YouTube keyword search

The entire blogging industry has changed so much and is changing rapidly,

even right now! What used to work in terms

of keyword research, or some of you might call it topic

research, may not work now and maybe not in the future.

It is either you adapt or you get phased out.

And if you are using expensive keyword

research tools, maybe you can start considering reducing your expenses.

So in this video, we will share with you

the keyword research strategies that are free and they still work,

and we are also going to talk about the newest method to do keyword research

that is much faster and more efficient than the existing methods.

Any idea what that method is?

It's ChatGPT and holy moly!

You're going to love what you see.

And finally, once you've identified those

keywords, I will share with you methods to validate them,

so you know you're starting your blog on the right foot that will lead

to massive traffic growth.

Let's go!

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Anyway, to find good keywords for your blog or website, there are two steps.

The first is keyword discovery.

I will walk you through what are the types

of keywords and all the methods to find highly relevant keywords.

And then the next step is to verify if those keywords you found have search

volume and an acceptable level of competition.

But for now, I need to assume that you are a beginner who doesn't understand

the basics and the different types of keywords.

If you are familiar with it, great!

You can skip ahead using the timestamps in the description.

But if you are new or want to keep

yourself updated, let's start with the keyword basics.

Now, when you write an article and you optimize your article based on one

targeted keyword, your article never really ranks for just one keyword.

It ranks for a range of keywords

that the search engines think are relevant to their searchers.

So sometimes when you are doing keyword

research, you will see keywords with different search volume,

but they all mean the same thing.

For example, "how much can you make

from YouTube", which has a search volume of 600 per month.

And then the keyword, "how much can you make from YouTube

views" has a search volume of 40 per month.

The same goes for "how much can you make from YouTube videos".

But basically, the search intent of these

keywords are the same, how much can someone make from YouTube?

So you do not want to write

one article to target this keyword,

and another article to target another keyword.

You want to write one article that targets one search intent

and hopefully you can rank for all

the other relevant keywords.

I hope you get the meaning because this is so important in terms of keyword research.

You've got to read between the lines.

And when in doubt, do a Google search on similar keywords

and see if the top ten results are almost similar.

Next, we're going to talk about the different types of keywords.

Now, assuming that you are a BBQ retailer,

which means you sell BBQ equipment like grills, smokers, etc. In your blog,

when you find new keywords with the methods I'll be sharing later,

you've got to know which category each of those keywords belong to so that you

can craft the right content to serve the right search intent.

First, we have the "Navigational keywords".

These keywords are when someone is trying to find a specific page on your site.

For example, if your BBQ retail shop is

named "Smokeys" and someone wants to know if you have a refund policy,

they would type "Smokeys refund policy" in the search engines.

So people who are searching for this type

of keywords already know what they want from your website.

You wouldn't need to do keyword research on this type of keywords.

With some business sense, you should be able to identify what those are.

The next type of keywords is "Informational keywords".

People searching for this type of keywords

want to get information or learn something related to your business or niche.

For example, if somebody types, "how

to grill ribs", they're expecting a how to guide, a step by step guide that will

tell them the equipment they need, the ingredients, sauces,

how long to grill, the tenderness and basically everything.

People searching for these keywords want to

learn something and they do not have a buying intent.

But you may slip some recommendations in the content in case they need them.

So, if you are starting a blog for your

BBQ retail shop, you'll be providing tips and techniques for grilling different

types of meat and you may use internal links to link informational content

to commercial or transactional contents to maximize your profit.

And these are the next two types of keywords. For "Commercial keywords",

they are something like "BBQ Grill reviews",

"Best guess BBQ Grills", "BBQ Grill A versus BBQ Grill B".

People searching for this type of keywords

are in the research phase and depending on their purchase habits,

some may research further and some may buy a product based on your recommendation.

And as for "Transactional keywords",

they are something like "Buy BBQ Grill", "Buy a specific brand of BBQ Grill", "Discount

code for a specific brand of the BBQ Grill".

People searching for these keywords have gone through the research process.

They have made a decision on what product

they want to buy and they are ready to make a purchase.

These are the two types of keywords that will bring sales to your business.

And the final type of keywords that will

also bring sales to your business is the "Local keywords".

For example, if somebody wants to buy

a specific product like "Weber Q 1250 gas grill", but they urgently need the grill,

they may not want to buy it online and wait for the shipment.

They want to visit a local store to get

that grill because they really need it right now.

So they would search for keywords like "buy Weber Q 1250 guest grill near me",

"weber Q 1250 guest grill for sale in San Francisco", etc.

So these are the five types of keywords,

but your next question may probably be since the transactional,

commercial and local keywords can drive sales to your business,

shouldn't we focus everything on these three types of keywords?

The answer? You shouldn't! Because you are limiting your reach.

You should be using your blog as a way

to build a brand, get people to know your business, be the credible source

of information for people interested in your business or niche.

It shouldn't be all about money.

So when you are building a blog for your

business, you should have a holistic approach and it should help your business

grow in a way that is more than just revenue.

All right, now that we know the basics and the types of keywords,

let me quickly go through all the long existing methods to find relevant keywords

for your blog before we talk about ChatGPT.

If you don't know, Google provides a range of awesome keyword research tools.

You just have to know how to use them.

The first of which is that Google auto

suggests or some veteran SEOs will call it Google Alphabet soup.

How it works is that you will brainstorm a keyword that is relevant to

your business or blog.

And using the same BBQ example,

we can start with a keyword, say "Best BBQ Sauce",

and then you will start typing the alphabet one letter at a time.

As you type, you will notice some keyword suggestions.

These are the keywords that people are searching for on Google and they may be

important to your blog, so you want to jot them down.

You can also add an underscore, let's say "Best _ BBQ Sauce",

and you will see these relevant keywords that are probably important to your blog.

Using this Auto Suggest method, you can add as many keywords into Google

and have Google tell you what people are searching for.

Then the next tool is the "People also ask" section.

Every keyword that you search

for on Google may have this "People also ask" section.

And as the name suggests,

these are questions that people are asking on Google.

As you expand each of the questions, more relevant suggestions will appear.

You want to jot down those keywords or questions that are important to your blog.

When you're doing keyword research, you want to expand as many questions,

and when you can't find any relevant question, go back up to expand

on questions that are related to your blog and more relevant suggestions will appear.

And when you think you've exhausted this section, go to the search bar and search

for another keyword and go through the same process.

We are pretty sure you will find a lot of keyword suggestions.

And do you know,

as you scroll down the Search Results page, you will see this "Related Searches"

section which may provide you with more keyword ideas.

Now the next Google tool is the "Google Keyword Planner".

To get this tool, just do a search on Google,

click on the button and provide some information about your business.

Basically you're creating a Google Ads

account, and from there you can access the tool.

If you already have a Google Ads.

Account, just go to the "Tools and Settings" tab.

Under planning you will see the keyword planner tool.

You can discover new keywords by clicking

on this and enter a seed keyword, let's say "BBQ Gas Grills". Get Results

and it will provide you with a list of keywords related to the seed keyword.

It will tell you the search volume of each keyword so you know there are people

searching for the keyword you are targeting.

Now, I won't go into detail of how to use Google Keyword Planner to do keyword

research, otherwise this video is going to be very long.

So if you want to learn more about it, you can check out this page.

The link is in the description.

Now the final Google Tool you can use

for keyword research is the "Site Colon" method.

This works very well if you want to know

what topics your competitors are targeting.

Let's say that this barbecue website amazingribs.com is your competitor.

What you want to do is to copy the site address, go to Google, type in "Site:",

and paste the URL of the site without any spaces.

As you hit Enter, google has found many index pages on this domain.

As you scroll through the results,

you will pick up some very useful topics that may apply to your blog.

On top of that, say you want to know your

competitor's articles that contain a seed topic, for example, "Gas Grill".

So on the search bar,

hit Space and add the keyword or seed topic and this will pull articles

from your competitor's site where Google thinks are related to the seed topic.

Plus, if you want Google to find

articles from your competitor's site that contains a particular keyword,

all you need to do is to add quotes around the keyword and Google will find articles

from your competitor's site that contains the exact match keyword.

Using this method, you will definitely find lots of keywords for your blog.

If you have exhausted one of your

competitors keywords, use this method on another competitor.

That's all the Google tools.

And since we're on the topic of finding

competitors keywords, here's another method.

Now, the alternative to the "Site:"

method is to find keywords in your competitor's sitemap.

Most of the sites will have a publicly available XML sitemap.

For example, this site. This is the URL.

Let's add "/sitemap.xml".

Some sites will have "/sitemap_index.xml" so

if you don't find one under "/sitemap.xml", you can try "/sitemap_index.xml".

But do note that some sites do not have a publicly available sitemap.

Now, as you hit Enter, if the sitemap is public,

you will see something like this go through the sitemaps and based on the text

in the URL you can find keyword ideas from there.

By the way, if you want to learn more

about Sitemaps and how it can benefit your site, do check out this video.

The link is in the description.

Answers.com works a little like Quora where you can ask a question and other

users on the site can answer your question.

The site is very good for discovering informational keywords.

Just enter a seed keyword like "how do I

safely handle and store raw meat before and after grilling?"

And it will show you the best answer.

And if you scroll down further, you will find related answers.

Click on them and as you scroll down

and you will have some relevant keyword ideas.

Just a note answers.com doesn't work well on some niches.

You've got to try it out yourself.

Now, Answer the Public is another useful

tool to discover keywords related to your niche.

But take note that you are limited

to three free searches per day on the site.

Enter a seed keyword, select the country and hit Search

and it will suggest questions related to your seed keyword.

It will provide you with "proposition keywords", "comparison keywords",

"in alphabetical order" and "related keywords".

It's just that simple.

Now, Ahrefs is a paid tool,

but they do provide several free tools to the public with no strings attached.

For example, the keyword generator.

On its keyword generator, enter a seed keyword like "BBQ Tips" or any

keywords related to your business or niche, and it will suggest a bunch

of related keywords with its search volume and keyword difficulty.

For the keyword difficulty, the higher the number, the harder it is to rank.

You can use this as a keyword validation tool, which we'll talk about later.

This is definitely a very handy tool for keyword research.

Personally, out of all the existing

keyword research methods, I would say that the Google tools

and the Ahrefs keyword generator are the most useful.

What do you think?

Do you have any other existing keyword research methods to share?

Do leave them in the comments.

Now, let's finally talk about how to use ChatGPT for keyword research.

Before everything else,

you might have questions about whether you should use

ChatGPT to write an article for you to be published and rank on search engines.

And the answer is no.

It goes against Google's Guidelines.

ChatGPT should be used as a guide and not an end solution.

With that said, ChatGPT is an amazing keyword research tool.

It has learned and absorbed a lot

of information on the web and it is a very good assistant.

Just to put it into context, if you are an expert in a particular

industry or niche, ChatGPT is just one level below you,

which makes it a highly qualified assistant to be helping you with tasks.

But they shouldn't be doing all the work for you.

The best part is you can treat ChatGPT like a human associate.

Let's check it out.

Now, there are no fixed commands to tell ChatGPT to do certain things.

You should tell it to do certain tasks,

like you would dedicate tasks to your assistant.

Let's take the BBQ retail shop as an example again.

First, I would treat ChatGPT like a new employee of my business.

So I would say, "assuming

you are a business owner of a BBQ appliance store trying to start a block

to sell your products, please provide me with a list

of underserved block topics in the BBQ niche."

As you hit enter, it will start to write out a list like you have instructed.

Now, this is interesting because every new chat, it comes up with different ideas.

But don't you think these can be the top categories of your blog?

They definitely can.

Right now, I haven't gone into researching keyword ideas yet.

In this approach, I'm going the top-down method.

I'm researching the top categories and then I'll go deep.

It is as though you are building out an entire site structure.

I will show you a bottom-up method later on.

And by the way, if you want to learn more

about building a good site structure for SEO and higher rankings.

You can check out this video right here.

The link is in the description.

Back to this.

Let's say that you don't want ChatGPT to stop at eight topics and you want more.

So I would say, "please provide me with a

full list instead of stopping at eight."

You see, it is providing you with even more top level topics that are

potentially the top level categories of your blog.

Don't you think this is amazing?

To me, it is.

And if you want even more,

just ask ChatGPT like you will ask the human assistant, "are there more topics?

Please provide me with everything."

And it goes on with even more ideas.

And of course, you can probe even more.

You can just type "Are there more?"

But for the sake of this video, let's move on.

Now, based on all these top level

topics, let's say that this topic is something that is related to my business

and I want to know what are the underserved keywords related to it?

I would ask ChatGPT what are the questions

people asked about the topic and it will go on to generate the questions for you.

These questions can be keyword ideas for your blog.

Kind of cool, right?

If you want more, just ask "Are there more?"

And you can go on and on and it's

practically giving you all the questions within the top level topic,

which makes it easy for you to build topical relevance for your site.

I don't know about you,

but I think this is really a game changer when it comes to keyword research.

Now, these are the informational keywords.

You can go on to ask about other types of keywords.

For example, I want to know if there are commercial keywords in this top level

topic I would ask please provide me with questions that have buying intent

and related to the topic and it will list them down for you.

As you can see, some of these keywords are

keywords that you've probably never think of and it is awesome.

Now, in case you want local keywords, you can ask, "assuming the BBQ retail shop

is located in San Francisco, can you provide a list of questions

with buying intent that locals will ask on Google?" And Voila!

It would start listing those questions for you.

Stay with me because we are going to use

another method for keyword research with ChatGPT.

Now, what if you want to do keyword research from the bottom-up perspective?

Let's start afresh.

Let's give a comment like "provide a list of keywords in the BBQ niche",

and it will start to generate a bunch of keyword ideas.

Now, these are all one word keywords which are highly competitive.

So if you think this list is not helping, you can adjust your command.

Let's say, "can you provide long tail keywords instead?"

And it will go on to get you those keywords.

How cool is that?

Of course, when it's done you can definitely ask for more.

But for now, let's say that I want to group this list of keywords.

Into top level categories so that we

can build a good site structure.

I would give a command,

say "From the keywords above, please group them based on their semantic

relevance", and it will start grouping them like a pro.

And with this you can build a really good site structure for your website or blog.

As you can see, these are top level categories that your blog can adopt.

So there are no set commands or rules.

Just ask the right questions, the right probes, and make sure

that the questions you ask are understandable by a human, and it will

provide you with the most phenomenal information you want.

And honestly, don't you think this is mind-blowing?

You no longer need to spend a lot of time researching.

If you aren't getting value from this,

can you do us a favor and smash that thumbs up button.

We really appreciate that.

And now that we've found a bunch

of keywords, let's verify them to see what we should focus on first.

Now, the old SEO advice is to avoid writing

articles on topics that are highly competitive.

And that still stands true.

But it doesn't mean that you should avoid them completely.

Just put yourself in the position of Google.

What is their mission statement?

It is "to organize the world's information

and make it universally accessible and useful."

And to make sure that the search results are useful.