Speaker 1: 0:52

Hi Ed Dawson here, and, as I'm a bit busy at the moment and need a break, welcome to another one of my best of SEO is not that hard podcasts. These are the episodes from the back catalog that I think have the greatest hits and ones that are still relevant and provide great value for you. So, without further ado, let's get into the episode. 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. Hello and welcome to episode 101 of SEO is not that hard.

Speaker 1: 1:38

Today I'm going to be talking about keyword overwhelm. Now. This topic came to me the other week. I was chatting with a friend of the podcast, steve, over in Louisiana and he was just asking me some questions about how to deal with keywords, how to choose keywords to concentrate on, on which pages, that kind of thing, and as he was describing it, he basically mentioned that he was overwhelmed by all the keywords that he was finding, and it was leading to a situation of not really knowing what to do. There's just too many, and I completely understand where he was coming from. You know, when I've used more traditional keyword research tools in the past, where you just get reams and reams and reams and reams of keywords, all of which there's lots of similarity between them, but you can end up with thousands. So it's trying to work out what do I do with all these keywords. Do I create a page for every keyword? Which keywords do I choose to start with? Just what do I do? It's like being buried under an avalanche of keywords and not knowing where to go with it.

Speaker 1: 2:50

Now, this is where there's a very simple way to sort of start to sort this out for yourself, and that's to use keyword clustering. Now, I know I've banged on about keyword clustering a lot over the last few episodes sort of 10, 20 episodes maybe but that's because it really is something that can make a massive difference to your SEO, especially when you're producing content and knowing where to start and what content to build from this huge list of keywords. So if you take clustering, what it'll do is you can take those big lists of keywords and, if you cluster them, put them into a tool like ours where you can cluster it. What we'll be able to do is find which of those keywords really belong together, because you don't want to be creating a page for every single keyword. Google clearly doesn't like that, because you can end up to be creating a page for every single keyword. Google clearly doesn't like that, because you can end up with huge numbers of pages with lots that are very, very similar, and that's when they start to cannibalize each other, like I spoke about a couple of episodes ago.

Speaker 1: 3:45

So, to deal with this keyword overwhelm, if you cluster the keywords, it will then narrow down the content that you need to produce. So you might have several thousand keywords, but really there might only be half a dozen, a dozen pieces of content you need to create to cover those keywords, especially because Google deals really well with synonyms. So you don't actually have to cover every exact keyword within a piece of content, because Google will do that, filling in the blanks for you. So it will know that if a user is requesting google a particular keyword or or a query and containing certain keywords, google will search for the synonyms so it might return content that doesn't actually have to exactly contain those keywords. Like keyword phrase. It can work out the synonyms. So clustering will help you a find out which keywords to pull together and also identify within those which of those keywords are the ones that are most related and the ones that you need to use within your content.

Speaker 1: 4:49

But after we'd discussed this concept of the clustering and how it can help sort out the keyword overwhelm, I said you know, I point out to you there's actually a different way that I do things. Um, because my philosophy is to concentrate on questions. Now it's fine to get a big list of keywords and sometimes I've done this. I'll get a big list of keywords, cluster them and from those clusters identify the topics of the clusters. So, like then, I've got themes that people are talking about and then what I'll do is go to um keywords people use and search for. People also asks around those particular themes that have been identified. That will then find me all the questions people are asking on that theme and I'll often do a deep search so I can get like a hundred or more questions that are people asking on that theme. So I've identified, I use a big keyword list to identify all the themes of the area and then with those themes I'll do this deep dive into people. So I have to get the questions out and then I'll cluster those questions to group the questions together. This then gives me a great base for what to actually create content on, because ultimately, people come to Google to get questions answered.

Speaker 1: 6:07

So if your content answers questions rather than tries to shoehorn in keywords, you'll actually produce more helpful content, better quality content, and you will naturally cover the keywords needed to answer the question as you create the content and, as I say, you don't need to hit every single individual keyword because google will deal with synonyms for you. So this is how to go from a huge list of keywords that are. That's the trouble with keyword lists they're quite often not very they make a lot of sense. They don't actually tell you what questions people are asking. But if you can cluster them to find the themes and then query the themes people also ask you, then get the questions that you need to answer, that will then cover all those keywords that you're trying to hit. So it's a different way of doing it and I know it might be different to what some other people might say to do, but this is something that's worked for me for many years and it actually makes a lot more logical sense and it helps you actually cover a topic in a way that's more holistic than just creating, churning out content to hit keyword after keyword after keyword after keyword, rather than actually trying to answer people's questions on a topic and build a picture of the topic that will help people understand what's going on. Also help Google understand that you know the topic that you're talking about, you're covering it in depth and getting that topical authority, so hopefully that helps. So if you've been struggling with keyword overwhelm, I would strongly suggest try clustering identify your themes, then find the people also ask questions around those themes and then base your content on covering those cluster. People also ask questions into the pages that google's actually looking for to rank. I hope that helps.

Speaker 1: 8:00

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 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.

Speaker 1: 8:34

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. 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 use dot com. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.