Beginners Guide to SEO - How to Choose Keywords for Organic Traffic

All right, so in this clip, we are talking about the SEO guide to ignite your site's organic growth. But this is a playlist on YouTube where we are talking about the ins and the outs of igniting your site's traffic, especially through SEO. And we're gonna talk through a handful of items that will help you grow. But before we do, don't forget to subscribe, whatever channel that you're coming from, especially if you're coming from YouTube, don't forget to hit subscribe and hit that bell button if you want to grow faster. So in terms of how to pick your keywords that will grow your traffic, so this is one of the key points, the key tenets around SEO, and I talk about this a lot. I just want to share a story with you real quick in terms of, well, some of the mistakes I made while trying to pick keywords. So a long time ago when I first started to do SEO, I had this website and I used to go to electronic music festivals. And what happened there was you always see the light shows on stage, right? So I was, you know what, I'm going to make a video on or I'm going to make a website on, on light show videos. And I did my keyword research. This is when I first started doing SEO. I'm like, oh, you know what? Look, um, this keyword is not that competitive. You know, I used Google's keyword tool back in the day and I decided to make the website. So I invested about 3 to 4 months on this website. I built a WordPress blog. I learned how to, you know, the ins and outs around WordPress, the right plugins to use. I picked a theme and I picked the hosting. You know, I think I was using like HostGator at the time. And I was like off to the races, right? So I started putting content up there. So I started taking, you know, content from all around the web and I started making this light show videos website, lightshowvideos.com. Um, and what happened was in about 3 months I was ranking number 1 for light show videos. And what happened there was like, I was like, okay, you know, I have this, this, this light show videos website. I wonder if I can sell it to a rave website. So I tried to sell it to a rave website and you know, the founder responds to me and he's like, I will offer you $50 for the website. So basically I put in 3 months of work and I was offered $50 for the website. So of course I was annoyed and I was like, well, I put in so much work, it ranks number 1 for light show videos. What I didn't really look into here was the importance of choosing the right keywords to grow traffic. So around content marketing or SEO, if I choose a keyword and I rank number 1 for it, but it's not driving any volume, there's no point in doing it. Another thing that happened when it came to, when it comes to content marketing, well, what happened was I actually ended up picking a keyword that drives a lot of volume, but it doesn't convert that well. So then I made a website called howtogeriddepimples.net. Okay, so howtogeriddepimples.net, I got a website, a new website, a brand new domain. And then what happened was I got a banner designed and that keyword, how to get rid of pimples, like a lot of people are like, when I was in college, I was always trying to, or college, as a teenager, probably in college too, I was always trying to get rid of pimples. I was like, that's a real problem, it's got volume. So then I made a blog called How to Get Rid of Pimples. And well, what happens is when you make a blog like that, well, guess what? I wasn't driving the right intent because I was driving people to a page and I was just trying to get people to convert. So what happened there was I found the right volume, but I didn't serve the user's intent, and that ultimately led to the blog failing. So that's just 2 examples of of how I had 2 websites that failed ultimately because I didn't do keyword research the right way. So what I want you to do here, what I want you to take a look at is a training that we've put together. This is part of our Leveling Up Marketing training, and it's basically on how to do SEO the right way so you don't make mistakes like what— miss the same mistakes that I made where it ultimately costs you a lot of time. And what happens there is you're gonna save the time, and well, all you need to do is just check out the video. And if you're interested, all you need to do is go to singlegrain.com/leveling-up and we'll drop that in the notes below in the description. And then you can check out the whole entire offering around the Leveling Up course. This is just a piece of it. And again, this is just a sample from the course itself. Let's talk about how Google works. So the major search ranking factors, there's a couple of things to think about: relevancy, authority, and trust. So let's talk about some of this. So relevancy, When you think about, let's say you create a website around gardening, for example, you like tomatoes, you like kale, whatever it is exactly. So you create a blog around gardening. There's a lot of websites out there where they start writing about all these different topics and they tend to not rank really well for anything at all because Google isn't really sure what that site's known for. So there's a lot of news websites out there that rank, end up ranking for a lot of different things. And just to give you an example, I know a couple of people that run large publishing websites and they tend to rank for porn keywords because Google isn't really sure. Sometimes like they write about celebrities all the time, so sometimes a celebrity's porn video might pop up. Whereas if you look at a blog that is very centered around tech, for example, like TechCrunch, or you want to look at Moz, for example, it's centered around SEO, or you want to look at, I don't know, neilpatel.com, my podcast co-host, it's more around marketing. It's because they tend to go very narrow and they focus on a niche. And this is the same thing with a business too. Without going too much into a tangent, when you think about, when you start a business, you focus in one area. You don't try to start many different products at once. You focus in one area, you get it right, and then you start to grow around that. And then from there, I mean, let's say you grow an expertise around marketing. If you tend to build software around that, it tends to work out well because you're in that, that industry or that niche compared to real life. That's how it is. And the people that are building these algorithms, they tend to think from a real life perspective. So relevancy is very important. And this also ties in with when you're trying to build links, for example. So you're writing the content, making it relevant, but when you're building links to your website, and let's say you're writing about gardening, you don't want a bunch of links coming from like porn websites or Viagra websites, for example. And these are fairly spammy looking links that actually takes the authority or the relevancy of your site down and that ruins your authority because you're a brand new website. You're trying to show to Google, you're trying to show to the search engines that you are worth taking a look at. Your authority is, well, it's growing. As long as your authority continues to rise, you're writing great content, you're building links, you're going to slowly go up and to the right. And then when you write new content, it's gonna naturally start to rank, and your life's gonna be a lot easier. But it's the same thing with life. Everything in life takes a long time to get going. It's just patience at the end of the day. A lot of people, when it comes to digital marketing, for example, they wanna see results very quickly. That's why a lot of people I've talked to in the past that said they've tried SEO, yeah, well, Eric, SEO hasn't worked for us. Well, how long were you doing it for? About 3 to 6 months or so. We're just spending too much money. Paid advertising is easier. Yes, paid advertising is very black and white, But that's the great thing about SEO. Most people aren't willing to invest the time and the money and have the patience ultimately, which is why I think it's so strong for any of you to take a look at SEO first, and that's where you start. Because in the very beginning, let's say you're starting out and you're trying to get a job, for example, or you're starting a business, that's gonna compound over time. Compound interest, it just keeps building, building, building. But the moment you stop, everything just goes down. So, if you're able to do that, you're patient with it, you're not reporting to any stakeholders in the beginning, you didn't raise any funding, You're not reporting to maybe other partners or your bosses, for example. Build your own stuff, build your own authority, and then your relevancy and your authority is going to go up. Then once you have that going, your authority of your site, you can call it your domain authority or your domain ranking, whether you're using Ahrefs or SEMrush, these are 2 SEO tools, and they give you a score. Once you've built that up, then you have more trust, and once the search engines trust you, again, like I mentioned, When you write something, for example, like on our site, we're known for marketing, it naturally starts to rank. Life becomes a lot easier because we've built the flywheel. And that analogy comes from an SEO expert, his name is Rand Fishkin. And if you Google what a flywheel means, you know those wheels that have, they get powered by water, for example? It's really hard to get it moving in the very beginning, but once you get it moving, it just keeps going, going, going, and it just kind of powers itself. That's what you're trying to build ultimately. You're trying to build a flywheel with your SEO, and that dovetails into all of your other marketing. All right, so now I wanna go a little deeper. This is another one of the videos from our YouTube channel, which just shows you that you should subscribe if you haven't already. Here's another clip. I'm not even just gonna talk about SEO, I'm gonna talk about my podcast first. What, what, what, what? I thought we were talking about SEO. We are talking about SEO. So let's look at my screen really quick. This is a podcast I have with my co-host Neil Patel. And well, we have 8.6 million downloads so far. We've been doing it for a little under two years or so. And oh yeah, you're seeing a lot of downloads here, right? We're last month, January 2018, 589,000. We're probably on track for about 640,000 in a 31-day window, which is not bad. 640, you look at 589, that difference, it's pretty good growth rate, right? So you're looking at it's like, oh, it's easy. Well, Neil has a brand. He's got a big email list. Da da da. Like, well, Eric, it's easy for you to say you get good traffic. You have a you have an email list, whatever. When I look at the this podcast and I look at the other podcast. podcast that I have, Growth Everywhere, which gets about 80,000 downloads a month. The issue is it took me, well, after an entire year of effort, I was getting 9 downloads a day. And then the second year, I was getting 30 downloads a day. I was spending 6 hours a week on it for the first 2 years. 6 hours per week while I was trying to run the business. So that's one thing. And it's the same thing with SEO too. If I look at SEO, if I look at our— if I look at singlegrain.com, which is one of the websites I have, I can see in the last 16-month period, and by the way, this is Google Search Console right here. The new one has 16 months of data plus, okay? So I'm looking at 16 months of data here. You can see that the graph is going up and to the right. We're looking at impressions, we're looking at clicks. You can see it's slowly going up and to the right. Not only that, if you use a tool like Ahrefs, you can look at my website, you can see that the keywords are increasing, the top 3 keywords are increasing. Everything is just going up and to the right. It just takes a lot of effort. It takes a long time to get the flywheel going. If I didn't do the first podcast, if I didn't slog it out for the first 2 years, there's no way I would have the second podcast that's doing really well. And I love both podcasts. Now, it's the same thing with this YouTube channel too. You're watching this YouTube channel right now, and as of this video, we're at about 6,200, 6,300 subscribers. But I started with about 1,500 or 2,000 or so in the summertime, and we built out our video team. Noah's sitting over here helping out. It just takes time. There's no shortcuts with SEO. People need to be patient. And most of the time when you're reporting to other stakeholders, Let's say you've raised venture funding, your board is going to want you to move really quickly. They're going to want you to spend on paid advertising. The more you can be in control of what you're running, you're not reporting to a board, to a bunch of co-founders that are not patient. The more patient you can be, the better. That's easier said than done, but I think if you can have a really sense of— a big sense of urgency in the short term, so you're just trying to get a lot of things done, but you're okay with things taking time, at the end of the day, it's going to pan out. All right, so now I want to go a little deeper and just to have you check out one of the clips that we did with Marketing School as well, just so you can get a little more deeper into the world of SEO.

Step number 1, keyword research. Now, I'm not going to tell you to, hey, once you have your blog down, the niche and your topic, you just go out there and write and you pick the most popular keywords. I want to use any keyword research tool out there like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, KeywordTool.io, Pick whatever one you want. Look for the keywords that have the most traffic, the least competition, and the highest CPC. I know what you're thinking, ah, that's too hard, they don't exist. Yes, they do exist. Take some time, they'll give you suggestions, they'll give you tons of keywords. This will give you an idea of the keywords that not only could drive traffic in volume, they're low in competition so you can see the results quicker, but most importantly, they have a high CPC. Typically, if someone is willing to spend more money per click to get a visitor over to your website, that means those visitors are worth money. You wouldn't pay $10 for a visitor that's only going to spend $1 on your site. You want to go after the ones that have the highest CPC because that means that eventually when you get the traffic, you'll be able to convert it into revenue.

All right. So mine is—

This is number 2.

Oh, we're on number 2.

Okay, great. Yeah, we're going 1 through 7 in order.

Okay, great. I'm assuming we're starting out, right? This is fresh.

Yeah, we're starting off. We just did the keyword research. What's step number 2?

The keyword research is we— well—

Well, I already went over the keyword research. That's step 1.

Yeah, I just— so this is an established blog already. We got like, you know, we got the CMS and all that stuff.

No, we didn't do anything. We really have a website. We have the CMS.

Yeah, so the CMS is set up.

WordPress is set up. No content has been written.

Great. We're going to write content. We're going to write skyscraper content because that's the type of content, the longer form content, just so we review a little bit. Skyscraper content, Google it, backlinko skyscraper technique. And it's about writing content that stands out from other people. So if you look at Wikipedia, for example, how are they ranking so high all the time? Right. And it's because they have content that keeps getting longer and longer and longer. And it's almost like the canonical piece of content. So how can you do that with the type of keywords out there where you think you can rank? You, maybe you sort out the ones that are maybe your top 5 opportunities and you start writing content. I would say, You start writing at least, you know, 4 or 5 pieces to kind of have a queue ready to go. And then when you're ready, then you can release those over a period of time. So long-form skyscraper content, that's at least what works for us. Your mileage may vary. We just, you know, that's what I like. So.

Now that you've got your skyscraper content, you've published it, it's now time to share the content. So I want you to go to BuzzSumo, type in similar keywords, see who shared your competitor. Pieces of content on Twitter. Google those people, find their email addresses, hit them up, ask them if they want to see your content because it's more thorough, it's better, it's more detailed, it's going to help them, and ask them if they want to share your content. Then you plug in those competitor URLs into Ahrefs, you see who links to them, you hit up each and every single one of those websites, you say, hey, I noticed you linked to my buddy Eric Siu or Brian Dean, and they covered X, Y, and Z. In my article, I cover A, B, and C that they don't. It's 5 times longer and it covers All this other cool, crazy stuff that you'll love. Feel free and link to it if you like it. And then the third part in the promotion is, see everyone you linked out to, email them like, hey Eric, want to say a huge fan of your work. I just linked out to you my latest blog post. Feel free and check it out here. If you like it, share it. Cheers, Neil. And that's it. We finished step 3. We're promoting it. We're getting the traffic that's starting to roll in.

All right, so I hope you enjoyed this clip on SEO. And again, if you want to check out the Leveling Up Marketing training that we have for individuals and for for teams as well. Just go to singlegrain.com/leveling-up. And don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe whatever platform that you are coming from. It helps us grow. Let us know what you think in the comments too. Let us know what you think in the comments if you think we are missing anything at all. And don't forget to check out the next video over there if you're coming from YouTube, and we'll see you tomorrow.