As a content creator, you probably have tons of ideas for what you could be writing about: questions your clients are asking you, myths about your industry, things they need to figure out before they can work with you.
BUT as a busy entrepreneur, you don’t have time to produce endless content. Before you block off time for writing, editing & promoting, you need to be sure that the content you’re creating (whether written, audio, or video) will help you get more clients. Before you create, it helps to do some research to figure out what people are looking for.
However … starting keyword research can actually give you even more ideas of what you could create!
A key benefit of keyword research is validating your ideas before you spend time on them.
Reviewing keyword data can tell you:
- how many people are looking for your topics
- how likely you are to rank for that topic
- whether it’s worth your time to create the content.
What criteria should you look for in a keyword?
No matter which tool you’re using for your keyword research, there are three things to consider when you’re researching & validating your ideas:
- Search Volume – Are people actually looking for this? You can create the best content on the internet, but if nobody is interested in it, then it won’t get you new clients.
- Competition – If you’re just starting out, you won’t have the authority yet to outrank the leaders in your industry; instead, you can target the right keyword for your to appear in the top 20. If you get more specific, you’ll have lower search volume but less competition.
- Relevance – While choosing your keyword, it is important to narrow down how relevant the topic is to a problem that you solve for your audience — how close these words are to your service and products.
Ok, cool, Meg … but how do I get these metrics? Let me share one of my favorite tools with you: Keywords Everywhere.
Why I love the Keywords Everywhere extension
There are a lot of free keyword research tools out there; I’ve talked about plenty of others before (see: Google My Business, Google Trends, Google Search Console, Yoast SEO plug-in, to name a few).
So why am I going to rave about Keywords Everywhere, even though it isn’t free?
- The quality of the data is better than the free keyword tools like Keywordtool,io, Ubersuggest, or Keyword Sh*tter, for a fraction of the cost of their paid plans.
- You’re not paying a monthly fee, you’re paying by the search term … meaning that if you’re only using the tool intermittently, you’re not paying when you’re inactive.
- It’s $10 for 100,000 searches, and you have a year to use them. None of my students have ever hit that cap … so it’s like paying $0.83/mo. C’mon, your business can handle that investment.
- It’s EASY. Instead of needing another log-in and to learn another interface, Keywords Everywhere integrates into your existing activity. Want to see Google search terms? They show up in Google! Want to know the search volume of your Search Console terms? Turn on the extension! Shopping on Amazon or browsing YouTube? Get data there too!
Hopefully that convinces you. Now here’s how to get started.
How to Download Keywords Everywhere:
Visit keywordseverywhere.com and download the Chrome or Firefox extension.
Even before you pay for an account, you’ll be able to see related search terms and trend data pop right up on your screen.
To get even more juicy info about your keywords, sign up for an account (the 100K searches for $10 should be plenty!); they’ll email you an API code that you can copy-paste into your browser extension to apply the credits to your account.
Then head up to your extensions and turn it on:
How to evaluate the Keywords Everywhere data
Search trends: How has people’s behavior changed?
The first change you’ll see when you turn on keywords everywhere is the trend data chart that pops up in the top right corner of your screen, showing how search traffic has fluctuated for that specific term:
This chart can show you if this is a topic that people are interested in consistently or seasonally, and whether traffic is increasing (like this chart about root canals) or decreasing over time.
You can also shift the timeline so that you can get more detailed info on a smaller scale.
Search Metrics: What are VOL, CPC & Comp?
As you scroll down on the search engine results page, you’ll see a few more charts popping up; you can click a button to load the Metrics for specific terms or for the whole chart, to get this kind of information:
So what do these three metrics (VOL, CPC, and CMP) mean?
VOL = Search Volume
Search volume is the average monthly search in the past 12 months. Some terms may be consistent across multiple months (“social media” is pretty stead), others may be cyclical (“quarterly tax due date”) or seasonal (“halloween candy”), which is where the trends chart can come in handy.
CPC = Cost Per Click
If a brand is running a Google Ad for that keyword, that’s approximately what that account would pay for each click to their website.
We’re talking about organic traffic here, but the knowledge that an advertiser is willing to pay for a keyword is an indicator that there’s a fairly fast return on investment on this traffic.
(In the example above, the lowest CPC is “root canal treatment cost” — because endodontists don’t want to bring in cheapskates who are price-shopping around. The highest CPC is “root canal vs. crown” — those searchers are in pain & have accepted that they need treatment, they’re just trying to figure out which they need.)
COM = Competition
Every Google search engine results page has a certain number of spaces for ads. If all those slots are filled, the CMP will be 1.00, if no ads are running, CMP will be 0.
So even if you originally rank #1 for a keyword, if there are a lot of ads running on the page, your click-through rate will be lower than on a results page with no ads.
Keywords Everywhere tutorial (starts at 6:26):
Getting new content ideas from Keywords Everywhere
In addition to sharing data about what you already are thinking about, Keywords Eveyrwhere can give advise about related terms you may not have thought of in additional data boxes, like the People Also Ask, Trending Keywords, and Long-Tail Keywords suggestions:
Does Keywords Everywhere also work on YouTube?
In the same way that Keywords Everywhere can appear right next to your Google search results, it can have the same effect on your YouTube search results.
Click here to learn all about it.