Technical SEO for Beginners: Keyword Research & Optimisation

In this section, we'll be looking at online tools for keyword research. These tools include Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, Google Trends, and Answer the Public, and I'll be covering the pros and cons of each.

If you're only going to use one tool for keyword research, you can't go wrong with Google Keyword Planner!

In this video, we'll cover how to get access to the tool, its key features, and why I think it's the best free tool for keyword research.

Get your free 14-day free trial of Semrush! :)

To begin with, Google Keyword Planner will probably be enough for your keyword research needs. However, I think SEMRush has some really neat features which make it worth the money. This is for you to decide.

In this video, we cover what some of these features are, and how you can get started.

Google Trends is useful for providing information on which direction a market might be heading. In other words, is a market expected to see growth over the coming months, or is it in decline?

In this video, we'll cover the key features of Google Trends and how to use this free tool.

Answer The Public is a nice alternative to the question tab on SEMRush's Keyword Magic Tool.

In this video, we'll cover how to use it and some of its key features.

In this section, we'll be looking conducting keyword research.

Videos include finding relevant keywords using Google Keyword Planner, how to narrow your keyword selection down once you've done your research, and how to conduct competitor keyword analysis.

I thought it would be useful to show you how to conduct keyword research in practice, and the brand we're going to do this for is Card Factory.

How do we find relevant keywords to target in the content on their website? This is exactly what we cover in this video.

In this video, we cover some of the important things to consider when choosing which keywords to target on pages. These include avoiding keyword cannibilsation, and using a mix of long and short-tail phrases.

In video 13, we found relevant keywords using Google Keyword Planner. In the video, we take our keyword research to the next stage by deciding which keywords we actually want to target for Card Factory.

I go through my method of choosing them, and strategy starts to come into play too.

In this short video, we'll be covering a neat little trick in Google search results to give you more keyword inspiration.

In this video, I wanted to go through a little bit of competitor analysis to help you gain a better understanding of what keywords our competitors might be ranking for, and which keywords we should be looking to target.

In this section, we're going to be thinking about how we can thread keywords into the content and meta data on our website. We'll also be covering website structure and how to create content calendars.

Lots to cover in this section!

There are no hard and fast rules on how to do this, but there are some guidelines on best practice. In this video, we'll be covering what those are, and I'll take you through a practical example of optimising content.

These are two often-overlooked details that can have a big impact on SEO performance.

In this video, we'll remind ourselves of what title tags and H1s are, before going through some examples of how we can optimise them with keywords we've found in our keyword research.

Although this video's not strictly related to keyword research, I wanted to include it because making sure these topics are covered will help improve the SEO performance of a website.

In it, we consider the importance of primary pages being linked to in the main navigation, having enough content on primary landing pages, and how to use questions as sub-headings that could rank for featured snippets.

A content calendar (from an SEO point of view) is a document that suggests which topics and keywords could be written about in any given month on a website.

These suggestions are based on content gaps on a website, content our competitors have written, and monthly trends shown by Google Keyword Planner.

In this section, we'll be looking at which tools we can use to monitor keyword ranking performance. There are a few options to choose from, and I'll be showing you a selection of both free and paid tools.

It's a good idea to keep an eye on ranking performance over time so you can see which changes you've made are working and where you should be focusing your efforts.

In this video, I show you a few different ways to do this. The tools I'll show you include Ahrefs' free keyword tracking tool, SEMRush's paid organic research tool, and a specialist keyword tracking tool called SEO Clarity.

In this video, I show you how you can use SEMRush's Keyword Gap tool to assess your keyword rankings compared to your competitors.

It's an intuitive dashboard that shows you at a glance which keywords you're ranking above your competitors for, and which ones you're lagging behind on.

In this video, I show you how you can monitor keyword performance in a Google Data Studio report. This integrates data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and shows at a glance year-on-year keyword ranking performance.

According to Brian Dean from Backlinko, there are over 200 ranking factors in the Google algorithm! In these next two bonus videos, I go over the most important factors to consider in 2021, and what they mean for SEO.

In part 1, we cover:

- Referring domains and backlinks

- Organic click-through rate

- Domain authority

This is a continuation of the last video as I explore a number of important Google ranking factors.

In this video, we cover:

- Mobile usability

- Dwell time & bounce rate

- On-Page SEO

- Content quality (E.A.T)

In this video, we explore the three pillars of SEO. These are Technical, Content & Link-Building (Off-Site).

This course focuses primarily on the content pillar, but it's worth having an awareness of the other two as they can help take your SEO performance to the next level!

Congratulations! You've completed the course. Be sure to leave a review and update me on your progress. Happy SEO! :)