SEO A to Z - part 12 - "Keyword Cannibalization to Keyword Volume"

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising 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. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, welcome back to another episode of Not that Hard. It's me here, ed. As usual.

Today we're on to part 12 of our SEO A to Z, so I'm going to cover keyword cannibalization to keyword volume. Everything starts with keyword today. So keywords is the first thing. Really, keywords, you know they are the words and phrases that people search for in google, which, therefore, websites aim to target. You know, we all know, well, I think we all know what keywords are. So, yeah, so if you've got a website, there's going to be certain keywords that you. You might not know what those keywords are, but there are keywords that your website needs to target to sort of serve the audience that you're looking to provide value to. So these are the keywords. We've got to find them, we've got to learn about them, and there's a whole load. Now we can talk about keywords. So let's start with alphabetically, as we always do, keyword cannibalization.

Now, keyword cannibalization this is a problem that can occur when multiple pages on a website target the same keyword, whether intentionally or not, and what you do is you dilute your ability to rank for the keyword across these pages Because, essentially, google, when it's trying to classify the pages on your site, it's these two pages that are essentially serving the same purpose, the same intent, covering the same keywords. It's going to look at them and go well, which one should I rank and in what circumstances should I rank each one? So what you're doing is you're diluting your ability by having two pages. It's better to consolidate into one page and cover those keywords on the one page. Now you might find that you know you're doing this. It could be hard to work out. Well, which bits should I have the one page? Now you might find that you know you're doing this. It could be hard to work out well, which bits should I have on one page, or should this, should it still be two pages? But just, we move around the subjects of each page. So this is where what you know to solve this problem, you can use.

What is our next topic here keyword clustering. Now, what keyword clustering do? This is the process where we group together related keywords to cover them on the same page or group of related pages to avoid keyword cannibalization. Now, keyword clustering best carried out in our experience by using search engine result page or SERP clustering now. Now, what this is is where we go to Google and for every keyword, we do a Google search and see what the top 10 results are. The top 10 organic results are for that keyword, and then we do it for all the other keywords that we're targeting to the same process. Do a Google search, get the top 10 results, see what they are and record them, and then, once we've got all that data together, we then compare which keywords have similar results. So we might say, if two keywords have three URLs that rank higher when we search for them in common, we'll consider these to be clustered because essentially, google's ranking the same pages for those two keywords.

Now, obviously, this is a really difficult thing to do if you're trying to cluster I mean even if you're just doing it for 10 keywords, let alone hundreds or even thousands of keywords. It's a huge logistical process to go through all those searches, record them all and then do all the cross-referencing. Fortunately there are tools out there that can do this for you. Keywords People Use. My own tool can do it for you. So we've got full keyword clustering. I can do search clustering like this. I can do thousands of pages in just a matter of minutes, do all those connections for you and create all the clusters for you. So if you're interested in doing this, do go to keywordspupiliescom because we can help with that keyword clustering process. But it's really powerful, this keyword clustering, because it helps you stop the keyword cannibalization. So it means that all your pages are really well targeted, with all the right keywords on the same pages and on the same page connected together rather than splitting out across multiple pages and diluting your ability to rank. So it's a really really key process when you are creating and designing a structure for a site and what you're going to write about and what keywords you're going to target on each page, on each part of the site. So really highly recommend that you go and look at that next keyword density, also known as keyword ratio.

Now this is kind of like an SEO myth. It goes back to the very early days of search engines and the very first basic search engines were very, very basic and all they did was look at the, look at the content of a page and count how often a keyword appeared on a page. And the more times a keyword appeared on a page, the higher they would rank it in the search engine. And when we're talking going about 30 years now to the very first basic search engines, now they were obviously incredibly easy to spam because all you had to do was just like repeat your keyword multiple times at the bottom of the page and you could rank and your keyword density would matter. It doesn't anymore and it hasn't for years. So if you see that anybody talking to you and saying you must have a certain keyword density ratio, well, you know, a certain number of times you have to mention the keyword on the page compared to all the key, all the other words on the page for it to rank in any place. It's just nonsense, it doesn't work like that. You can actually even rank web pages without for a term, with for a query, without even having the query on the page, if you, if you have the right backlinks, if you have the right um using other synonyms on the page, google is really good at working out what related keywords, how people can search for one keyword, but they actually mean another one using synonyms. So, but keyword density just this is a warning flag. Do you see? If someone talks to you about keyword density being important, that's a red flag. Walk away from that. If someone talks to you about keyword density being important, that's a red flag. Walk away from that person's advice, because they're giving you terrible, terrible advice.

Next, we've got keyword difficulty. Now, keyword difficulty is a measure that some keyword research tools will assign to keywords to try and indicate how difficult it would be to rank for a certain keyword based on competition. However, they don't factor in that this difficulty level will vary depending on the site that's trying to rank for the keyword, how much topical authority it may or may not have in the area. So, for example, if you've got a website that is amazing on the topic of lawnmowers, right, you have got loads of authority on lawnmowers, loads of other lawn mower sites linked to you. You are just you know, you are the topical authority on lawn mowers. Then keyword difficulty for you on anything lawn mower related, it's going to be really really low. So a tool might say, oh god, this lawn mower related keyword is really really difficult. But for you on your site it's not because you've got that authority, you've got all that building, you've got all the right content you are. If you talk about lawnmowers, google's going to give you a massive, great big leg up.

If you started to write some content about dishwashers right, you could find a keyword research source and, hey, this is a real low difficulty. This, this dishwasher term, is really low difficulty. You could write content on dishwashers, put it on your lawnmower site and it might not get anywhere at all because the dishwasher site, the sites with authoritative dishwashers, are just gonna, are just gonna, outrank you, even if they are not as big a site as you. They might not have the same number of backlinks as you, they might have much lower page rank than you, but because their topical um niche is dishwashers google relates dishwashers to them they're much more likely to beat you. So this is why keyword difficulty from keyword um research tools is a really, really tricky one to sort of wrap your head around and work on. So it can be useful. I'm not saying it's you know, if you take it as relative, you know if it's in your topical niche and you're looking at keywords just in your niche, it's saying which ones are harder, which ones are easier might work. But if you're starting from new, for a new niche or a new site, then Whatever you do, you have to cure difficulty difficult for you because you're a new site across across the board. So yeah, it's concept that some tools use and I'll'll just say take it with a pinch of salt.

Next we've got keyword grouping. Now, this is just another term for keyword clustering. So you'll find some people talk about keyword grouping, some tools talk about keyword grouping. What they're essentially doing is trying keyword clustering and just going back to keyword clustering, obviously I talked about doing SERP clustering, search engine result post clustering. There are other clustering techniques that some people will try and say to you are the best, like using AI, by using NLP and various other techniques. But trust me, we've tried all of them. When we were building the clustering into keywords people use, we tried the AI, we tried NLP, we tried a whole bunch of stuff. Nothing comes close to the results that you get from search engine result page clustering, because we tried all of them before doing search engine results. But, uh, clustering, because that's harder. The search clustering is harder. In terms of crawling google, it's a harder one to do. We looked for the easier options, the sort of the quick fixes, and, trust me, they're nowhere near as good. Right next up, we've got keyword research. So, yeah, keyword research is the process of discovering what keywords to cover when developing content, and there's yeah, there's loads of free and paid keyword research tools out there to help you achieve this.

Keywords people use. Obviously, my tool is the one that I'm. Obviously. I obviously think that's the best because I designed that around my process. My process has always been to consider questions first rather than just pure keywords, because essentially, everybody goes to google to ask questions. They're trying to solve a problem, they're trying to get a question answered. It might not be a straight question with a question mark on the end, but underlying what everybody does when they go google. Think about it yourself. You're trying to answer a question. Even if it's like where's the cheapest place to find this lawnmower, and you type lawnmower, you're still trying to answer a question there. So I always think in terms of questions first, which is what we built. Curious people use to concentrate on questions. So, as I say, depending on what you want to do, might use other tools, but do have a look at my tool. You might find it's useful or you might not, and it's free to try. So you've got nothing to lose. So that's my pitch. I'll try not to pitch again in this one.

It's difficult when we're talking about keywords and we've got a keyword research tool. Next we've got keyword stuffing. Now this is very similar to when we were talking about keyword density just now. It's a very basic spam technique of trying to repeat same keyword and keyword variations on the page over and over to try and improve rankings. Now it's easily spotted nowadays and easily discounted by the search engines. Don't keyword stuff. It won't help. It'll just make your content sound awful. Um, it's the kind of thing that's going to be picked out quite easily by the search engines now. So yeah, not, not a recommended technique.

Then, finally, we've got keyword volume. Now keyword volume is a metric that some keyword research tools will provide for a keyword. That estimates the number of monthly searches for a keyword. But you've got to be cautious over the accuracy of these figures. There's no tool has direct access to google search volume data. So these tools are all using a small number of data suppliers who will give keyword volume estimates based on some data that they pull from. Most of them will pull from the keyword AdWords tool and some other sources online that kind of aggregate this data. Now, the number of keywords out there is almost infinite that people ask. You know, google say themselves that 15 to 20 percent of all the queries they see every day are brand new and never been seen before. So you've got to consider almost 50. You know almost a fifth of all queries and brand new every day. So chasing volume is not something I've recommended.

I've done plenty of at least one of the podcasts on the concept of why you shouldn't chase volume. Now we do actually now in some parts of keywords people use involve volume and volume works on sort of short tail queries. So, like broadband or broadband deals or broadband speed tech, we can get data for these. But it's still just an estimate and it's not a guarantee that there are that many searches around on these terms. But it's an estimate and we use it now in kubectl where we do that when we do the clustering process. We talked about kubectl. When we do that we try and work out, for each cluster that's produced, what the broad topic area of that cluster is, and we will then be able to go and get a keyword estimate on that broad topic, which can then help us and help you decide which clusters to aim for first.

If you're trying to go after volume, if you want to sort of split your effort and say, well, I'll write for the clusters that have, across their topic area, the most amount of volume first, and we do this. But it's still something where my overall philosophy is don't concentrate on volume to a great deal, because ultimately, the people you want on your website it's not just pure numbers. Most people are trying to sell something on their website. You want the people who will buy, and you know so. You only really need the people who really you know, whose intent matches exactly what you're selling on your website. So the small number of people who come out of the hordes that actually buy, they're the ones that you need to worry about. You don't need to worry about. You don't need to worry about the volume. The only the only one way you do worry about volume is if you're trying to do display ads and you are a pure volume player, but you know it's the one case where it's different. But from anyone, anyone else, the only people you really need are those who are really in the market for what you're selling, and that's where you concentrate on the questions. Concentrate on the intent of those people is the key thing there. Okay, so that's it. We've done keyword cannibalization to keyword volume.

Uh, and I'm sorry if I did talk too much about keywords people using this. You know I've, if you listen to enough of my podcasts, I try not to um have them as a pitch for our product. We are sponsored by the product, obviously, but just this one was so about keywords. It's so relevant to the product that I couldn't help but get it in, unfortunately. So I do apologize if it was too much, but if you can think of any other Ks you know any other terms winning with K that I've missed, then do let me know. I can get them added. And until next time, see you later.

Before I go, 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 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 it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

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