 All right. Can everyone hear me? Awesome. We are going to get started. People want to trickle in. They are welcome. Thanks for coming. So the title, let's see, a non-SEO's guide to the power of search behavior. If SEO is not your primary day-to-day responsibility, please raise your hand. Perfect. You've come to the right place. Welcome. Everyone else. I'm sorry. It was in the title. I don't know what to tell you. But no, we're going to have some fun today. But before we get in too much, I have to get something off my chest. I use the wrong hashtag almost all of yesterday. It's WCKC, not WordPress, Kansas City. So I would love to see your tweets and hear everything, but please don't make my mistake. And I also want your questions, but if you're okay with it, I'd love to save them until the end. I have 90 slides to get through, so we need to keep this train moving. Maybe. Maybe. We'll see. We're actually not going to start off talking about search behavior. We will get to that for sure. But first, we're going to look through some survey data. Now, some of you just lean forward in your seats a little bit, eager to nerd out as we look through this data. But a couple of you cringed a little bit and look through the look towards the door. Please don't leave. I predicted this. And I tweaked the rest of this presentation just a little bit so that everyone could be intrigued. Problem solved. All right. There are approximately 121 million men in America at least 18 years old. According to one of the most authoritative sources on American behavior, heterosexual men have sex 63 times a year on average. They use the condom 23% of the time. And if you forgot your calculator, that should equate to between 1.5 and 1.1 billion condoms sold per year. But there are two sides to every story. Women in that age range out number men by 100 or by 7 million. They have heterosexual women have sex 55 times a year using a condom 16% of the time. And that should equate to between 1 and 1.1 billion. If you're following along, these two numbers on the right should match. So my question to you is, who's lying? What do you think? Turns out they both are, like big time. Nielsen reports only 600 million condoms are sold per year. And that includes all orientations, bachelor at party gag gifts, sex ed class props and any other reason you'd want to buy a condom. That anecdote and a few others are come from a book, a few others that we're going to talk about today from a book called Everybody Lies by Seth Stevens Davidowitz. I highly recommend it if you're interested at all in big data or human psychology. But the title is ironically pretty truthful. We all lie, don't we? But why do we lie? And we're going to get to that in a minute. But here's an interesting stat. University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert S. Feldman concluded in his research that 60% of people lie at least once in a 10 minute conversation, which means I'm probably going to lie to you a few more times today. Sorry about that. But you don't want to know what shocked me the most about that stat. It was from 2002. And that was before social media encapsulated our lives. You know the place where everyone tells the truth all the time. But what does lying have to do with search behavior or any other type of market research? I'm glad you asked. We will get to that. But in terms of why we lie, I think a lot of it has to do with incentive, which is really driven by subject matter and the setting that we're in. So if I asked all of you, what's your favorite time of year? I think pretty much all of you would tell me the truth because it's a pretty harmless question in almost any setting. What if I asked you if you've ever been jealous of a co-worker's success, all of a sudden how I ask you and who's in the room at the same time may dictate your likelihood of lying. Now when we look at audience research or market research techniques and deciding which ones to use for our marketing decisions, we generally put these three criteria under the microscope. How measurable is it? When it's all said and done, how much can the output easily be put onto a spreadsheet and statistically analyze? And if it is measurable, great. But how contextual is it? So what are those measurements actually mean about the audience that we're researching? And that's really where the qualitative research generally comes to play. And then finally, is the juice worth the squeeze? Is it economic? But shouldn't accuracy be held to the same rigor? I've already picked on surveys once, but I'm not quite done because I know some of you are thinking, all right, Tyler, sure, surveys about uber sensitive subjects like condom usage, they're gonna give you some false information. But my business is about blank and we don't have to deal with that. But it turns out that surveys that allow you to paint yourself in any sort of positive light can fall victim to false reporting. It's due to something called social desirability bias. I know what social desirability bias means. It means lying on surveys. People lie on surveys so much that they had to create a fancy name for it. I'm serious, look it up. But if you still are not convinced, I've got two more examples for you. In 1950, Denver residents were polled on several things that were verifiable by official city data. One of the questions they were asked is if they voted in the last mayoral election. 36% said they did. Only 13% actually did. It's an anonymous survey. Now you might be thinking, all right, that was 70 years ago, Tyler, maybe we're just as likely to lie, but our survey methodologies improved a ton since then. So we shouldn't have to deal with that. Well, much more recently, University of Michigan graduates were asked if they graduated with lower than a 2.5 GPA. 11% fell into this category. Fewer than 2% admitted to it. So how do surveys match up in our measuring stick? They're highly measurable. I also rated them really well contextually because we write the questions and the answers. So we have a lot of influence on how well we can interpret them. We talked about accuracy. And while some of it is within your control, an online anonymous survey is going to give you more truth than maybe one in person or given over the phone. But even the online anonymous ones can give you some false information. And then finally, depending on the type and the scale of your survey, it can be fairly economic. So let's look at another one. Oh, yeah, my 100% unbiased, entirely scientific score put surveys at 10 out of a possible 16 points. So let's look at surveys. I don't think there's as much of a misconception on the propensity for inaccuracy with surveys. I think we know we're making a trade off. We're trading statistical validity, this idea that who we're talking to is a valid representative sample of a larger audience for deep, rich qualitative insights, which we may not be able to find otherwise. But those rich qualitative insights are also not super measurable. And the more we make them measurable, the more we lose a lot of that context. So that's also a trade off. So this loses a couple points in his and I gave it a score of an eight. Now, let's look at the other end of the spectrum. There have been countless studies that have tried to reduce our complex and nuanced thoughts into a single number, pupil dilation, skin responses to pictures, reaction times to words. Those are just some examples. We've even found ways to map out our thoughts into 3D visualizations, which is mind blowing. It's also mind mapping. I guess it's mind mapping, but but there's only one problem. We don't know what any of these numbers actually mean or we can't actually agree to it. So while it's 100% accurate and super measurable, we don't actually know what those measurements are really telling us about the people that we're studying. So the opposite end of the spectrum gets a similar score. Uh-oh. What about social media? Many suggest that social media, it's the new focus group. It's more immediate. There's more data and you still get a lot of that and it's a lot of times it's cheaper and you still get a lot of the qualitative insights that you're looking for with focus groups. But what about its accuracy? If you haven't read this article from the New York Times back in January, I highly recommend it. Let's forget about the Russians for a second. We're doing our fair share of creating fake accounts just fine on our own. This article zooms in on a company called Davumi, which sells Twitter followers and from politicians to professional athletes to actors. Buying the perception of influence is a very lucrative business. But even when we set aside fake profiles, either from real people or bots, and we look at real people using social media, we find out that they're not being very real at all. The Atlantic and National Enquirer, two publications that have very little in common in terms of content, actually sell a similar number of copies per circulation. The National Enquirer actually sells a little bit more because it's a weekly publication. Google search data reinforces their similar popularity with a near one-to-one ratio in search volume. Want to guess how many Facebook likes? One-to-one. No, I'm totally joking. Twenty-seven-to-one in favor of the Atlantic. Are we lying about how much we like the Atlantic? Are we conveniently forgetting to like the National Enquirer? Probably a little bit of both. But does this really surprise any of you? Don't we know this? Don't we routinely make memes of how we, you know, as social media is just a distorted view of reality? Me, after drinking one local beer and telling everyone about it. That'll be some of us at the ruins today at her after party. I can't grow a beard, though. How people flex on Instagram and what it's like in real life. Has anyone seen this woman? She's awesome. She mocks celebrity photos by showing how ridiculous they are if just a real person does it. So this is her wearing a revealing picture of herself on a t-shirt. This is her doing an amazing rendition of whatever that is. Here's her copying Beyonce. But showing what motherhood more closely resembles. It's funny, but there's also like an unsettling truth about it. You know, we're not always who we say we are in social media. So I gave it zero love on the accuracy category, but even with its drawback, social media gives us a lot of information and ends up with one of the highest scores we've seen so far. So I said earlier that incentive is really what drives our likelihood of lying. In terms of surveys, we don't have a huge incentive to lie, but not really one to tell the truth either. With focus groups, our incentive to lie grows a little bit because we want to avoid those face to face judgments. Similarly, we crave admiration even if it's from a stranger. Our desire or incentive to lie with social media grows even more, or at least to embellish the good parts of our lives and to downplay or hide the bad or the mundane because it influences how we're perceived by our peers. But what about search? There's not really an incentive to lie. There's actually a very powerful incentive to tell the truth. Think about it. The more honest you are with Google, the more likely you are to get what you want. And that powerful dynamic is what makes search behavior one of the most transparent reflections of reality. According to Seth Stevens Davidowitz, the author of the book I talked about over the last three elections, it wasn't vote registration rates, early voting movement or the polls that most accurately, accurately predicted voter turnout in various regions. It was Google search data. Searches for vote, where to vote, how to vote were stronger predictors than any of those things I just described. Many attribute Trump's win not from more of his base coming out to vote than expected, but less of Hillary's and the polls famously got this wrong. If you were looking in the right spot, though, Google got it right. Now predicting voter turnout is one thing, but could Google search data actually predict the next president? Due to our from a strong statistically significant relationship found in the 2012 election, Stevens Davidowitz correctly suggested Trump would win would be the next president just three weeks before election day in November of last year of 2016. Guess again, that was more than a year ago. And it wasn't searches for Trump or searches for Clinton, a search for a single candidate doesn't really tell us much about how someone feels about it. So actually searches with both candidates in the same query. But wait, how could searches with both candidates point to the favorability of just one whoever's listed first, a search for Trump versus Clinton would be more likely searched by someone who favors Trump, or Clinton Trump debate would be more likely searched by someone who favors Clinton. And at least in the 2012 and 2016 elections, the order was a strong predictor of affinity. And I wonder how any of this may translate to your business when a brand or your business and a competitor search within the same query. So because it's highly measurable, fairly easy to understand, really accurate and cost effective, search leads the way, at least in my unbiased score, with 12 out of 16, but 12 out of 16 75%. I mean, that's not perfect. So what is holding search back? Dramatic pause while I drink. First is context. To really understand a search query, we have to be able to answer two questions with a reasonable amount of confidence. Who is searching it? And what are they looking for? And some searches are downright ambiguous. Take a look at this search for doors back on March 9. We have shopping results for doors. We have general door and furniture information. We have news about the Interior Secretary's 139,000 door upgrade. And some results about our information about the rock band from the 60s and 70s. So even Google who is as smart as it gets is like, I'm not really sure, like, here's all the doors, just good luck, you know, and sometimes we have real data that can back up and help explain like the example with the order of the candidates are searched, but sometimes we're left with a question mark. Another key drawback for search, which is not specific to it, but I think is amplified by it, is this combination of dimensionality and confirmation bias. If you ever heard the saying even a broken clock is right twice a day. Well, that's a very rudimentary explanation of dimensionality. It essentially means that when we're dealing with lots of data, we're bound to have random things correlate just by mere chance. And the more data that we have with search, there's a lot, the more likely this could happen. Confirmation bias is just simply our tendency to interpret data in favor of the way we already thought or the way we already hoped before we did the research. I love this quote by Houston Rockets, General Manager Daryl Morey, not just because he's the general manager, my favorite basketball team. Go Houston. But analytics are used much like a drunk uses a lamp post for support, not illumination, which is so true. So if we have a tendency for confirmation bias and a data set that makes dimensionality more likely, then we're at real risk here for some misleading research. There's also the penchant for the repugnant. What do I mean by that? If social media is where we over emphasize the good in our lives, it's reasonable to assume that search is where the unsavory is more likely to take place. Whether that's super shameful, like wondering if it's okay to like your sister or if it's slightly embarrassing, like putting rug on your carpet, which I didn't know was worth second guessing. But now I'm confused. And now I'm a little embarrassed. I need to go check. So and then the final main drawback of search behavior is one we have complete control over and is ultimately why I'm talking to you today. Off too often search behavior is only used to inform SEO or PPC. When I search what is keyword research in Google this Wikipedia page is what shows up first. Let me save you some reading. Keyword research is a practice to achieve better rankings in search engines. Now even though I see this every day when I stop and think about it this is exactly how I feel. Are you kidding me? Using keyword research just for SEO is like using duct tape just to fix leaks. Sure, it's a great use case, but there's so much more. I mean, think about duct tape. It's used for everything like human fashion, cat fashion, parenting, you know, all the big ones. Or maybe it's the key. Maybe it's just the word itself. Maybe keyword research has lost its luster, like, maybe it just makes you think of, you know, long lines of data in a spreadsheet or weird people who talk about self referential canonical tags and redirect chains. I think we should rebrand it today. What do you think? So in the book, everybody lies, the author often describes keyword research as digital truth serum. Now that sounds cool. I think we could get more people behind that. But I don't know if that's it. I feel like we may be able to get one chance at this. Let's think a little bit more. Ooh, aggregated mind reading, huh? Now there I could get on board with that but I'm not feeling I feel like you will know it when we feel it. Oh, I got it. Bitcoin. There it is. That's all we need to know. Alright, no matter what you want to call it. I hope you're starting to understand the powerful opportunity and resource that search provides in our ability to really understand the audience that we're researching. Alright, Simon Sinek says start with why I did that. We're going to get into the how the rest of this presentation, we're going to go over two things. One is how to do keyword research, at least a basic quick tutorial how to do keyword research. And number two is how to apply that keyword research to various set of things, not just SEO, not just your website. Okay, I will say if you care about this, if you're serious about this and you have the capacity, have an SEO professional do it. There's nothing I can say in the next several minutes that's going to make you as effective as someone who does this on a daily basis. But I do think that there are times when we don't have all the time or we don't have the resources and it's important that everyone has some basic skills to do quick directional research. I'm only going to share free tools or freemium tools and only give you tips that don't require any SEO background. We're going to use a fake company for this. I purposely chose an industry I know almost nothing about. In fact, I didn't know ground cover was a landscaping term until a couple weeks ago when I was building this presentation. And the first step in any landscaping project in the Hermanson household is to ask Mrs. Hermanson for guidance. That's my wife. So all right, so let's help Gordy out. The first rule of keywords is don't start with keywords. If you're ever going to have a leg up, if there's any step, we're going to have a leg up on other SEOs. It's this one. Honestly, too often we jump right into a keyword research tool without first slowing down and stopping and understanding more about the industry, the competitive landscape, the product and most importantly, the customer. Now, we'll talk more about this in a minute, but I think if you're an in-house marketer, if you're a one man show, one woman show, you may already know a lot about your space, but if you're an agency or if you're dealing with multiple fields, I would never, ever, ever skip this step. But I do, I have a confession. You know how I, through like surveys and focus groups and social media under the bus earlier, some of you probably work in those areas and you're like, I hate you. I have a confession. I actually like all of them, but hear me out. Okay, so as long as we're not using just one source of information and overvaluing what it has, using multiple sources to spot trends and corroborate insights can be really, really helpful. A keyword research tool is only as good as how well you use it. The old adage garbage in, garbage out really rings true here. So gather all of your historical insights that you already have, uncover a few new curiosities, do some of this non keyword focused research. First, it's going to help inspire and, and give you kind of some direction for, for the next parts of this. And so we helped Gordy out. We did some of this initial research and we found people looking for landscaping are often really concerned with some not so beautiful areas on their lawn. Drainage and flood prevention is a, it's, it's a common functional problem that they have that's associated with landscaping. Knowing that right mix of sunlight, shade and water, that's a recurring issue and then Fido's bowel movement. So we got to figure something out there. Does he go in one spot? How do we limit the smell? All of that. Now, obviously I didn't actually do a real focus group or a survey for this fake company. And I told you I didn't know anything about landscaping so I didn't, I couldn't make it up either. So I use this tool keyworded.com. Yes, that's with 2Ds. And I found it really helpful. It's not always going to be a homerun but it can be useful. So what it does is it searches within the subreddit of your choice on reddit.com and pulls the most common words and phrases used. So definitely jot that down and give it a look. Number two, find out what's already paying the bills. So we've done our initial research. Now we want to see where we're all, where Google already finds us, the terms Google already has associates with our brand. Think about it. If Google is the most sophisticated algorithm you and I know, then shouldn't we pay attention to the words that it already finds us relevant for? A great place to start here is Google Search Console. It used to be called Google Webmaster Tools. That may be more familiar to some of you. A couple of things about it. It gives you real search data, not just rankings but actually where you're getting impressions and clicks. It's also free. And for a lot of you it may already be set up on your site which is really helpful. So you just simply log into the Google account that has access to it. Select your site and under search traffic there's a link that says search analytics. You can splice and dice it by a lot of different ways. Devices, pages, whatnot. You can expand the date ranges. Google's rolling out a beta version that goes back 16 months. It has only been 90 days but a lot of good information here. Second is on site searches. So when I told you earlier when we're trying to kind of diagnose a search term or try to understand it we need to ask ourselves who's searching it and what are they looking for. But we're always making some sort of an assumption there due to the anonymity. We never know for sure. However when someone is actually on your website they're infinitely more likely to be your target market than some random person on Google. A lot of you have an on-site search feature here. And assuming it's set up in analytics it does take a little bit of setup whether using Google analytics or Adobe or something else. You can see what people are searching on your site. Mind this information. Take a look at this. It's going to be lower volume than what you're you know normally used to if you're looking at keyword research. But these are your target. This is your target market you know and this is what this is showing what they care about and maybe where your website could be falling short. And then ranking data. Where are you already ranking and where's your competitors ranking? Did anyone see Alyssa Murphy's presentation from yesterday? A couple people? Cool. So she also recommended this and a couple other tools which either means that these are really good tools or I didn't have my presentation finished last night and I just kind of stole all of her material so I'll let you be the judge. This tool is called Moz Keyword Explorer and you can put in your website and the competitors and so on and see all the ranking keywords that they have in their database. As far as free goes it allows 10 queries per month for free which isn't a lot but what I like about it is it doesn't limit the number of results it gives per query. So if they have you know 15,000 words that you rank for they'll give you all 15,000 basically. All right so we did our original research our non keyword focused research then we jumped into where we're currently visible you know where Google already associates with our brand. And those are going to really funnel into this step three where we're going to be doing more targeted research to get more robust lists and I'm going to show you some of the best keyword generation tools out there. We're going to stick with Moz that's a tool we just talked about so not only can you put your domain in there you can put a keyword in there and I think it generally gives you a thousand suggestions as long as it has that many for it. I don't just like it for the volume or for the number of suggestions it gives but the quality of suggestions it gives and that can be really important. Whenever you're using a keyword research tool it's sometimes it's hard to know like where are they getting this information. Well Moz surveyed a bunch of SEOs before they created this and they said where do you get all of your keyword information and they did their best to basically find all those sources and how to come in here. So there's Google information data directly from Google there's ranking information there's topic modeling a lot of good stuff and then you can sort by various things but also filter keywords that are questions keywords that exclude your query to get broader ideas lots of good stuff. So just from this one search if you can't see it I've a search backyard landscaping I was able to find and cluster lots of good information so it was fairly obvious like people want plans and ideas and pictures before jumping into a project. You also have a lot of people who are interested in DIY so they want something simple easy to execute but some things were not so obvious at least to me. There's a lot of specific interest around I'll just say abnormal yards really small yards how do we do landscaping there slanted hilly those kind of things. So yeah a lot of good information just from that one search. Keyword Finder is another tool to take a look at it actually provides five free searches per month unlike that are five free per day instead of the 10 per month like Moz but unlike Moz it does limit the number of results it will or suggestions it'll give you on the free version. It'll also show you the top ten ranking websites for the term you typed in and some associated data. Before I talk to you about this next tool I want to make sure you know what I mean when I say Google Suggest. Google Suggest is what shows up below your search bar before you press enter and besides filtering out for inappropriate information or private information it's based solely on volume so the suggestions at the top are the most commonly searched phrases that include what you've already typed. My wife knows nothing about SEO but she was nice enough to let me practice this presentation on her and she also wondered this same question. Unlike or just like the name of say what yeah it says what age does a man emotionally mature and I still don't know so yeah just like the name implies infinite suggests has no limitations to the number of suggestions it provides but which is awesome but unlike or just like any other free tool it doesn't have it's got some limitations it doesn't have volume in the platform it also only uses this Google Suggest API what we just talked about but what it does is you type in your term and it will give those suggestions just like we talked about here but then it'll pretend you type in A after it and get those suggestions and then B and then those suggestions and so on and so forth which ends up being a lot of information but then you can take it a step further by clicking into any one of these suggestions and run back keyword through the same process so you can really go down some rabbit trails which can be very beneficial. Another tool I've heard it mentioned twice already so it must be good answer the public not only does it have this older bald man it also uses the Google Suggest API like infinite Suggest it'll do the things I just said in terms of your root term plus A plus B plus C in this case I wrote partial shade but it also has some pre-baked common question comparison and preposition modifier so it will be like can partial shade blank partial shade versus blank partial shade around blank so you can get a lot of good information here as well another reason I like answer the public is it integrates with this Chrome extension called keywords everywhere see all these volume estimates on the right that comes from this chrome extension keywords every works with a lot of websites including just Google search and Google search console but also answer the public so definitely check that out and Google Trends I've heard this mentioned a couple times it gives relative search interest over time for particular term or topic it also gives some geographical interest in indices and then gives you some recommended keywords as well so here if you can't read it says sod installation and we can see that it typically peaks around late April or early May raise your hand if you have heard of Google correlate nobody okay I totally buy that if I didn't buy it if I thought you were fibbing I was going to remind you what this whole presentations about okay Google correlates actually been around a long time and it uses Google Trends data to correlate which keywords have similar search patterns so it unsurprisingly if I type in custom landscaping the terms that have the most similar search patterns over time our outdoor patio cushions hardscape dirt delivery and so on and so forth but you can also offset the time frame so what if we wanted to know what search queries have the same search patterns as custom landscaping but search three weeks before baseball and softball terms interesting so I want to make sure that we're clear here correlation and causation are not the same thing and this doesn't even mean that these are searched by the same people but it is interesting that year after year just before custom landscaping peaks in search volume people have baseball and softball on their minds we'll come back to that in a minute okay so we probably have a really intimidating list of keywords at this point now we have to make sense of it otherwise we just have a lot of data and nothing to do with it so the very first thing we want to do is group these keywords this is a just kind of a basic example but you could have a spreadsheet simple spreadsheet you have your keywords your volume estimates I like to have a category and a subcategory in this case they all have the same parent category but you can have as many as you want with varying levels of sub categories and then if you have an idea of where it is in the marketing funnel you can also include that as well when evaluating keywords from an SEO standpoint we typically look at three overarching variables search volume difficulty and relevance now with difficulty it really depends on the space to know the competitive landscape you need to know what landscape you're in and since today we're not really talking about SEO but how search behavior can inform lots of other things we're not going to talk about that with volume these are my two favorite tools ahrefs and maas keyword explore the reason I like it I can talk more about this afterwards but I'm not going to go into great detail here is is Google keyword volume estimates they're shaky okay so what's nice about this is they use they take that as just one input but they also use clickstream data and this sounds a little big brother and scary but which it kind of is but it's real recordings of people searching like billions and billions of searches a month so they're actually looking at real searches as well to kind of make sense of it all when it comes to relevance the very first place I would query is your brain I understand that whether a keywords relevant or not can be subjective it can be on a spectrum but if you've done that upfront research we talked about a lot of this is fairly intuitive when it's not intuitive type that keyword into Google and look at the search results the quote the closer those search results if you're trying to look at who are those search results talking to what are they talking about the closer those audiences and topics are to the audience and topic in that you're intended audience and topic the more likely it is to be relevant when you're doing this make sure that you're not logged into Google make sure you're not you're you're searching privately otherwise Google's going to tailor your search results to your history and if you're in kind of a regional or you're in a different location and you want to see what the search results look like in in some other region you can go to I search from common and look at it from that perspective as well it's also important to know that when you're trying to understand a search query there's there's explicit and implicit clues if we search if we see a search for safest baby cribs 2018 there's some things we that are obvious we know they're concerned about safety we know they're looking for options because they search plural and we know they're looking for something in 2018 or something recent but there's some implied information they're probably first-time parents a lot of times parents reuse their cribs for kids number two and three they may not know what makes a crib safe or unsafe but they know that those standards have probably changed since their parents were looking for cribs for them 30 years ago they may be looking for other nursery items at the same time maybe safety is more important to them for a crib than costs or aesthetics so these are things that are not obvious they're not black and white but there's some implied information in every kind of query and that's that's a good thought process to go through when you're when you're trying to understand what these queries actually say about the people okay so up to this point we've talked about the unique value that search behavior provides in comparison to other traditional market research we've also gone through a quick tutorial on how to do keyword research now we're going to put that research to work so I'm going to go over 10 ways to use search data for anything but SEO this is not going to be an inclusive list or comprehensive list and it's going to change for each vertical we're going to be in landscaping today but it's it may not change it may be different in yours what I hope is that these 10 maybe a couple of them directly apply but really I hope that these are good thought starters for you to start thinking of how you can use this this powerful resource to help your own business number one job postings Gordy was pretty underwhelmed with the job candidate pool he was getting for his landscaper position he was hoping for someone with professional landscaping experience but pretty much just got people with lawn mowing experience and that's it however when he started doing keyword research he noticed the stark contrast in the keywords in the search results between the term landscaper jobs and landscape architect jobs and he wondered what those results suggested about the people searching them if Google's job is to give you what you want can kind of reverse engineer that a little bit and say okay well who would be who would this be relevant to and I know it's hard to read but on the left there are questions of like what does a landscaper do what is landscaping it also has some salary ranges right in the search results and it's a little lower than he was actually expecting to pay conversely if you look on the right you have a higher salary range and you also have some listings some websites like the Bureau of Labor statistics that may suggest a more educated audience so while naming is an everything this simple change to just changing like the the name of the the job title could improve his chances of getting better quality candidates number two customer service so pretend Gordy talked to his office manager and asked for a list of the most common questions or objections received by the customers he then crossed crossed reference that to the most common topics that he found in keyword research now a lot of those are going to you know match there's going to be a lot of overlap but there are going to be some unique things in both lists so for some of the topics that are uniquely in the search behavior top column that those may be things that customers often forget or don't feel comfortable bringing up on the phone having the office manager test incorporating those topics into the conversation could improve customer satisfaction and upsells at the same time some of the things uniquely in the right column may not be answered very well on the website and these could be good ways to improve your website and and make it a little bit more informative number three campaign development Gordy couldn't help but realize or notice the prevalence of DIY related searches when it came to landscaping now he knew some of this was an inevitability but he wanted to find kind of a gap or a middle ground between Gordy doing it all and DIY because it's going to open up his customer pool a little bit so that's when he came up with DIY do it mostly yourself this is where Gordy could do some initial consultation with customers to help them kind of take it from there set them up for success and if they got hung up later or if they tackled a bigger project in the future and wanted to leave it to the pros he would be more likely to be top of mind number four media buying I can't stress enough how awesome and informative Google search results are let's pretend Gordy found gosh that is hard to read small backyard landscaping ideas was a really relevant term that's that's his tart that's what his target market's looking for scrape those results and look for advertising opportunities this is a really smart way for paid and organic to work together five brand name so Gordy hadn't completely sold on Gordy's ground covers he was pretty sure but he had a couple of looking at so we searched his actual brand name and nothing came up which was good but then he started searching some like predictable variations like Gordy's landscaping overland park which is where he's housed and he found that there's actually a Gordon's landscaping in the same city knowing that there are some overlap here and it could lead to some confusion be a little bit harder to stand up from the clutter he decided to go with a different name number six finding your niche how many landscaping companies are there and what makes any of them stand out what if Gordy wanted to own a smaller part of the market rather than fight for scraps among all of it noticing this trend or the specific search interest in uneven yards and landscaping around that pointed to an underserved audience an audience that needed you know some expertise in this area so by targeting them specifically he could make a name for himself for a smaller part of the audience number seven relationship marketing this one's easy everyone should do this if he finds out that landscaping searches for landscaping peaks at a certain time every year he needs to be timing his emails and SMS messages to reach out to his customer base when they need him most a affiliate relationships there's clearly an overlap between landscaping and foundation repair companies especially when it comes to water drainage or so I found out and he while a lot of these lot water drainage solutions are required pretty significant work Gordy is not really equipped for some of the more heavy-duty type of activity so that's why it made sense for him to partner with another company foundation repair company to do customer referrals back and forth and since one doesn't always proceed the other in a specific order it was a great way for both of these companies to have a new customer stream number nine smarter targeting remember when we said earlier how baseball and softball terms seem to have a similar search pattern as custom landscaping that happened three weeks before well assuming Gordy does residential and commercial landscaping which this is a fake company so we can assume whatever we want why not target baseball and softball fields for business not only would that be good money in and of itself it's a clever way to get in front of his B2C customers before they are before they have landscaping top of mind ten social media so I have another confession I work in the health care marketing industry and as much as we fight it sometimes the agency and the client we can just get trapped in our own pharma bubble speak for getting what's for getting what's familiar to the patients similarly Gordy kept using the term landscape design when he was talking to a social media following and it wasn't until he started doing keyword research to realize that people saying landscape design are actually usually looking for jobs or professional education or just some serious DIYers so by modifying his language to make landscape ideas or landscape planning he's meeting the customers where they are is falling where they are to create a stronger bond as a result alright let's bring this home so we learned today the keyword research acts as a digital truth serum and can be a great add-on or alternative to your traditional market research techniques while it's best left to the pros keyword research should can be done by almost anyone and should be in every marketers toolkit finally keyword research should not just be used for SEO is there's such an incredible wealth of information like duct tape it has multi uses or at least that's what I've been telling you this whole time I hope someone's been fact checking this because you know like I said everyone lies I'm just joking thank you so much I really appreciate it and I'm happy to answer any questions to sorry any questions come up all right you know it all great perfect thank you so much I'll be around for a few minutes after if anyone has anything thank you again so much