Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content to build traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, and today I'm going to be talking about when is a zero volume keyword not a zero volume keyword?

Speaker 1: 1:25

This is a real bugbear of mine. It's one that comes up quite a lot with keywords people use. When we're talking to people about our product and about my general philosophy when it comes to SEO and how you choose keywords and topics to write about, people always come back and say, yeah, but what's the volume of that keyword? How much traffic is that keyword generating? What's the volume? And there's a big issue because lots of SEO experts out there and gurus and advice says you must look at a tool that gives you keyword volume and then you should prioritize the keywords that you rank you try to rank for based upon the volume for those keywords. Now this, while it sounds like it makes sense, it's. This is this situation where people are measuring for the wrong metric. Now, now, I've had recent episodes where I've talked about why most SEO tools are wrong. If you go back a few weeks and look at that, you know there's an episode called why most SEO tools are wrong, and that's where I tell you exactly how and why these tools get their data from, why it's wrong, why it is incorrect, why you mustn't pay too much attention to it, and my philosophy has always been you cover a topic in detail, because if you cover a topic in detail, you will pick up loads of keywords you're not even thinking about ranking for. But I want to give you some examples right here. So most of the queries that I look at and we look at in keywords people use are going to be a good few words long, sometimes as much as seven or even more. Okay, now, when you've got queries that are this long, they're naturally going to be so many ways to construct very similar keywords and phrases around that seed that you're working with. So here's some examples.

Speaker 1: 3:16

So I think we're going to write some content about home office desks for small spaces. Okay, that's what we're thinking about. So here's 10, and there could be, you know, this could literally be hundreds around the same thing, but here's just 10 for you. So example best small desk home office. Which home office desks are best for small spaces? Best compact desk for home office. What are the best desks for small workspaces? I have a small home office. What desk should I get? Best desks for tiny home offices. Which space saving desk is best for home office use? Best minimalist desk for a small home office. Home office desks that fit in small rooms. Best corner desk for a small office space. Okay, that's 10 different queries there, but they all have the same search intent. That is, someone who is researching into what are the best options for a desk for office use in a small space.

Speaker 1: 4:17

Okay, and if you're selling those kind of desks or you're trying to help people find those kind of desks, maybe you're an affiliate or maybe you're an e-commerce store or maybe you're just blogging about it you know there are so many terms there. That's just 10, and we could literally do hundreds like that, but they're all 10, and we could literally do hundreds like that, but they're all reconstructing the same keyword, the same keyword, intent and Google. It's really really good for a few things. One is synonyms. Okay, you don't always have to have exactly the keyword. It will infer keywords and synonyms from your content. So this is one thing. This is why we always say gather all the questions people are asking about a topic, about a topic area, as many as you can. Gather those questions, cluster them so you get related questions together and then write a piece of content that covers all those questions.

Speaker 1: 5:14

You don't have to explicitly have every question in there. Sometimes you will, just as the way you write it, sometimes you won't. But what you're doing is you're not just ranking for those keywords that you've thought about and that you've discovered, those questions you've discovered. You're also going to pick up a huge number of other keyword phrases, especially long tail keyword phrases like this. You know you can have one piece of content which will rank for thousands of keywords, literally thousands of keywords and keyword phrases. Okay, and cumulatively that's going to add up to a lot of traffic.

Speaker 1: 5:47

But if you went to a place and said what's the search volume for home office desks that fit in small rooms, those tools are going to say to you at zero, because they haven't got any data at that level. Okay, but cumulatively that page could be getting thousands of visitors a month on a really broad range of these keyword phrase, question phrase, keyword strings. So this is why when I say you know one is a zero volume keyword, not a zero volume keyword because clearly one at that level of data, those types of keywords, the volume estimators have no data so they'll say it's zero, but it's really a good number. If it's just 10, you get 1,000, you rank for 1,000 of these keywords on a piece of content. 10 a month on each one is great. That's 10,000 visitors from that one piece of content. All really low volume. So this is why it's just not worth worrying about volume on these things.

Speaker 1: 6:51

You might be interested in volume data for how many people are interested in home office and the desks in home offices. But you know that's going to be a lot of people because lots of people have home offices. So you have to use a bit of intuition and sometimes at a very high level. Those volume tools can still be useful if you're interested in, say, you want to compare how many people have searched for broadband, any keyword with broadband in it, versus any keyword with I don't know mobile phones in it and you can compare the comparative size of two markets. Okay, you might find that broadband's a bigger market than mobile phones, but I would ignore all of the volume data on that.

Speaker 1: 7:27

Okay, just think about writing content that's going to cover a topic, not the keywords. The questions are important when you're trying to work out what you want to say in those topics and what and what different pieces of content you can answer. You're not. You're not worrying about the volume level. Okay, you're just worrying about covering the topic in detail. And that's where you'll start to drive traffic from, because if you just concentrate on a small number of keywords just because of the high volume, you're not going to succeed, because A there'll be lots of competition because other people are just writing targeted pieces of content for those very short-tailed keywords, but you're going to miss out on so much opportunity all around because you're not properly covering it in detail. So that's the end of my rant today. I hope you found it useful. I hope it sort of helps reinforce why volume is nothing to worry about and why zero volume keywords are actually really so valuable. Anyway, until next time, keep optimizing, stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 8:38

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, the Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson on both.

Speaker 1: 8:50

You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform Keywords People Use at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online, pus those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And, finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize and continually refine your content and targeted, personalized advice to keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is Not that Hard.