're a little bit more specific.

These are what we call long tail keyword terms and that one makes a little bit more sense. It's a long term phrase. It has a few more keywords collected together. Now these are the things that Google will aggregate data wise and they'll serve back up to you. And these are the things that I want to help you navigate because let's look at this.

Let's say you're generating a campaign, you're launching a product, you're just trying to populate blog posts. Now you might say, I want to compete for Nike shoes. That would be awesome because I want those millions of people following me and finding my stuff and translating into conversions eventually. But here's the thing, with those, it's really competitive. It's really hard to capture those.

It's really hard to get, to show up in search results in a way that your stuff is above the fold. Also, and this is where I get super excited about keyword research because I'm going to say that people searching for Nike shoes are searching with the intent to browse. The people searching red Nike free trainers 5.0, do you think they've maybe browsed quite a bit and they're looking to buy? So those are the ones that we want to capture, drive to our assets, whether it's a website or whether it's a landing page or anything, social media even. And you want them converting into buyers through your stuff.

Does all this make sense? How this comes together? Okay. We're going to do this one more time. So sales training.

Let's say you are launching a product. It's all around sales training. Sales training is kind of at the very top, has a lot of great search volume and it's something that you definitely want to compete for, but maybe not right out of the gate because that will take a lot of time. Most of these high search terms will take time as in months, if not years, and a lot of resources, money being one of those things. But let's say you start doing more searches and you see sales meeting best practices.

Suddenly you have a great title for one of the modules within your programs that people are already searching for. You already know that you have 10,000 people looking for that. And if your stuff starts to show up because of how you use these keywords, they find your stuff first. You're beating out all the competition and you know that you're serving up information and content that already matches the demand that's out there, which you bypass the entire sales funnel and you just start driving to sales and revenue. Now long tail would be how to make a sales meeting more productive.

That might be new information or it might be something that now you know specifically what modules to put into your sales training package, where before you were maybe thinking, you know, I'll probably talk about maybe some sales copy, I'll create some modules around this or that. But do you have that peace of mind knowing that what you're serving up is actually what people are searching for? Now you do. Now Google does provide this information and it empowers people like you and I to gather the information to form a strategy around it and to show up in search results for specific things that you want and specific buyers. So the biggest question is, are they finding you?

Are they finding your assets? This is what we want to make happen. Now keyword research, this is where I'm going to be sharing my pro tips. A lot of people have, has anyone done keyword research before? And it's kind of convoluted maybe.

Are you always sure that what you just did, keyword research, is what needs to happen in order to translate into the next thing? Good. That's a good baseline. So keyword research, really simple to do. But I'm going to share with you a couple extra sets that go to take that data and turn it into something that you'll suddenly be able to create a hierarchy from.

Now I do this for major brands on a daily basis. And the great thing about keyword research is that you're always going to be looking at it and doing it again and again, and it's just always going to provide more insights for you. So I do this for big brands, but I also do this for myself with my own business, startup businesses. I do this for entrepreneurs because this is where the value is. You're going to get so much information that's going to drive to an end goal of revenue versus just kind of top of the funnel that will maybe translate into revenue eventually.

We want to drive sales. So at this point, I think I'm going to just do this live with you. And all these tools are free to use. I've only used free tools. There are paid tools, and you can certainly access those, but you can do just as well with the paid tools.

Now if you've used keyword research before, then you're probably familiar with Google AdWords. This is what most people in paid use as a platform to get into pay-per-click stuff and ads. But what it's really great for also is for organic search. So we basically let all the people spend their money and their budget, and then we gather the data and we use it for free. That's the best way to go about anything in my estimation.

So the first thing you'll look for is AdWords, the keyword planner specifically. And what you'll do is you'll go to Google AdWords. Under tools, you're just going to go to keyword planner, and let me see if I can get back on the internet because that would be important. So we have a presentation deck. So we're going to go to keyword planner.

You're going to sign in and make an account. Now they're going to ask you to put in some credit card information. Don't do it. You don't have to. Next thing, you're going to go down to keyword planner.

It's found under tools. Super simple to find. And then the next thing you're going to do is you're going to find the search for new words. And it's the first thing listed under five new keywords. Now for this, you want to enter three to ten, what we call seed keywords.

Seed keywords are an idea of what you think people are going to search for. And this is just going to help you feed the machine so that Google starts giving you back more keyword recommendations and all the data around that. So you at least need to tell them three specific keywords that you're looking for. Now for this one in particular, I decided I wanted to start a website. I have a friend who just found out she had a bunch of food allergies, and what was missing from her diet was a lot of sweet treats.

So I wanted to find out some great recipes to serve up and to start aggregating audience around chocolate chip cookies, healthy cookies, gluten-free cookies. So I dropped in a few keywords here. Most of these just came from my own brain. I'll give you a tool in a minute where if you're just like, I have no seed keywords, I have like one, they will generate the seed keywords for you. So you're going to drop this into the keyword planner.

And from that, they're going to start crunching data. You're going to hit get more ideas. What they're going to do is they're going to start generating the ideas for you. And from this, you are going to get upwards of 800 keywords reported back to you. But more importantly, within that keyword set, you're going to get things like the average monthly searches.

You're going to understand what the competition is. And what the competition means is that's the number of advertisers or other buyers competing for that keyword. And so you might think, well, I definitely just want low competition keywords. Not necessarily. You might want to compete on a higher level.

You might want the medium keywords. You want a healthy mix. You'll probably want to stay away from highly competitive keywords because that means they're expensive and they're hard to get at. Now the suggested bid, that is a paid metric. So all those people putting money into Google AdWords, they're serving up the suggested bid, which is how much they're willing to pay for that click.

And what this tells you is what the engagement on that particular keyword is. So it's not something you necessarily need to know and assign a hard number to, but you need to know that the keyword that you're going for has high engagement, that other people want it. High engagement means revenue. It means they're looking to buy. So it will serve up upwards of 800 keywords.

And if we were doing this live, you could also download this into a spreadsheet. And this is where we go into the next steps. So you have all this information, you download it in full, and then I prefer to upload it to a Google Drive. But basically, if you open it into a spreadsheet, you can do the same thing. I just bring everything into my Google Drive.

Now from there, you're going to get this. It's a lot of information, might be kind of overwhelming, but here's what we need to do. Whatever keyword research you do, and I am doing this on a daily basis, I always have to do cleanup on it. A lot of times, you'll search for cookie recipes and you'll get salmon recipes. You'll get pasta recipes.

It just happens. So you will have to always go through it and clean it up. Also, a lot of these keywords that are served up as suggestions for you are good seed keywords for the next round of research. So just know it's always evolving. I just took you through the science of this and I'm going to take you through one more step.

You have all this information and you only really need three things from this. You need to know what the keyword is, you need to know the average monthly searches, and you need to know the suggested bid. So everything else, we're going to delete. And that's all those columns. So all of this, we're going to remove and it's going to go away.

And what you'll be left with is this in a spreadsheet. Now I like to do some other things. I like to freeze frame the top bar so that when I'm scrolling, it's always at the top. I like to bold those things. I like to just make the spreadsheet my own.

So feel free, if you know spreadsheets, make it visually compelling to you. Now we're going to add one metric into this that's going to organize all of it and give you a way to create a hierarchy for everything you do. And what I call this is the benefit score. And what that means to me is the amount of resources in are going to result into a certain call to action for me and for the people searching for this. But mostly, and this is all you really need to know, it organizes all the data in a way from a top down that you know exactly what are your power keywords and the ones that you want to focus on.

And you just start chunking those together. So what we do is we create that column, and then the formula is simple. Within that column, I want to times B, this average monthly searches, by the suggested bid. So it's a simple formula, Excel sheets will usually do it for you, but if you just type in equal B2 times C2, then you'll get a new number. This number means absolutely nothing, just in and of itself.

You're welcome. But once you do that and you copy and paste that, extend it along the entire column, what you start to see is a hierarchy. Because now I'm going to sort this list in a way that starts organizing the benefit score, the highest benefit score at the top, and then all the way down. The science part is over. Everything else is going to come from the human eye and looking at this.

And what I see immediately is that chocolate chip cookies has a high average monthly search, a pretty good suggested bid, but it looks like some other keywords, like healthy cookies have pretty good monthly searches and a higher suggested bid. So this is where I start forming my content, this is where I ideate around campaigns, this is where I start adding into social posts. I know what people are searching for. So everything that comes after this is what is going to create the content, the words. Because keywords are the most important thing with any of your digital assets.

You can have an idea in your head of what you want to serve up, you can have the end goal, but if you're not matching up what people are searching for and what's being served up, then you're missing, there's a huge gap there. So by your personas, you start to figure out what people are looking for, the human people. You match up with the technical side, which is the Google machine and all their robots, and they do most of the work for you. Where you drop them in the sales funnel, it all comes from this. If I want to start looking at chocolate chip cookies, but I see that chocolate chip cookie recipe has an equally high average monthly search, but a better suggested bid, that's what I want my content to be around, or at least have it dropped in somewhere.

Now we can do this with any number of other things. If we did the sales training, you would start to see that people talk about sales training using different words. They use coaching versus training. Sales can be translated into business development, and maybe that's not something that you had initially used in the content that you created. So it gives you an idea of new words that you can use that mean the same thing, but you explore a totally different audience.

And right now, you're probably working from a network of people. You have ready-made buyers, but if you want to cast a greater net and on a daily basis, use keywords to your advantage. On the Google machine, 15% of keywords on a daily basis are brand new. That means you're never going to saturate your market. That's a huge deal when you have an online product or you're trying to always get new audience shares, and you want audience shares that are already engaged.

So that's what I have to share with you. Analyze the data. Do it on a reoccurring basis. Everything that you already do, I do it again and again and again. I almost always have 10 iterations of keyword research before I start working on my products and services.

That's it. Why don't we open it up for questions now? Go ahead. All right, so after you find the keywords and based off the algorithm, you're like, Hang on. Livestream audience can't hear you.

All right, good. So yeah, so my question was this. After you use your algorithm and you find all these keywords, right? And then you build your business around the keywords. How do you tie the business with the keywords within like your title of the business or anything like that?

So the brand? Are you meaning the overall brand? Yeah. are a beast in and of themselves and a beast meaning they have no competition. You can dominate those, especially if you have a unique brand.

So just by doing what you do on a daily basis, you can name your brand anything and it will start to show up in association with everything else. But I would never actively try to pursue branded search terms because the part of keyword research and the content marketing you're doing is to make your brand, people have awareness around your brand. So you can just do the work in matching up what people are searching for and what they'll do is start associating really great content that they're searching for with your unique brand. Does that make sense? Okay.

Go ahead. Awesome formula. I love how it's real simple, just organize it, bid times the actual search volume. But how do you know if you can win it? Like you're going to spend this campaign to go after the top five that look like, oh, these are juicy, but how do you know your clients set up to win those keywords or they're just like top 10 is just too hard, let's move on.

Yeah. So there is a tool that you can use to track keywords and the movement on those. And movement can go up and down, but month over month, you definitely want to be advancing in the way of page one versus page 50. So the tool that I would recommend, and there's a lot of free tools within this, but I'm not sure what the paid service part of it is, but Moz, M-O-Z, that will help you track keywords. And they are the industry standard when it comes to digital marketing.

So that data alone, you can start aggregating and you can start figuring out, okay, I'm moving in a direction. But let me tell you that for a lot of my clients, including Dell and Adobe and Time Warner Cable, we have to abandon certain keywords. We are tracking it on a daily basis because they just are stubborn. Again, keywords are tied to people and people are squirrely people. They're always doing different things, right?

So there's only so much data that we can know, we can bank on. But if you're working on collections of keywords that are associated, you can start seeing where they're going. That will give you a really good idea. Does that answer your question? Good.

Let's pass this back. Hang on. Alright, so you have that, the last column. First off, I never even knew about that, to multiply the, I mean, I don't know. Lawrence is an engineer.

Maybe he knew. I don't know. It makes sense, right? I've never, and I've always found it very difficult to, I knew how to do the keyword planner, but I never could figure out really where to focus, what weight. I'm just looking at competition and it's hit or miss.

So that was really valuable for me. With that number now, are we just looking at the highest, top to bottom, the top highest numbers, and those are the ones we want to work with first? Or is there a range, like anything above 400 or 4,000? How does that work? Yeah, great question.

Great question. There's no range because every keyword search that you do is going to be different. And that's where all the metrics are awesome, collectively. But individually, they mean very little. So, consider it from a top down.

That's how I do it. But I'll go through and clean up that data. There's certain things that I just don't even want to look at because it doesn't tie into my product the way it should. So that's where it's the art of it. And you'll get better at that.

And the more you do the research and the more you drop it in, you're just filtering out more of the unknown. And that's what you want to move towards. There's still a lot of variables out there, but if you're working with a certain amount of data that's well organized for both the technical side and user intent, then you're in a pretty good focus pool already. So then just start testing it. You might have different landing pages that you use different keyword sets for.

That's what we do on a daily basis. Testing is kind of the jump off point from there. Yeah. So thinking about this from the standpoint of someone that's just getting started, someone new with their business that doesn't maybe have a website, or what digital media do you recommend to try to get the keywords built in? Yeah.

So there are tools that you can use to build simply landing pages in all of ten minutes. That's a great place to start. And maybe the only call to action on that landing page is to opt in into an email. I mean, ultimately, you want to start gathering audiences and you want a home base for that. Social can definitely, social media can start ranking for things, but it's a lot harder because it is basically wiping the slate clean every single day.

That's how timely it is. And you want the social to drive, again, to a home base, hopefully, which is your assets, your URL. So start with a landing page. Do a simple search for, I mean, Squarespace. You can build a website very, very quickly.

But landing pages, where it's just one call to action, that's a great place to start. You need no technical skill to build those. Any other questions? Go ahead, Josh. I've actually got a couple questions, and I might have missed this, but you said there was a tool that you can use for keywords?

Yes, thank you. So keyword.io is the URL, keyword.io instead of keyword.com. And it's a free tool. You basically put in just one keyword, and what it will serve up is specifically long-tail keywords suggestions. Again, you'll have to clean it up, but you can download it and you can export it as a CSV file.

It makes it really easy. It has a starter key list. I mean, it will serve up upwards of 600 keywords. So you really are not going to have any problem finding some unique keywords from that. And the other question I had was, do you always look at just the average monthly searches?

Because I think this might be a little bit more advanced for the audience that we have, but I think maybe some of the people out there have some businesses that maybe they sell stuff that could be for Christmas or stuff like that. Do you look at the searches when it's trending? Because sometimes there's keywords out there that only rank during those peak times. Exactly. So we do look at monthly searches for most things, but when you get into a situation of seasonality, that's when we start looking for, okay, when are we going to start ramping up?

So those average monthly searches, you'll see the build. So you'll see when you could probably time your campaign versus just kind of throwing it out there like the month of. You can start timing it perfectly to build to the maximum season. So that's a great way to use that. Most of these, because they're paid metrics, we look at the average of them.

Because again, Google's not serving up exact metrics, or at least we don't know. What they serve up to us is what they decide to serve up. Anything else is just like, thank you. So we make a lot of assumptions. So the paid part, if you go into PPC, that's when you'll probably get a little bit more exact with each of those metrics.

Gotcha. Great question. Yeah. Hi. Hi.

This is great stuff. Thank you so much. A quick question on, so you're not suggesting that we use a pay-per-click campaign or anything. We're gathering these keywords and then you're suggesting landing pages, maybe blog posts, other ways of using it. I just wanted to clarify that.

I am suggesting you can use this for paid. But paid is a little bit difficult in terms of sustainability. It's a churn and burn system. So wouldn't it be great to have paid, but you also are building up organic, which means that it sustains for the duration of time. You can start ranking for certain keywords and then almost abandon them for another set of keywords.

Paid, you're never going to have that option. You're always going to have to put money in order to get money out. So I would say use both of them. But if you're just doing paid, the day you don't do paid, your whole infrastructure is gone and wiped clean. Makes sense.

Thank you. Yeah. All right. Let's go ahead and give Shantay a huge round of applause. Didn't she do an amazing job?