Why we've been thinking about volume recently

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hi there, welcome to SEO is not that hard. It's Ed here.

As usual, today I'm going to be talking a bit about why we at Keywords People Use have been thinking about volume recently. If you're a long-time listener, you will know that I generally say to people don't worry about keyword volume, aim to answer people's questions. Now, that still holds. That's still my complete philosophy. But I do appreciate that there comes a time when you do have to start thinking about volume, because at a certain point, you have to be deciding on how you're going to spend your time and effort when there's only so much content you can create in any given time period. So how do you decide which content to create? And that is where, time and again, talking to customers, I'm hearing the question about volume. So that's where we've been giving it some, some thought here at curious people use, on how we can sensibly think about volume without sort of breaking the philosophy and end up people chasing volume for volume's sake rather than it being chasing volume because it's the sensible thing to do so.

In context, here's a bit of history as to how I've always looked at creating content and building sites, and that's a framework that I've built up over the years, bit by bit, and it kind of splits into five parts and I call it the quest framework because it just helps me remember what the parts are. So the first letter, q, is questions, that's finding questions, sourcing questions, the questions that people are asking about your topic, about your products, about whatever it is that you're interested in building content about. Find those questions. The second part is U understanding intent, and that is where we in our process, we actually where you cluster those questions together that are related to each other so you can then build content around them. So the third part, engaging content creation that's when we build the content that's going to answer those questions, the questions that we've clustered together in in the understanding part. Then obviously we structure our website that's the s and it builds topical authority that's the t. So that's really how I've always built sites and this was a manual process back in the day when I started. So it's thinking and finding all the questions I can, then grouping them together into related concepts, then creating the content, then structuring the website, building topical authority. Now, obviously, as I said, that was all manual back in the day and a lot of it at the time was because these data sources weren't available, like people. So I only became available uh, 2015, ish time, um, prior to that, you know, we were. We were just literally building question sets ourself and it was laborious. You missed a lot of questions. It wasn't perfect. So that's why, as time goes on, we we have automated more and more of the process to bring better results.

Now, obviously, at the point before when we were choosing what content to build, we weren't looking at volume because we didn't have volume data, but we were making volume decisions for ourselves really. So, for example, in broadband at Kodi, we didn't really cover business broadband because we just knew that there's less volume on business because consumers in the UK uk there are like 36 million households, something along those lines, 30 million ish households and we knew that there was a far smaller number of businesses, business premises, and those business premises tended if there were big companies tended to use very specialist broadband sort of internet providers and if there were smaller companies tended to just buy a residential normal broadband. Anyway, the actual number of people buying specialist sort of business broadband deals that we could sell with the providers we've got, that didn't require lots of salesmen as of the sort of self-service business broadband stuff wasn't a big enough market. We just knew that intrinsically we didn't need to research the volume. So we chose to consumer side and even within that, you know, we'd make decisions on which, say, providers to cover in the first instance based on volume. We knew who the big providers were. We knew more people are going to be asking questions about them. So we just built content on them. So we were chasing volume. We just weren't chasing it at the keyword level.

And I still don't say chasing at the keyword level is the right thing to do, because we know that when we go and look at any of these keywords that we find any questions. If you go to the providers of keyword data and we say to them what's the volume for this question, this long tail question, and they always come back and say zero. Now we know it's not zero because these are questions that we're getting, for example, from Google. People also ask Google only shows questions that people have asked it and it sorts them by volume. So we know that we've got a sorted by volume list, we just don't know the volume. The keyword information providers who aggregate data on keyword volume, they're only guesstimating it from certain sources and they can only get it at a certain level, so they can't go down as granular as we do in the keywords we source. So they just say they're all zero, which is nonsense.

Um, but we're thinking now we can actually probably bring keyword volume in at a higher level. And that's where, once obviously we've you've found your questions and then you've clustered your questions using our clustering tool, we then take, say, you may put in 300 questions or even more that you've discovered and you bring it down and cluster it, it might then become, instead of being 300 keywords, it might come down to sort of 10, 20 clusters. Within these clusters we've then got a lot more information. So each cluster may contain, you know, a few dozen questions, five or six questions, but enough questions where we can then actually interrogate that question set and say okay, what are the core themes of this question set? How can we narrow this down to a sort of a shorter um the other head terms that could summarize what all these questions are about? So, for example, um say it was broadband again and we have got loaded questions about landline telephones related to broadband.

All the individual questions themselves will come back as zero. But if we can shorten that down to landline phones, we can then get a volume estimate from the data providers for that shorter head term which we can then compare with all the other clusters. So if we do the same thing for all the clusters and find what the kind of the shorter term, shorter head term of the topic is for that cluster, we can then start to sort those clusters by volume, give traffic estimates for the size of each cluster. So, while that's not going to give you individual keyword volume, if you know that if you cover that cluster properly, answer all the questions within it, which automatically as part of this process, finds you lots of other keywords that you'll start ranking for because you naturally answer the question, google will start to rank you for lots of other keywords that you aren't specifically writing for, but you'll pick up the synonyms for them. You'll start including keywords, just incidentally, and you'll start ranking for more of them.

It'll help you, with these volume estimates from clusters, make sensible decisions about where to focus your time, and obviously it makes sense to focus on the, the clusters that have got more search volume and the topics that got more search volume, rather than the clusters that have got more search volume, and the topics that have got more search volume rather than those which have less. So, then, this is something we're working on, looking at how we can work it out, so can't make any promises yet on when it's coming, but this is the kind of thing where, if it isn't an obvious one, like it was in the broadband example between business and consumers that I give, it will help you, hopefully, a more granular level, find where to focus your efforts. So that's why my focus on you know, don't look at volume when it comes to keywords still holds and that's a hill I'll die on um. But when it comes to topic level, obviously, yeah, there is. There is always a a good reason to look at volume for those, even especially when it's starting off on a site.

If you are trying to build a site just to create a huge volume of traffic. You're obviously going to want to go for broad overview topics that have much more volume than those that don't. It just depends on your niche Some niches, volume doesn't matter. All you're after is customers who are going to buy a product off you, and then volume doesn't matter. All you're after is customers who are going to buy a product off you, and then volume doesn't matter. It's all about complete topicality and getting the right people in front of you, whereas other people, other sites, are looking for volume, because they'll maybe just be a display advertising business and it's all about volume, and then that matters a lot more.

So, anyway, I'd just like to share that today. I'm sure we'll be talking more about this in the future and as soon as you've got anything to share, you will be the first people to know. Don't worry about it. And yeah, if you've got any thoughts on volume, if you've got any thoughts on any of these, they do get in touch. All the details are fine to get in touch with the show notes or in the outro at the end of the show.

And yeah, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use that. You can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. You by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO. Is not that hard.