All-Stars of Traffic Transcripts – Dan Thies -1-
Dearl:
Coming up first is the keyword guru. Quite simply, he's going to set the record straight
about what is the right and wrong way to do keyword research. He's the head of faculty
of Stomper Net, he's the founder of SEO Research Lab, his name is Dan Thies, and Dan is
a Web Traffic Allstar.
Welcome, Dan, and thank you for joining us today.
Dan:
It's great to be here, Dearl.
Dearl:
Now, to get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became a
Web Traffic Allstar?
Dan:
Well, I didn't start out trying to do this. It all sort of happened as a series of accidents.
Even before the Internet came along, I was publishing a paper newsletter for probably
200 or 300 subscribers, called "The E-Marketing Strategy Letter". It was more about
database marketing, telemarketing, fax, and all of the other technology that was
available. It was sort of a natural progression, when the internet arrived, to start talking
about participating in, back then, Usenet news groups and getting into things like AOL,
getting into the discussions there as an extension of market research mostly at that
time. Then, when the web came along, it just sort of became natural to move the
newsletter onto the web.
Basically, what I did for a long time was just write reviews of other people's products.
Most of the time, they weren't very complementary reviews, but I made a lot of
commission. Even when I would pan something, people would go and buy it. In fact,
some times they would buy it more often when I panned it. It kind of became obvious
that I needed to have my own product if I really wanted to make serious money with
online direct marketing. The newsletter, with as many free newsletters as you could
get, it just didn't seem like the paid version of the newsletter was going to work very
well. Actually, John Reese has proved that that's not necessarily true with the Reese
Letter for quite a while.
I basically had a book on email marketing already written, called Email Marketing Fast
Start. I had an outline for a book on pay-per-click advertising. I had an outline for a
book on search engine optimization. Email marketing was really more of my area of
expertise at that point. Trying to be a smart marketer, I surveyed my list and I said,
"Hey. I've got these three books I could do, and then I'll sell them to you. Which one do
you want first?" I got something like 80% wanted the SEO book. So, OK, fine.
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I locked myself in a room for a couple of weeks and finished the SEO book.
Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on whether I believe in fate, the thing sold like
7,000 copies. I had people like Michael Campbell find it, pick it up, and start promoting
it. So, by the time the dust cleared from SEO Fast Start, it was too late for me to be an
email-marketing guru any more. I was just sort of thrust into being an SEO guy by
default.
I sold that for a couple years and then decided that I was bored and that just about
anybody who was doing SEO or any kind of search engine marketing was so focused on
getting traffic and getting rankings, and not really focused on the quality of the traffic
and conversion. That's when I started talking seriously about keyword strategy. SEO
Research Labs was started as an attempt to actually start doing some measurement and
testing and things like that, and just get people data on, "What's the click-through rate
for a number 3 listing on Google?" or things like that.
We did some of that but ultimately, it was another one of those, "Let's do a little survey
and test something," that got me into the keyword research business. I did just a test
offer because one of the things people had been asking about over and over again that
had bought my book is, "Can you give me help with putting together a keyword list?"
Just to see what the market would do, I did a test. I think I took a segment of only 300
customers out of my customer list and emailed an offer that I think was for $120 or
something like that. I would do a keyword report and send them an Excel spreadsheet
with some data on their keywords.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on whether you believe in fate, I caught 120
clicks out of 300 emails and ended up selling 40 keyword reports. They were all due in a
week. The best people that I have doing this work take a couple of hours to put
together a report. So, I immediately had to reach out and get some help to actually
fulfill on this. It ended up taking a couple of weeks to do it. Based on that experience, I
realized that it was really a viable ongoing business and started doing it.
I thought, the sort of business owner or the sort of do-it-yourself person that was more
of my customer for SEO Fast Start, would be the type of person that would be interested
in a keyword research reports. However, what I found out was that the people out
there that were actually doing consulting in agencies and folks like that were very
interested in out-sourcing that function. The reason why is it's hard to do it well, or at
least back then, especially. It was hard to do it well. You had one or two tools that you
could use and it took a long time. If you're doing four sites a month, you still have a
learning curve to kind of learn it again every week.
So, what we were able to do was make it cheaper for the consultant versus their own
time because we could have people that were specialists and [didn't necessarily] have to
know everything about SEO. We were able to do really well with that business for a
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long time. That business is now, more or less, in kind of a holding pattern. We're pretty
much only servicing the consultants that we've been working with for a while.
Fortunately, it's a lot easier to do that stuff yourself now. In fact, the new version of
Google's keyword tool is just amazing in terms of what it can do for you on keyword
strategy.
Dearl:
Now, Dan, as you're talking, from my perspective, it seems like we've almost come full
circle from when you first got started. Now, it seems like there's so many different tools
out there, and that keyword research stuff changes so quickly that it's kind of hard to
keep track of what the best practices are.
Dan:
Yeah. I think that's sort of true and sort of not. In online marketing circles in particular
but anywhere on the web, there's always someone that wants you to believe that the
world just changed yesterday and you've got to hear from them. I think some of the
stuff that Nitro Marketing has been doing for years is exactly the same stuff we've been
doing for years because it's just tried and true marketing principles. Likewise, with
keyword research, your goals are still the same.
The fact is that you know have some better tools available but you also have a lot of
people that are just kind of putting out hype and some of these kind of nutty ideas to try
and sell you some new tool when, at this point, to me, the best tools are free. There are
a few paid tools that we use but you don't really need to do.... there are spy tools out
there that you can subscribe to but you don't really need to spy on your competitors to
know what the keyword should be in the market. There are tools that you can use that
will let you see what keywords your competitors are ranking on without having to use
the guesswork of these spy tools.
Dearl:
Now, Dan, before we get into exactly how to do keyword research, can you talk a little
bit about the importance of it and why people should spend their time and money on
doing keyword research?
Dan:
Sure! Keyword research is about search marketing. I say this all the time but the search
starts when someone types something into the search box and hits the search button.
Those words that they type mean something. Those words that they type reflect some
kind of intent. There's some kind of conversation going on in their head, and depending
on the keywords, you can find out a little or a lot about what's going on. Some
keywords are very specific and it's very easy to tell what's going on, some keywords are
more vague. It's not just about finding out the list of keywords that might be relevant,
it's also about really understanding what that relevance means and how you get
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yourself to be more relevant for keywords, or how you find the right traffic.
The goal of keyword research and keyword strategy isn't to get more traffic necessarily;
it's to get more customers, more profits, more sales. If it were just about the traffic,
that's a different approach then you'd take if you're thinking about how I reach out into
this channel and find the customers. The cool thing about search is that you basically
are catching people in the act of looking for what you offer. So, a good keyword
strategy helps you do that; find those places where people are out there searching and
get them to your site.
Dearl:
What are the steps involved in doing effective keyword research?
Dan:
Well, let me give you first the old school version, and then sort of the shortcut version of
what we can do now. Then there's actually another step beyond just discovering the
keywords that's really kind of the key to making it work and selecting the right keywords
to focus on. Back in the day, back when all we had was Word Tracker, our brains, and
maybe a few tools that some of us had hacked together, what we started out with was
brainstorming. I think you still start out with brainstorming, trying to think up some
keyword ideas and what are people likely to be using.
Then, we typically do some time in looking at forums, blogs, any place where people are
talking about the products or services, what kind of problems are people trying to solve,
and things like that. We try to find as much of that information as possible. If you have
an ongoing business, where maybe you have customer-service reps that are talking to
people on the phone or answering questions by email, the language that customers use
is often different than what we use internally. A friend had a company where they had
an html code validation tool. Amazingly enough, people didn't type in "html code
validation tool" when they searched.
They would type in things like "html checker" and stuff like that. CD duplicator or CD
burner? Well, those of us that buy them call them CD burners; people that sell them call
them duplicators or replicators or whatever the correct, technical name is for the
product that they have. So, you want to try and do that brainstorming work first just to
make sure that you're not forgetting important aspects of the market space. What we
would typically do then is go onto Wordtracker and start digging into the database there
and find keywords. Now, there are a couple of different features of Wordtracker, for
anyone who's used it, they actually have a new interface now that works a lot better.
Typically, what you do, is you type in some root term, like maybe you type in "baby gift"
if you're selling baby gifts. Then they show you all these different variations of that.
We developed an approach for using Wordtracker that we call "dig and dump" which
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basically is that if the list that we come up with has mostly relevant search terms, mostly
search terms that really make sense, that somebody would search for that and then
want to see something that we offer on our website, we go ahead and add that whole
list, and then we'll clean it up later. However, in a lot of cases you find that maybe a few
out of the top few are relevant and then they start to become really irrelevant, in which
case we tend to then drill down into the variations.
The concept of the long tail gets abused a lot but it's interesting that just about in any
market, you're going to have one very high-volume search term and then a smaller list
of maybe 5-10 search terms that make up almost the same amount of search volume.
In almost every market, it rapidly falls off in volume from there to where you're less
interested in targeting that specific search term on the web page and more interested in
the way that people that vary the search query. So, if people search for "baby gifts for a
boy", "for a girl", and then you get into people might type different colors or occasions
or things like that. Those long search terms that are four or five six words aren't
necessarily going to be great as something you build a web page around, but the
individual words that make those up are what we call keyword modifiers. In the process
of going through and just finding all of the search terms that might be important, we're
after making sure that we want to get the top 20, 25, maybe 50 high-volume search
queries that are being done that might be relevant in our market.
We also want to capture a whole bunch of other data because those extra words that
tag along get woven into our copy. That becomes [chuckle] really important because
that's an extra 30-50% traffic if you do that effectively and just work that copy into your
page. Even if you're not ranking necessarily well on the major search engines you're
targeting, you can actually do really well with mid-volume and long tail queries without
doing specific SEO targeting, just by getting the keywords onto the page.
Once you've got that, our typical step at that point is to start gathering what we call "the
keyword metrics", the data on the keywords; things like the search count. If you're
using Wordtracker, they've got a count in the database from that. Based on the market
share of the search engines that Wordtracker gets data from, you can get a guess as to
how much the search volume will be up inside Google, Yahoo, or MSN, the real search
engines that people use. We also like to gather things like how much competition there
is.
There's this notion of keyword effectiveness index. It's a number, KEI, that people talk
about a lot. Please, anyone who hears this, ignore it! It's useless. However, what is
interesting is actually looking at how many people are competing. You can just do a
search. If you do a search for "baby gifts", I'm sure it will tell you there's like 23 million
or 150 million results or whatever. That's not your competition . The competition is the
people that are actually trying to do SEO, and the real competition is the people that are
actually doing it well enough to be on the top of the first page.
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On Google there's an all in title search. You just type "allintitle:" and then type in the
search term that you're after. It will show you pages ranked based on which ones
actually have all of those words in the title tag page. Putting keywords in the title tag on
a web page is SEO 101. It used to be number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 factor in [inaudible 15:28] back
in the day, before search engines started analyzing links. That narrows it down. Now,
maybe you have 25,000 competitors.
You can also do searches based on in anchor. That means that people have actually
linked to that page using those keywords. When you combine those two things, you
end up discovering that there really are only a few thousand websites out there that are
really trying to get ranked for this term. I can't imagine the greatest action hero in
history, Bruce Lee, beating up 23 million people but I can imagine him beating up a few
hundred or a thousand. If you think of yourself as you're in a fight, you just reduced the
number of people you're actually fighting with. The rest of them are spectators at best.
Most of the time, with that big number, that 150 million or whatever, it more tells you
how popular those words are in the language. Then it tells you who's trying to do SEO
and actually get the traffic. I always tell people, "Don't worry about the competition so
much. Usually, the competition is stupid and lazy. The ones that aren't stupid and lazy,
they get successful and busy, and they stop thinking about keyword strategy. So, you
can still be in there.
Now, the new school, the new, easy way to do keyword research is with the Google
keyword tool. Just Google "google keyword tool" to find it because the URL is not easy
to spell out and have anybody remember. What that tool lets you do is a couple of
things. You can type in keywords and get a list of related keywords from Google. Now,
these are suggestions. It's cleaned up. Wordtracker has an unfiltered feed of pretty
much whatever people type, and Google does clean up their data, so you don't
necessarily get all of the data. They're trying to come up with suggestions which means
sometimes they skip stuff for some unknown reason. So, you do have to spend some
time drilling down.
The cool easy thing that you can do is you can actually put in the address of a website,
check a box that says, "Get keywords, not just from this website's homepage, but from
all pages that are linked from it," and hit the go button, and Google will pretty much
give you a nicely clustered list of keywords for any website that you point it at. You can
do that with as many competitor sites as you feel like to build a big keyword list. You
might not get all of the long tail stuff, and we still go onto Wordtracker or Keyword
Discovery to get what we call the modifiers, those extra words people type in. Google
seems to be editing some of that stuff out.
For the high-volume keywords, the major priorities that are really going to bring you the
most traffic and the most customers, Google can expose that for you in about 10-15
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minutes. It doesn't just tell you what your competitor’s keyword strategy is, it also tells
you kind of what it ought to be. That's why our keyword research business is a little bit
in limbo right now because the main value that we have now is the additional data that
we gather which is really only useful for consultants that are involved in projecting
budgets across large keyword campaigns, and not so useful for the person that knows
they're 25 or 30 keywords they need to go get.
Dearl:
Wow. That's fantastic, Dan. What's a checklist of things people should not forget to do
when doing keyword research?
Dan:
Well, first of all, don't forget that your customers are the ones that decide [chuckle]
what the words are. Maybe not a checklist, but the second thing is that relevance really
matters. We don't use the search volume or popularity of a keyword to decide which
one is the best. We use what we call a weighted popularity. Basically, what we do with
that is make an estimate, and there are elaborate ways that you can try to get a better
guess but that gets into probably a 3 or 4-hour conversation about the science of
keyword strategy.
However, if you imagine that there are 1000 people a day searching for "purple
widgets", and you sell 2 out of 4 kinds of purple widgets. So, maybe you're relevant to
only 50% of the people that search for purple widgets. Out of 1000 searches a day, only
50% are likely to want what you have, so you really only have 500 targeted searches a
day. That’s 50% times the 1000 a day. Understanding that is the difference between
going and trying to get ranked Number 1 for "new car" and spending what it would cost
to do that, versus spending half of that to get ranked for "new Honda", "Honda leasing",
and "Toyota leasing" the keywords that really indicate a buying intent and that are really
relevant.
To an extent, you can do this by just doing some brainwork, but if you work with clients,
like I have in the past, clients are always overly optimistic about how relevant they are.
If you're selling Harley Davidson baby jackets for babies, and someone searches for
"unique baby gifts", that is a unique baby gift but if that's the only thing you sell, you're
not going to satisfy very many of the people that search for "unique baby gifts". So, you
have to think of it from the customer's perspective and not from your own perspective.
The last thing I would say that you don't want to forget about is that the keywords are
the keywords. I mean, people are searching, using whatever words they're using, and
you can't change that. The idea that there's going to be some non-competitive niche
out there that there's a lot of money to be made but nobody's trying to do it, forget
about that. That's the needle in the haystack, and it's a whole lot easier to go after a
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market that you know is working and go take it, rather than to try and invent some new
market, at least in my experience.
Dearl:
Dan, do you have a real-life example that people could see of this process?
Dan:
Well, I don't know about something that people can see but I can tell you a story about
Brad Fallon. He was one of the two founders of Stomper Net. He's a pretty well known
guy online with Internet marketing, with SEO. He actually did the first version of
[inaudible 22:02] with Search Engines and I recently did the updated 2008 edition of
that, working with them. Brad's claim to fame, at least as far as people knew, was that
he had done a really great job of doing SEO for My Wedding Favor site, where they sell
wedding favors. That's the bubbles and other junk you buy; rice to throw and little
trinkets and trash that you give out at the wedding. That's probably not the description
they want me to give but anyway, more or less it's the plastic junk that you get at the
wedding that's got the bride and groom's name on it and stuff. They were ranked
Number 1 for wedding favors.
They had a group of 60 apprentices that they had taken on, not just SEO, but all kinds of
just building online businesses. They had what they were calling a boot camp. They
invited me to come and talk about keyword strategy. I've been doing SEO for long
enough that I remember when Brad was just an annoying newbie that showed up at
forums and asked questions but understand here that I'm in a hotel with about 60
people that think that he just farts money and can do no wrong. They're all talking
about how, "There's now way anybody could possibly beat Brad on that wedding favors
search." So, one of his competitors was actually there because she's actually smart
enough to wholesale [inaudible 23:28] competitors. She started bugging me about can I
help her. I made a bet with Ken Gins that whichever one of us would get Brad's Number
1 ranking for wedding favors away from him first, the other one would come out and do
a live event for them. I'm thinking, "All I've got to do is grab this Number 1 ranking
somehow and then Ken will have to come out and I'll just sit and watch him work while I
collect the admission fees." However, it didn't work out like that because Ken actually
passed away.
This lady would not leave me alone. She kept bugging me. So finally, I said, "OK, I'll
work with you. You can take one of my classes." We started doing this work on
keyword strategy. She was, I think, on page 2. Somewhere on Number 19 for wedding
favors. You really have to be in the top few spots to get enough traffic to make it worth
a big effort. So, what we did was we built a list of keywords, just like I just talked about.
We went through and just said, "OK. Top 50 keywords. Number 1 is “wedding favors.”
We're going after Number 2 through Number 50." We spent about 6 weeks just doing
basic SEO stuff--title tags on her pages, pointing links from one page to another that had
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the right keywords in them, just really basic SEO.
After about 6 weeks, we had found out later when we started sharing some data, just
kind of comparing results with Brad, after six weeks of working on just a smarter
keyword strategy, just going after that low-hanging fruit, she had gone and was actually
getting more traffic out of Google than Brad was even though he was Number 1 for
"wedding favors.” There's an interesting lesson there because in every market, there's
that one search term, maybe one or two or three search terms that everybody's beating
themselves up over. There's more money right underneath that, right below their
radar. Brad had gotten so busy, I mean, this was by this point, I think a 2 or 3 million
dollar-a-year business, and that doesn't even include the wholesale site, he wasn't even
watching [laugh] the search results past that one.
Their keyword strategy was two words, one phrase. It didn't take much to go and grab
the rest of the market out from under their nose, [inaudible 26:05]. The interesting
thing though is all of the work that you do in building links and all of the other stuff that
you do to boost your position on these second-tier keywords, that also brings page rank
and link reputation into your website. If you're targeting unique wedding favors, guess
what? That also has wedding favors in it, in the link, and so I think it was 5 or 6 months
before she was in the Number 3 spot, or maybe the Number 2 spot, and we had been
working together, I think about 7 or 8 months when she grabbed the Number 1 spot.
She actually held onto that for almost two years before Brad got some of the hack issues
that they had with their site knocked out and got back on top, where he is now. I think,
at this point, he's unlikely to take his eye off the ball again. It probably is impossible to
beat him now. We did not go after that big marquee search term that you'd want to sell
an info-product off of. All we did was go and get all the money. I think that's a pretty
good example of what you can do with keyword strategy. Now, these days, you'll find
most of the time that whatever those second-tier keywords are, there's somebody
that's decided to carve out a niche, and that they're specializing. If it's "bridal shower
favors", which is I think Number 5 or Number 6 keyword in our list there on the wedding
favors site, there's sites now that target just that. So, do you do have to compete with
them. Fortunately, if you do have a broader, more general site, you actually have a
chance to sell the same customer more stuff. You actually probably have a lot of
advantages in terms of the lifetime value of a customer, that somebody who's trying to
subdivide a niche and go smaller doesn't have. We've never really had too much of a
problem knocking the little guys out of the way when we want to. You can always, of
course, just create your own niche or boutique type-site yourself. It's very easy to make
another website [chuckle] and go do that.
Dearl:
That's a great story. That actually highlights the point perfectly that no matter how
smart you are, you really need to make sure you don't take your eye of the ball, and
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about the volume of keywords can really make up for not having the Number 1 listing
for the keyword you really want.
Dan:
Yeah, and by the way, it's about profit. I mean, out of the top 10, there were 3 search
terms that we pulled out immediately because when I started walking though the list,
"Tell me what you sell here. Are you actually strong and do you have a strong offer to
make it worth getting traffic?" There were three of them where she said, "Boy, it'd be
great to get Number 1 for that. We've got like 80% margins on that stuff." I said, "Why
didn't you think of this before? Why are you worried about wedding favors where you
make maybe 30% and you've these things that you make 80%?" That was the first thing.
We actually stopped down and didn't do any keyword strategy until we had all the SEO
done on those. Those were like a week to the top of the first page. In two cases, we
had double listings with nothing but just basic SEO.
I mean, obviously, she didn't have a completely weak site, she was on page 2 for a
marquee search term there, but it was maybe a couple hours of her time to go grab
Number 1 rankings, and Number 1 and Number 2 sometimes, for these search terms
that were the things that made her the most money. That's another thing to think
about in terms of relevance is what's the best thing for you, in your business. A lot of
the time, there are things that you have to carry, that you don't make money on. None
of these guys in the wedding business make money on the wedding cameras. If you
notice, there aren't a whole lot of them doing pay-per-click advertising on wedding
cameras because they don't make a profit immediately on that sale, although maybe
they can sell them stuff afterwards.
Do you want to spend a bunch of time being Number 1 on Google for "wedding
cameras?" Well, no! Compared to other things that you could do with your time, like
getting Number 1 for "bridal shower favors,” it's not the same impact. Even if there was
more traffic, it's not the same impact on your business.
Dearl:
I appreciate your time today, Dan. If people want to learn more about you and how to
do keyword research the right way, where would you recommend they go?
Dan:
I would recommend going to seofaststart.com. Download the book. I mean, you can
get on my list if you want to but you can also just download it directly from the
download page and get on my list after you decide I'm not full of it. The keyword
strategy chapter in there is pretty darn good. We also, at Stomper Net have some video
at stomperuniverse.com that covers a number of different things about keyword
strategy. There's a thing we call the "adwords triangulation method" which is about
doing pay-per-click advertising for eCommerce, business, consumer-type sites. When
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people are doing stuff like baby gifts and stuff like that, it's really an effective technique.
We also talk about some of these aspects of keyword strategy, commercial intent, and
stuff like that there.
Dearl:
Now, we are out of time but what are your final thoughts about how to get more traffic
and sales today?
Dan:
I think we spend too much time on the front-end traffic, the acquisition of a lead, rather
than the follow-up. Build a list. I don't care what you sell. Come up with a good offer
and build a list. If you're selling wedding stuff, create a free resource where people can
go and do wedding planning, and then you can sell them all that wedding stuff by email.
There are a whole lot more channels besides search and they all add up to more traffic
and more success. Just being present in more places means that you'll probably do
better with search because people will link to you on their own.
Dearl:
Excellent. Thank you for joining us today, Dan.
Dan:
Thank you!
Dearl:
That was great. I really appreciated Dan's [inaudible 32:11] about such an important
topic. Now, before we move on to the next Allstar of Traffic, I'd like to take a quick
break and get your feedback on that lesson from Dan. Now's the time to go and vote
for Dan Thies. Please stop right now and go to allstarsoftraffic.com/16 and rate the
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