 All right, everybody feeling good? We're ready for the next speaker. We're gonna get started. Next speaker has spoken at MozCon many times, always one of the most popular speakers we have. Dr. Pete Meyers, a legend in the SEO industry. He created MozCast. He created the Google Algorithm Search History. He has the most interesting job in the world as a marketing scientist. He gets to play with algorithms and data all day long. Today, he's gonna talk about something that is really important in these modern times of constant change, and that's keyword research. Sometimes a boring topic, but not with Dr. Pete. Excited what he has to say. Let's watch Dr. Pete. Thanks for joining us from MozCon Virtual. This is my ninth time on the MozCon stage, as it were, in my home office. And I'll be honest, it's not how I expected to spend my ninth year here. And I'm sure it's not how you expected it either. We miss you. We're sorry you're not all here in person. This has been obviously time of tremendous change. I keep trying to avoid the word unprecedented, but the truth is, it sounds cliche, but I'll be 52 weeks after MozCon. I'm airing this a little early. And I've never been through anything like this. I remember the Blizzard is 77, and that makes me sound old, a couple of snow days. But this is so different for us. And this time change, it can be difficult, it can be painful, it can be destructive in a lot of ways. We've seen what businesses have gone through. I know some of you have gone through a period of loss and we're also facing the difficulty and the sadness of decades of problems in our country that we're trying to fix. And I don't want to make light of any of that, but I hope that there is opportunity in the sense that I think we hear people say, when will we get back to normal? And I hope we don't, honestly. The more I think about it, normal isn't very good for a lot of people. And so I hope we can do something better. I hope we can put in the thought and the empathy and the work that it takes to be better. And so today I'd like to talk about how we deal with these things from a business perspective, from a marketing perspective. Again, I don't want to make light of anything anyone's going through. I know businesses have been destroyed, businesses are dealing with economic loss. Not sure if you're going to come out of this, but I want to at least try to give you some of the tools to understand how to deal with change from a marketing perspective, how to see these trends as they're occurring. Because things are changing so fast on a global scale that we just don't know what to expect next. We don't know where the opportunities are, but I believe they're there. And I want to talk to you about that a bit today. So this story today starts on a little lighter note. About a year ago at London Search Club, I believe, I had a dinner with the SEO team from Lego out of Denmark. And thank you to Torban and that team for letting me share some of this. If you're familiar with Lego, you know that they have licensed products. And so they work with Star Wars, for example, with Disney. And they have a lot of information in advance, which is pretty cool. But they have a very difficult task that they have to start producing before a new title comes out, let's say a new movie, TV series. And they know they're not going to get it all right. They know that they're not going to know necessarily what's popular, what really takes off, what people, what ships, what planet, whatever it is, you know, the things that really capture the audience's imagination. And so they want to be able to track that as quickly as possible after release and adapt as fast as possible. And so they don't know, for example, if, you know, Rebel Princess Elsa or Off-Duty Trooper or NASA astronaut Jedi Mae Jemisin are really going to be the big thing. I may have made some of these up with the kids. But this is the challenge they faced, right? They just have to be able to adapt. They have to be able to gather this information and their existing keywords aren't going to tell them the story. And as an SEO, that was really interesting. But to be honest, I kind of put it in the back of my mind after a while and thought this doesn't affect most of our customers. This doesn't affect most people. And then I thought back to a conversation I had had a few months earlier at Moscow last year with a government organization and they were launching a new initiative. And they knew that it was going to come under attack, frankly, in the sense of a disinformation campaign, possibly a long disinformation campaign. And so they wanted to be able to know what questions people had, what keywords they were searching, as soon as it happened so that they could at least counteract this disinformation. They could put out their own information. And this was a really unique, interesting problem that keyword tools and a lot of what we do don't sell. And again, it was interesting, but I kind of said, well, you know, that's true, great. But they're not like everybody else. And then this came along. On March 11th, WHO declared coronavirus a global pandemic. Obviously it had already been in play, but I think this was around the time where we really started to realize something different was happening. And behavior changed on a global scale, on a massive scale. And it wasn't just schools being closed. I have two kids, that was obviously a big thing. It wasn't just staying home from work, but consumer behavior changed, shopping changed, things we needed changed. The way we viewed our lives changed and search changed dramatically. So massive shifts. We've seen SERP flux outside of algorithm updates until about last week for two straight months, almost three, we've seen massive SERP flux, massive ranking changes. And as SEOs, we're not equipped for that. We're not equipped for this rapidly moving world. And so when this happened, I thought back to these other problems and realized this matters now. This is something we really do have to solve. This is something we really do have to face. And so I wanna tell you a bit about that today. A little bit of good news. In May, 2020, according to Adobe, year over year e-commerce sales were up 78%. If you see the little truncated graph on the left, up $52 billion from expectation, the pink is what we expected, the blue is where it's at. That gray-dotted line is the holidays, 2019. We are above holiday e-commerce spending in May of 2020. This isn't all good news. This obviously comes on the back of brick and mortar. It comes because of drop in spending other places. But as online marketers, there is a massive shift going on. There is massive spend, there is massive interest. It's just not in the things that we thought it would be in. And so what are these new things and how do we find them? This is an extremely important question right now for our survival as businesses. A little morning, my seven-year-old saw the Lego slide. He said, that's really cool and he helped me with the photo. And he wanted to know how I did it. He's like, I wanna see this thing you're working on. I said, I gotta tell you, there's a lot of graphs and stuff and I don't know if you're gonna be interested. He's like, no, no, dad, I really wanna see it. I got six slides in and he said, I'm getting bored out of my butt and left the room. So I've added some Lego slides. Hopefully you will not be bored out of your butt because it doesn't sound very positive. So let's talk about a tool we know and hopefully I'm gonna give you a different way to look at it and some new things you don't know. This is Google Trends. I hope you've all seen this at this point. Google Trends is great for tracking a trend when we know what it is. That sounds a little weird. Don't we usually know what it is? Well, lately, no. We don't always know what we're looking for. Well, let's say we do. So Disney Plus Star Wars released the show The Mandalorian last year, put a lot of marketing budget into it, did pretty well, took off. And if you type in Mandalorian, sure enough, you see what you expect, right? Little bit of interest before it came out. Big peak when it came out. Slow down, but still some interest. And I think the season's over now. I haven't seen all of it. But the kind of thing you might expect to look for. Here's where the story gets interesting. This is the Razor Crest, the ship from The Mandalorian, Lego set coming out in September. A bit after the release of the show. In time for next Christmas, I don't own this yet. I'm just not saying you should buy it. I'm just putting that out there. But what's interesting, this looks really cool, is this little guy, Baby Yoda. Obviously Baby Yoda took off after the introduction of The Mandalorian was hugely popular, was a trend people didn't really see coming. And merchandising lagged incredibly. I mean, it was shocking how long it took. You could get t-shirts and things because those can be produced on demand. But in terms of toys and things like that, it took a long time. So why is that? Why didn't they know this? Well, it turns out that if you look at most Mandalorian character lists, Baby Yoda isn't there. There's two reasons for this. Number one is that he's a puppet. And so the normal structure of these are the human actors in our show, they don't appear. But the other problem is that Baby Yoda is not a character in the series. The character is named the child. And this is not some pedantic Star Wars point I'm trying to make of, well, actually, there's no Baby Yoda. But think about this as an SEO. Think about if you were an SEO for Disney Plus and let's imagine the situation. I doubt even they have this, but let's imagine the situation where the SEO for Disney Plus has all the scripts, access to all the writers, can call them anytime they want, knows everything there is to know about the show. I doubt that's even true. Now, knowing how marketing departments work, I doubt that's true. Let's say it's true. Nowhere in that wealth of information would Baby Yoda be mentioned. And yet, Baby Yoda was a massive trend at this point and at some point in the Middle-Even, eclipsing search for the Mandalorian itself. Just this incredible spike in interest. So how could we see that coming? I'm gonna get to that, hopefully. The same with coronavirus. Okay, we all heard about coronavirus as it was spiking, obviously big search spike in mid-March to be expected, leveled off a bit as we all kind of knew what it was. But what about COVID-19? These terms at this point, and at the end of May had already reached the same level as coronavirus, but these weren't words that anyone was using, anyone, especially in the general public, when the pandemic was announced and when it was first appearing, even when the WHO announcement came out. So how could we see that coming if we were only looking for coronavirus? And then from a business perspective, here's the problem we face. Let's say your hair salon or a barber shop and you're tracking the trends and they went down. No big surprise. This is an issue of, we know this is not just correlation, it's causation. You were closed, everything was closed. We couldn't go places, obviously went down. But how would you know other than your own internal logic and trying to see how things were changing, that how to cut hair would spike? How would you know that as this thing you cared about and were tracking in a traditional SEO sense was falling, something else was rising? And at some point, even past that, I was one of those people who video search for how to cut hair and I hope I didn't, you can tell me later how I did, my wife saved me a little bit. But how do we know? How do we know what's coming? And then a bit of a warning story, but interesting too, this is a trend for stuffed unicorn. And stuffed unicorn had a holiday spike, which you might expect, people buying stuffed unicorns for people. Perfectly lovely thing to do. And then around mid-March, there was a spike. Why were people buying stuffed unicorns during coronavirus and were they? And this is a problem we have with trends, right? This is a correlation in a sense. And if we know something like with the hair salon, we can imply causation. We can say, yes, it's very likely this is because of COVID. There's no doubt of that really. But in this case, why is this happening? Trends don't really tell us that and Google Trends doesn't tell us that. So I wanna talk about how we get ahead of trends and how we can use these tools in more interesting ways. So let's go back to this. Let's say that we're midway through March, we realize, you know what? People are gonna have to cut their own hair and we start to track this. If you go down, there's two sections I wanna talk to you about. One is this related topics. And you see that second topic care clipper and I'm gonna click on it. It's up 200% at the time I made this. And let's take a look, way up. I may not be shocking to you, but what's interesting is, this is a very different search than what we were looking for. It's not something that would have come up if we were tracking those other terms. And it's also a commercial intent search. So now we've shifted from this informational intent, how to cut hair that maybe we could write a post about or a video to a commercial product to something we could sell and a B to C potential. And now as we see this, we can start to intuit and think about, wait a minute, people are gonna need scissors, they're gonna need beard trimmers, they're gonna need combs, they're gonna need certain kinds of product. And we started to see a different picture. And so I think that's really important, seeing those intent shifts. So we know, how do we switch this from informational intent to commercial or maybe commercial back to informational? And then there's another one, Zoom. Obviously we knew Zoom had this huge spike. I have a family of four, I have two kids at three points, I think in the last three months, we have all been on Zoom at the same time. So we are very aware of this. And we saw the spike, we see it leveling off, it's not anywhere down to where it was before. But how can we work with that? What opportunity is there? We look down at the related queries in Google Trends, backgrounds for Zoom, best Zoom background, Zoom bombing. In January, unless you were a security expert, what would you think Zoom bombing meant? You'd have no idea. And you would have no way to be tracking that search and to look for it. It would never occur to you to put that on a keyword list. But now we're seeing, what are people looking for? What's changing? What's this introduced? How has this changed our lives? What's cool about this is, you might not know there's an export, you don't just have to look at the five. And if you export, I think you get 20 or 25, of two different things. So you get these top queries, kind of interesting, but it's stuff you'd expect. How to Zoom, Zoom meaning Zoom map, your average related search kind of stuff. But you go down and you need these rising queries, they call breakout queries, the things that have really taken off. Backgrounds for Zoom, best Zoom backgrounds, games to play on Zoom, Star Wars Zoom backgrounds. Now you're getting into this commercial intent or at least to what people want and need. You know they're using Zoom, that doesn't really help you. Hooray for Zoom, they're making a lot of money. We'll, I have our complaints, but hey, we're all using it, but it doesn't help the rest of us. But some of these other things might, games to play on Zoom might, Star Wars Zoom backgrounds might, these are opportunities, these are things that we can start to track and see how they overlap with what we do. So stuff to unicorn, let's go back to that one. Let's look down at that info at the bottom. At first, if you go to the SERP itself, especially now, it's not gonna tell you anything, right? This is what we would expect. I can buy stuff to unicorns, I can see some pictures, perfectly nice things. No idea why that would spike, right? We go down to that bottom and on the left we see Deadpool fictional character. I know Deadpool sometimes rides a unicorn because they have the t-shirt, but I still have no idea what that has to do with COVID. And then we look on the right and we see Fortnite Deadpool stuff to unicorn. And in one search I was able to find out that Fortnite launched a special edition Deadpool stuff to unicorn, got a lot of attention, it was kind of an Easter egg. And that has nothing to do with COVID other than that a whole lot more people are home playing Fortnite. So this is a great sleuthing tool in the sense this is also a way to dig into these trends, understand them, understand if we're just looking at correlations, we need to look at year over year, we need to look at the seasonal stuff too, but this can really tell us, is this a fluke or what's causing this? And give us a way to investigate. So I think that's pretty cool. Google Trends has also launched some portals within it. They have one for coronavirus protest racial equity. They have one essentially for Black Lives Matter. They have one for Pride Month. These are really interesting because these aren't searches. These are actually telling you what's trending and giving you some information. The coronavirus one gets into some commercial terms and can be really worth checking out. All right, I've already talked a lot about Google and we're giving for an SEO company that's uncomfortable. So we're gonna do one more Google thing and then move on. This is cool. This is think with Google. They have a tool called Rising Retail Categories. If you look at it, you might miss some of its usefulness. So I wanna walk you through something. You can set a handful of countries. There's not a lot, unfortunately. And weekly, monthly or yearly change, stick to monthly or yearly, weekly doesn't have much data. And so I click something on top trending categories like household disinfectants and see what we'd expect now. Lysol spray, disinfectant wipes. This is interesting in the sense that if you had done this earlier, you'd probably know something that seems obvious now but wasn't. But if you look at those eight on the left, you're probably gonna say, okay, disposable gloves, bicycle parts. I don't do any of that. What interest does this have to me? You might miss that there's a little tiny gray scroll bar and for year over year change, I've seen up to 400 categories. So 400 categories by 10 topics, 10 queries, we have just under 4,000 queries, excuse me for sick. There is no great way to export this. If someone were to want to try and scrape this, that would be interesting. I'm not suggesting you do it. I would be happy to hear about it on the download. But there's a ton of information here if you're willing to dig through it. And that's gonna be a lesson with a lot of this. There's a lot of work to be done but there's a lot of great info out there. This is a weird site, Boing Boing. Davin news site covers a ton of topics and they have a store. I bought a Lego drone. It's pretty cool. It flies like a brick, but it's fun from the Boing Boing store. And if you've ever been there, they sell some really weird stuff and you might be inclined to dismiss it. Go to their store page and look at these categories with me. Work from home essentials. Online courses for making the most of extra time. Do-it-yourself deals to keep your mind busy. Top-at-home fitness gear. Kitchen appliances for eating in. Deals for staying entertained and sane. Every single one of these is targeted to quarantine. It's targeted to our current situation. And Boing Boing, it's a weird name but they're an incredibly effective organization when it comes to tracking trends. And so go check them out, see what they're selling. Don't think about, do I wanna buy this thing? Think about, why are they doing this? What trend does this reflect? What are people looking for? I'm gonna give you an example. When you see six cam mini fridge and wireless speaker combo, you might think, why the hell do I need that? And why would I pay $60 for it? And that's fine. I'm not gonna tell you to buy this. But look at that buy line. This cooler lets you drink up and rock out almost anywhere. Okay, not bad copy. Let's think about it. Where would people use this? They'd use it on their porch, on their patio in their backyard. Where are people spending more time during quarantine? On their porch, on their patio in their backyard. This is incredibly laser targeted to our current time period and what we're going through. And so go to the site, see the things you're selling and think about why. And I think there's tremendous, especially from a B2C, you deal with consumers, tremendous opportunity to learn from that. Pinterest trends, thank you to my friend, Sha on our team. It's still in beta, it's missing a lot of data and please understand if you don't use Pinterest, the Pinterest audience is very different from the Google audience. But a couple of cool things about this. One is that you can browse, you can look at trends, we can look at things like fashion, food and drink. Obviously, again, Pinterest has a very particular bent. But again, very consumer focused. So a lot of things people are interested in. Oh, what's cool is if you start a search in Pinterest, it's not a regular search, it's essentially an auto suggest and what you get is not only a list of topics, but these spark lines, these trends that you can compare to clients. And so if I type in cut hair, I see things that are going down like hair upduce for long hair because frankly, we're not going out and we're probably not going to put a lot of trouble into our upduce. I haven't been able to do an updo for a while. But then we see cut your own hair and we see the spike and we see even hairstyles for long hair length, kind of spiking before all this came in. As people are starting to realize they need haircuts. And so you can click on these, you get a trend much like Google Trends, you get suggestions a little bit below that and you can start to layer those in. So here's how to cut your hair, no big surprise, how to cut your own bangs, that's interesting. You know, that's a more long tail query. Maybe there's too much info on how to cut your own hair and videos and everything else, competitive. But maybe how to cut your own bangs or how to cut your own sideburns or how to do a certain kind of cut, there's still opportunity and still something you could do. And so this is a really cool tool for exploring. This is also great for, I think Will Reynolds was the one who used to talk about this a lot, for that kind of auto suggest, see what happens approach. So in this case, I typed in at home. Pretty vague, doesn't really tell them much and saw what they completed. At home anniversary ideas, at home butt workout, why not, at home CrossFit, at home spa day. What's going on right now? People can't go to the gym. They wanna exercise at home. People can't go to the spa. They want a little quality time at home. People are celebrating birthdays and anniversaries at home. This is only seven, eight queries that come up on the screen, I think got cut off. And already I can see they're all trending and there's just wealth of information about what are people doing at home? So play with this, again, it's spotty, there's data is weird in some cases, but there's all this cool stuff if you kind of let it auto complete and see where it takes you. And finally, a tool that you probably given up on because if you use it the normal way, it kind of sucks. And that is search. And it kind of sucks because if you type in a search like Mandalorian, you will get absolutely everything in the world that everyone is talking about right at this moment, whether or not they should be talking about it. I have two tweets in Russian here. I don't know Russian, no offense to people who do. I hope these are bots because according to Google translate, they're kind of offensive. So this is not real useful, right? You have a little high school Spanish, I might be able to get through that. But this is just things that whoever just said this in the last few seconds, but you cook on those dots, you pull up advanced search and advanced search and Twitter has gotten very powerful and really useful. So just one keyword, I'm gonna put in Mandalorian, not gonna worry about whether it's exact or not because it's one word. I'm gonna restrict English. I think this is actually more interesting and useful if you don't speak English because you can get rid of all the nonsense we're saying and focus on your own target market. So this is useful, we'll be able to pin down but I'm gonna stick with English queries for now. I'm gonna go to Google and I'm gonna ask when did the Mandalorian error and they're gonna tell me November 12th. I'm gonna put that in at the bottom. I'm gonna say, show me what happened between November 12th and November 30th. I wanna go back and look at time. I wanna take a little trip through time. And I'm gonna ask for minimum likes of 50. This is a little quirky, go lower than you think. Don't put in like 1,000, put in 25, 50, see what happens. But basically I'm saying, you know what? I don't want every random opinion. I just kind of wanna see what took off. I'm gonna run this search. First result we see in November 26th, baby Yoda is our God now. That indicates to me with 48,000 likes that baby Yoda probably did all right. And what's interesting about this is I didn't use the words baby or Yoda or the term exact match baby Yoda. I started with Mandalorian. So within two weeks after the show launched, we could see a trend, but we can do better than that. We can narrow that date range. And then November 12th, the launch date of the show, there were already tweets with thousands of favorites talking about baby Yoda. The second tweet I pulled up, I haven't known baby Yoda for long, but if anything happens, I will throw hands. This person will fight you over baby Yoda the day they learned baby Yoda existed. That's a trend, my friends. That's a thing that's gonna take off. And you could have known that on November 12th, and that's fascinating to me. So this is not just a little back in time. If we're monitoring this, if we're careful, if we're filtering through the noise, we can see trends as they happen and we can adjust. It turns out this is, if you look at the actual search bar, what comes up when I type all this in is kind of like advanced search operators in Google. So I've got exact match baby Yoda, MinFaze 50 English, and my start and end date. They use since and until, but it's really just your start and end date in your monthly format. Real quick, I'll show you. You can type in regular keywords. You can do exact match and quotes just like Google. You can use the OR operator. I think it's all caps. I'd suggest parentheses just keeps it cleaner. You can negative match with the minus. You can do hashtag searches. MinFaze, MinRee tweets since and until your start and end date. And there's a bunch of things around the accounts that you can do too. So it's really elaborate. You can start to do it with advanced operators or you can just use that UI. That's great too. So usually when I wrap up a deck, I don't do it real well. I'm not great at conclusions. And so I give you these bullet points. I'm like, oh, I'm trying to tell you what you did. But when I throw a lot of tools at you, it's tough because I think people go, oh, that's cool. And then they go home and have no idea what to do with it. And so I want to try and tell you a case study. And I also want to say, look, things like Baby Yoda and Lego, they're fun. But I think sometimes they're great as a speaker but they don't resonate with you and your business. So I want to walk you through something. Let's say you're a wine store and COVID hit and you had to shut down. A few days later, a couple of weeks maybe, you see this article or maybe you just are doing some research on your own. Alcohol delivery could be a sell for ailing Chicago restaurants. And right away you see wine for delivery. And you think, okay, is there an appetite for that? Even at the end of March, you can see that there was, even probably in early to mid-March, you could see that trend taking off. And let's say you just looked at wine itself. You can also see that wine kind of spiked around the holidays and it went up a little. But this wine trend, there wasn't some wine thing we didn't know about. People want delivery wine. They're stuck at home. They're kind of depressed. They want a drink. And we go down and look at related queries and we see official quarantine wine. Turns out Ashton Kutcher, Kutcher Kutcher, I never know, released his own wine. However you feel about that is fine, but it was for charity, so it's all good. But National Wine Day, that's interesting. I'm gonna come back to that. I go to Pinterest, I type in wine. I'm just gonna see what auto completes, right? Some of this, not that useful. Wine bottle crafts with lights, wine cork wreath. It's fine. It's from the holidays, you can see that. Wine basket. Okay, we don't just want wine delivery, but we could do gift baskets. And we could send gift baskets to ourselves. This isn't Christmas anymore. I'm not gonna send this to my friend. I want a wine basket too. There's something here, there's something taking off. We click on that. We can see that this wine basket trend far exceeds the holidays. There's something very real to tap into. I go to Google and I say, National Wine Day, what's up with that? May 25th. If I got ahead of it, great. If I didn't, don't worry. End of May, let's say I missed National Wine Day. But I go to Twitter and I say, you know what, National Wine Day, I want to see at least 25 favorites. Start me in mid-May, take me to the end of May. I edited the results a bit, but all of these were in the first 10 to 15. Obviously, you're gonna have to dig. It's not gonna magically pop up. Here's what I found in just the first 10 or 15 results. Research conducted by the University of Alberta has found that a glass of red wine is equivalent to an hour at the gym. As a data scientist, I'm skeptical. As a marketer, damn, people are home. The gym is closed. Every day can be National Wine Day. And this is why, and this is a thing we can market and tap into. And in fact, this person says, Happy National Wine Day, or as I like to call it, Monday. Now you have a catchphrase and a target market and you know you have a trend. All in a couple of tweets. I would never read a Buzzfeed 19 things post, but here's 19 things you could put in that wine basket. And so there's a wealth of information. And even if you missed it, every day is National Wine Day. It doesn't matter. You found your message and you found it in, this took me about five minutes. The screen took me five minutes to edit. But the results were all there. And I wanna give you a couple of quick examples. You know, here's a company that tapped into this. I don't know anything about them, but the quarantine and chill custom bottle. Take your wine, you can engrave it, you can add cigars, you can add a basket. You know, they did this pretty quickly. It's kind of cool. And one quick happy story before I wrap up. When a fairy in unicorns show up at your door, you really get to know your neighbors. Turns out in my own trend research, I found that there's a group of people called the wine fairies that are delivering wine to their neighbors in surprise, dressed as fairies in unicorns. And that's nice. And it's something, it's not exploitation. It's something you can tap into and say, you know what? Why don't we sell a product for them? Why don't we sell some pre-packaged baskets or bags? Impact's a six. Why don't we give them a discount? Why don't we tap into this cool thing that's going on that's nice and send a message about our brand and tap into a trend? And here's the thing, we can't tell the future. Maybe COVID won't last that long. I hope not. Maybe it's gonna last months. But we'll never be able to tell the future. And so we need to react and we need to get ahead of it. And I hope I've given you the tools to do that. Thank you. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference and I will see you online at least. Take care. Bye.