WEBVTT NOTE This file was generated by Descript 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.899 Jeff: The use of search volume as one's north star for all keyword research is 00:00:04.899 --> 00:00:10.219 the biggest mistake that we see from an ideation and a prioritization metric. 00:00:10.219 --> 00:00:17.164 It's just natural because of the tomes of information in SEO to believe that 00:00:17.164 --> 00:00:20.935 using demand in isolation is good enough. 00:00:21.149 --> 00:00:25.842 Google trained the market to believe this because the only keyword research 00:00:25.842 --> 00:00:29.076 solution that they released was the Google AdWords keyword planner, the 00:00:29.076 --> 00:00:34.516 results it returns is their MSV or their search volume data point. 00:00:35.276 --> 00:00:39.301 It also has pay-per-click competition, which has nothing to 00:00:39.301 --> 00:00:40.961 do with organic search and SEO. 00:00:40.971 --> 00:00:44.931 It can give you a relative reference of commercial intent, but that's about it. 00:00:45.311 --> 00:00:48.936 And their perspective on pay per click competition. 00:00:49.536 --> 00:00:54.236 So this created a market where keyword research was driven by 00:00:54.566 --> 00:00:56.066 search volume as the north star. 00:00:56.186 --> 00:00:59.846 And I'll walk through why this causes such tremendous problems 00:00:59.950 --> 00:01:03.700 and some examples where it causes significant problems for teams. 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:08.563 And then I'll walk through where it causes significant competitive risks. 00:01:08.863 --> 00:01:15.937 The first one is that all I need to focus on as a business are keywords with 00:01:15.967 --> 00:01:17.967 a particular level of search volume. 00:01:18.200 --> 00:01:23.012 When the reality of content strategy is that you need to build robust, 00:01:23.012 --> 00:01:28.112 comprehensive collections of content, that exhibit expertise that tell the story that 00:01:28.112 --> 00:01:30.168 you understand the entire buyer journey. 00:01:30.176 --> 00:01:35.291 And what that means is you're going to be writing content that contains topics 00:01:35.291 --> 00:01:40.551 that have lower search volume naturally to round out that as collections of content. 00:01:41.061 --> 00:01:46.485 So what happens when a team is heavily focused on search volume only is that 00:01:46.605 --> 00:01:51.215 they're not writing in depth content that speaks to all the stages of the buy cycle. 00:01:51.585 --> 00:01:56.925 And that covers really specific user intents that people are looking 00:01:56.925 --> 00:02:00.525 for, either in the content that they land on or the content that's 00:02:00.525 --> 00:02:02.815 being linked to in that content. 00:02:02.865 --> 00:02:06.205 Strong SEO teams will look for this. 00:02:06.420 --> 00:02:10.590 They look for someone who's looking for a keyword volume list, sort descend, 00:02:10.950 --> 00:02:14.130 and they've exhibited the pattern that they're just walking down the list. 00:02:15.360 --> 00:02:20.910 It puts you in a tremendously susceptible position to strong content teams. 00:02:21.180 --> 00:02:23.970 And I'm talking the best publishers in the world. 00:02:24.030 --> 00:02:28.170 When they have a publisher adversary, who's doing this, or 00:02:28.170 --> 00:02:31.320 they've exhibited this signal in the clusters that they create. 00:02:32.380 --> 00:02:36.431 They will do multiple techniques in order to invade that person's turf. 00:02:36.791 --> 00:02:40.511 Hilarious reality here is when people are doing these predictive research 00:02:40.543 --> 00:02:44.313 using search volume as the north star, they're almost never right. 00:02:44.833 --> 00:02:48.828 And I've looked at so many people's estimate programs, and there's so many 00:02:48.828 --> 00:02:50.448 other factors that have to be involved. 00:02:50.958 --> 00:02:52.518 Should you use keyword research? 00:02:52.578 --> 00:02:55.008 Should you use search volume at all in your process? 00:02:55.038 --> 00:02:55.788 Absolutely. 00:02:56.238 --> 00:02:59.296 It is a very important directional metric. 00:03:00.076 --> 00:03:05.296 It also can give you a sense of if I were to gain authority on this high search 00:03:05.296 --> 00:03:12.196 volume term, I'm going to unlock the ability to rank for a lot of other things 00:03:12.346 --> 00:03:14.326 and I need to also do that research. 00:03:14.626 --> 00:03:18.916 But it's truly a directional metric because let's say the 00:03:18.916 --> 00:03:23.446 search volume is very high, but this might be a zero click search. 00:03:24.726 --> 00:03:25.536 No one clicks on it. 00:03:25.566 --> 00:03:25.956 Why? 00:03:26.076 --> 00:03:30.156 It could be a, what I call a know, K N O W, simple intent. 00:03:30.366 --> 00:03:32.016 What's the capital of North Dakota? 00:03:32.676 --> 00:03:33.696 Bismarck, right? 00:03:33.756 --> 00:03:38.586 Click through rate on that query is extremely low because Google 00:03:38.586 --> 00:03:39.936 answers the question right there. 00:03:39.983 --> 00:03:44.203 So you've got all different types of things that need to go into your analysis 00:03:44.203 --> 00:03:48.793 of words and teams that work with solely keyword research as that north star that 00:03:48.793 --> 00:03:51.572 drives the bus make mistake after mistake.