SEO Keyword Tools

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>> Two more tools I want you to know about are Google Keyword Planner, and Google Trends. So Google Keyword Planner is great for expanding out from a basic set of keywords, finding relevant related phrases that you should also hit. Google Trends, I'm sure many of you have heard of it.

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If you haven't taken a look at it recently, it has gotten a lot better. It used to be like two years ago, it would consider computer programming to be one unsplittable topic and we would see like, the trend of computer programming is going up. And now, when I demonstrate it, how it works, which is what I'm gonna do next, you'll see that things get quite a bit more granular.

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So with that, I'm just gonna give you a quick walkthrough as to how these tools work, the two Google tools. So what we have here is, we have a couple sort of things you can do in this tool. We can sort of examine with the richness of a set of keywords.

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So looking at the volume data that's, you're getting to see Google search volume on these keywords. And this is my favorite tool of the three, because naming things is hard, coming up with expanded name for these are comprehensive lists is hard. So we're gonna look at search for new keywords using a phrase website or category.

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And finally, this last one, which is sort of the the expander, and I'm gonna just use frontend masters as an example here. So let's use frontendmasters.com. And let's see if they have our modern SEO workshop page as one of the things that Google has indexed thoroughly. We're gonna constrain our search to English, and we're already set up for the United States.

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Let me cancel this, so I was trying the SAS course last night. And now, we can just hit Get Ideas, and what it's doing is, it's kind of looking through the content, and it looks like we've got a lot of general information about SEO. It's a course for frontend developer, learn to be a frontend developer, responsive design with emails.

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So this stuff doesn't really relate to the SEO course specifically, but you can see that it is really, really focused on frontend masters. And typically, what I do here is, I wanna look at the suggested bid. And I skip over, like anything that's in the $40 range, screw that, no, thank you.

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Web developers online, that's also a low intent keyword. That's someone that's looking for a contractor. That's not someone that's looking for a video course. Here, email design course. Now, if we had something that was on HTML emails, and we were sure that we would get a conversion on that-

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>> Which we do.
>> We do, so the subscription price of frontend masters per month might not justify spending $28 for a bid on that keyword, that's one bid, right? So going down here, the less than $10 range, that is where I think that you can get a lot more value.

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So learn web development. This looks good, there's high competition, so that might turn me off there. But APIs with Node JS, that's a good one. We have a great Node JS API design course, which that the Express course, right? Express and node.
>> Yeah, we have several API design with node Express course, and then we have a production node with AWS deploying the APIs.

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>> So what we can also do is, I can say that I don't want anything that is greater than $10 here, and I only want medium and low competition keywords. So if I'm gonna show up, and there's a bunch of other highly competitive people trying to edge me out, I will opt out, I don't wanna spend money on that, right?

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You might have a different strategy for that group, if I have a bakery and I'm trying to compete with Panera, maybe I just wanna say, look, if you're looking for Panera, you're not my customer, right? They sell these mass produced baked goods, and I'm trying to sell these gluten free special things that they don't even offer.

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But here, now we're in business where we see some of these low competition. So you want low competition, high number of average monthly searches, high relevant to you and your business. And then what we can do is, we can actually add some of these to effectively a shopping cart, which then they make it, of course really easy for you to convert that into a Google AdWords campaign.

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But you can also use this, if you take the frontend masters, some of the basic Web development courses and use jQuery, you could even scrape this and just get the keywords out of their UI. And use it elsewhere, just as a big like text file containing all of these.

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>> So we originally did all the keyword research.
>> Yeah.
>> We used aid tools, acting like we're gonna pay.
>> Yeah.
>> But then take those keywords and place it in the title tags, in the descriptions, in the page, in the links, get link, inbound links, using those keywords, and then show up first-

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>> Exactly.
>> In the organic search.
>> Yeah, these are using your your frontend development skills to have an advantage over people that don't know they can extract this stuff really easily. So that's Google AdWords, sorry, that is the keyword planner. I wanna show you this other aspect of it that expands keywords.

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And we will see if we can come up with an interesting result there. So if I wanna put in here, let me put Ember, Angular, view, react, polymer, others like smelt glimmer for react. All right, so let's see what happens. So please, enter keywords and at least two list.

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So these are, See what has changed a little bit, let's see, one more line separated by commas. Okay, And over here, we can do Promise, JavaScript, Async function, and let's try this. This might be a little bit specific here. Okay, so we found a very small intersection between these two things.

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Google Trends is really interesting here, in terms of how it has developed over time. And I'll show you what I expect will be surprising to some of you in terms of the granularity that we can have react js. So it is identified, React as a JavaScript library. Yeah, this is hugely more granular than it used to be.

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We've gone from like, computer programming, a profession, to react js, it is a JavaScript library. They don't even call it a framework, correctly so [LAUGH].
>> Where were you typing that?
>> Sorry, we're at Google Trends here, and I'm right here at, we're a little cut off here.

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Let me see if I can grow things up, let me just shrink my window, so it's not fullscreen. We have a little projector issue here. There we go, so we've got explorer topics up at the top, and I can just type reactjs. Well, let's see if I can do, I'll be really impressed if they do this.

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Okay, they don't get preact, sorry, Jason. All right, react apparently meets with the criteria here. And boy, it is increasing in popularity. I wonder, this must have been like the f8 conference or something like that. And apparently, super popular in China. This doesn't surprise me, a lot of Chinese software development is consulting and contracting to support American companies, this is the most popular framework.

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Freelancers always wanna gravitate towards the thing that there's the largest number of jobs for, so that's why we're seeing a lot of interest there, a lot of interest in the States. And you can see that related topics are also pretty like granular here. We've got Node.js, we've got ECMAScript, git, TypeScript, Meteor is coming up, Sass, that's what we taught yesterday, and so on.

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So I just want this to pop back up on your radar as not just a tool that you can use for keeping a pulse on the trends of the world, but you can see, what are the up and coming things that relate to your technology. If you were looking for a list of blog posts, this would not be a terrible place to start, to get inspiration for topics to write about that relate to your specialization.

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Here's an interesting one that I was playing with last night. It's, if we remove this, and we search for elixir. So we found that this was elixir as a programming language, it's identified that, which is surprising again. So steadily increasing, so it is doubled in popularity since 2014, 2015 until now, which that seems about right.

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But look at how we have a concentration in Scandinavia and Poland on this language, which totally makes sense because Sweden is where Erling is, and elixir is really popular there. But you can see that we have sort of a hotbed of that in this particular area. So in terms of like, when I do Alexa workshops, I know, I'm doing one in Berlin later this month because this is where that's happening.

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So Google Trends is hugely more useful than it has been in the past, just because, either they have more data or their algorithms have gotten better. But the end result is like, you can really see, with a high degree of granularity, where things are going and clusters of related topics.

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>> The whole debate around it is, are they searching for it because they're interested in it or because they're having problems with it, right? So like angular versus react, is angular actually more popular or is it that they're having more errors and searching [INAUDIBLE].
>> Yeah, I don't have any advice there, that's a problem unique to you and me Mark.

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>> It is true.
>> Where the meta people in the room that are actually targeting programming languages. With that, so I hope you play with Google Trends a little bit on your own. It's like some of the best free data you can get for trends and topics. And my favorite section is at the bottom, these related topics and related queries where you can just, like here, if you didn't know that Ecto is something you should target if you're using elixir.

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So that's their persistence library, you should absolutely use that Phoenix framework, is like the rails equivalent there. So we're already seeing, these are amazing keywords to hone in on, that might not be as competitive as the word elixir which by the way, I don't target because I get a bunch of pharmacy related competition there, for just the general word elixir.

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And rails would be the same problem, rails for what? Rails for your garage door, so and this would let you kind of hone in on something more relevant.