Business Life Hacks by JMarketing Influence Agency

Keyword Research to Generate Conversions (Not Just Traffic)

May 07, 2020 Josh Strawczynski Season 1 Episode 3
Business Life Hacks by JMarketing Influence Agency
Keyword Research to Generate Conversions (Not Just Traffic)
Show Notes Transcript

Josh and Dan talk about why keyword research for SEO needs to focus on conversions and lead generation, not just traffic alone. You'll learn how to find which keywords are easy to rank for, which ones will generate leads and sales, and which ones fit into your long term vs. short term strategies.


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Dan Lemp:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of'the business life hacks podcast'. This week we're talking about SEO and keyword selection. So Josh, do you want to start us off with this?

Josh Strawczynski:

It's a big topic for us because selection of keywords is the basis of SEO. We have so many clients that come to us having spent money on SEO with other agencies. We take one look at their keywords and they are garbage. They're low value, they have no buyer intent for whatever reason, they haven't seen any results and yet they're ranking for some of them and they've spent a heap of money. So today we're going to take you all the way back to the research phase. I'm going to talk about"what are the two sorts of keywords you're looking for?"and"how do you assess them?" Dan, you hit up our SEO division of JMarketing. What do you look for? What are the sorts of keywords that you're trying to recommend to clients? Yeah, great question. I run the SEO team at JMarketing. And, one of the things that makes our SEO stand out from that of other agencies is that we're focusing not only on search traffic but on conversions and what's actually going to drive profitability and leads and real bottom line business results for the client. And so much of this comes down to keyword selection and it's really important to put the time and research into picking the right keywords now, so that six months down the line, 12 months down the line, you can actually get profits from that and not realize that the whole, this whole last six months to a year of work wasn't ultimately going to be profitable for you or for your client. I think of this in kind of two phases. So there's early buyer decision cycle and there's late buyer decision cycle. That means people who are probably going to take a year, 18 months, two years to buy something and late in buyer decision cycle means they're ready to buy right now. So we typically recommend that someone go for late buyer decision cycle keywords first and then so that they can be generating revenue more quickly and then focus on longterm, late buyer decision, or early buyer decision cycle keywords. Next. So let's get some examples. Yeah. I was thinking about a tax client of ours in Australia and an expert in high individual, reducing tax of high individuals, high wealth individuals, tongue tied. Wow. Gosh, I'm going to be quiet and let you talk. Tell us a little bit about them. Yeah. Use the examples.

Dan Lemp:

So yeah, this client is one of the top. Um, it's okay, Josh. Everybody loves you. Um, so this client is one of the top tax experts in the world, specifically in offshore banking. And so people are coming to them to try and lower their taxes and often by setting up their companies off shore. So an example of, a key word that, uh, from a person who's late in the buyer decision cycle ready to buy right now is, um,"offshore banking solutions Australia". So that's someone who we're not just Mmm. Targeting generally the topic of offshore banking. It's specifically someone who's looking to set up an offshore bank and looking for someone who can do that from Australia. So that's someone that's an example of a keyword with a high commercial intent. Someone who's ready to buy right now, versus a keyword, which is also a really good keyword."How to pay less taxes for high income earners". So that was an excellent keyword for them. I was doing my research and I saw that there was a big opportunity because the competition for this keyword, it was pretty weak. But people who are searching for that term, they're exactly the kind of people who would, hire our client to do their service. But they haven't expressed in that keyword that they're actually looking for that service right now during the research phase. So if our client can be the, the person who is educating the person searching that term while they're in the research phase, by the time that person gets to the buying phase, then our client is going to be on the top of their mind. C ause that's b een who's educating them about the topic this whole time.

Josh Strawczynski:

Absolutely. Right. So that was perfect. That's a great example of middle funnel and bottom of funnel. So you said that that search term was, it's a real life example. I remember this one quite well because you and your team put together a big, like 2000 plus word article that was best in class answering it, giving away tons of good information. And really it was no wonder that it ranked so quickly. But tell us a little bit about what you look for when you're trying to qualify. These keywords are saying, okay, this is good, this is what we should target. You're not just thinking it up, you doing your research. What are you looking for?

Dan Lemp:

So yeah, I'm using, using various tools, to do the keyword research. The main tool that I use is a, i s"keyword k eg". Excellent tool to find out, how much search traffic is there for a term and w hat i s the competition level for that term? So the t here four things that I, that I want to see in a k eyword for it to be the perfect unicorn keyword. So one, does it have high search volume two, does it have a high commercial intent or is this the kind of person that our client is interested in? Three, what is the content like that the competitors are producing? I'll talk about that a little bit in a second and fourth, d id the competitors have a low domain authority also? I'm going talk about that in a second.

Josh Strawczynski:

Does it, So just to drilling quickly. Does it have to have a high search volume? Cause I imagine there's not many high net worth individuals who are searching for that term you used before?

Dan Lemp:

No, it doesn't have to. If it had a high search volume, it's even better. But it doesn't have to because for this client, each lead that they generate is worth a lot of money. So they only need to get a few, in order for that to be valuable. And because those are the, you know, someone's searching for say"offshore banking solutions Australia", they are because they're ready to buy right now. It's more valuable than something like offshore banking where you don't know what that person is looking for. You don't know if they're looking to spend money. They could just be doing a research paper at university. They could just be generally interested in taxes, but they don't make a lot of money. They could be interested in lowering the taxes, but they only make$12,000 a year. This client is only looking for a high net worth individuals. So we really need to bring them the traffic that high net worth individuals who are interested in offshore banking solutions would be searching for.

Josh Strawczynski:

Okay. And you mentioned domain authority as something you'd look for. For those who are listening at home who maybe have heard the term, don't quite know what it means, just give us a little breakdown and how you're comparing us versus them in terms of competition.

Dan Lemp:

Yeah. So domain authority is a metric that shows how much, how much authority does Google give to this particular URL. So something like the Australian, a tax Bureau or whatever it's called, dot gov that is a government entity. A lot of people are going to be linking to that. A lot of people on the internet will reference that government entity. And so Google will see all of that happening and give a high domain authority to the Australian tax Bureau, which means that if it has-

Josh Strawczynski:

Just so people understand, I'm just jumping in to make sure we clarify. Out of a hundred, what would a dot gov that's linked from all the other dot. Gov's looked like? It's probably going to be over 80 out of a hundred. We're typically, the ideal is under 20. Those are going to be easy to rank for. We'll, we'll go for anything under 40. Yeah. And well, we know we'll rank very quickly. We'll go for stuff that's higher, but primarily a unicorn, so what we're talking about are in there. It's a maximum fully ranch. Yeah. Those are the low hanging fruits. That's the first priority is getting stuff with a lower dose domain authority or even if it has a high domain authority and you're able to produce content that's a lot better than any of the other content that comes up for a particular keyword. Then that's also an opportunity where you can produce better content. It's more specific and a rank above the competitors. Content and producing content is probably a whole topic for another podcast, but that's something to look at as well, But that is the other metric that we look at it. It's not so much a metrics, it's not as quantifiable, but what we'll do is jump in and say who is ranking for this term and what content are they showing? If for instance, we see product pages, people just selling a service, well, we're definitely going to be able to write more useful content than that. Google wants to serve up the website, which best answers the search query. So if it's a question, how do I reduce my tax for a high net worth individual, then that's quite long winded. That's quite that we're looking for long form content. We're looking for really interesting insights, really interesting angles, links to, authoritative places and downloads and references to statistics. If we can write better content than the next guy, then we've got much better chance to rank for it. And that's the analysis we're doing all wise. We're willing to give away secrets, we're willing to give away really good advice and we will get rewarded for it through higher rankings and SCR. Anything else to add, Dan, before we wrap up? I mean, this has been a very top level, a pproach to keyword research, but it is just so critical. Anything else you wanted to throw in there that our listener should, should know to be thinking about?

Dan Lemp:

I guess just a really quick example of how, focusing on conversions is what's more valuable than focusing on traffic. We have a client who produces, and rents and sells, these big touchscreen displays. Specifically their main target audience are people running trade shows. And so before we took over their SEO, they were actually getting more search traffic than they are now. But the key is they're getting more conversions now than they were before because before they were targeting keywords like touchscreen, which could be anybody, it could be someone looking to repair the touch screen on their phone or on their laptop. It could be someone looking for"how does a touch screen actually work". We don't actually know what someone's looking for with touchscreen. Whereas once we started making them target keywords like a touch screen display rentals for trade shows, yeah, there's a lot less search traffic. But all of that search traffic, anyone who comes to the site from that term is directly relevant. They're looking for exactly what our client does, which means they have a much higher chance of turning into a conversion.

Josh Strawczynski:

That was an interesting conversation to have with a client to show them that their traffic has dropped 75 80% because of web of redirected everything, but then talk them into saying, well, if the average sale is say, and I'm just making this up,$5,000 and you close one in five sales, that means every word lead is worth a dollar. And if we now actively look at how many leads you had before and how many leads you have now you're X amount of dollars ahead of where you were once we got the client to see that that bigger is not always better when it comes to traffic. We really got a client that bought in and SEO has become a very, very important part of their business. So that's it for this episode guys, thank you so much for listening. If you do have any questions, feel free to email us. It's josh@jaymarketing.agency or dan@jaymarketing.agency. We're always happy to answer them. We're really looking forward to your tuning in for next episode. Make sure you subscribe. Please pass to anyone that's interested and we'll see you next week. All right. Thanks so much, Josh. Thanks to our listeners and we'll see you next time.