@tjrobertson52

If you have a website and you're doing SEO to improve your rankings in Google, you should not start with keyword research. Now I know that goes against all common SEO advice, but let me explain why this is not the best place to start and what you should be doing instead.

There are two big limitations with keyword research. One is that even if you're looking at hundreds of keywords, it's still a tiny fraction of the terms people actually type into Google when searching for your product or service. And the second is that even if a keyword is hyper relevant to your business and there are a ton of people searching for it, it doesn't mean that keyword is available to you.

You see, your website only has a certain amount of authority with Google, and keyword research can't tell you if it's enough authority to rank for a given search term.

Now all that being said, I do keyword research almost every day. If you don't have a better source of data, it's the best tool there is. But if you have an established website and you're already getting at least a little bit of traffic, there is always better data available.

So what do I recommend using instead? My favorite source of data is Google Search Console.

If you don't already have your website connected to Google Search Console, do it right after this video. It's completely free. It's easy to do.

Just Google Google Search Console. This is a free tool that Google offers that shows you data directly from Google Search. It's gonna show you the exact queries people typed into Google before your website showed up in the search results.

It's gonna show you which of those queries resulted in a click to your website and which page they clicked on.

But I wanna talk about what I think is the most useful data, and that's something called impressions. Impressions count the number of times your website showed up on Google search results page, whether or not they resulted in a click. So if you're already getting impressions for a given search query, that means you are ranking for that term at least some of the times somewhere, but maybe not high enough to get clicks.

So unlike keyword research, which is showing you the terms you could theoretically rank for, this is real practical data. You're already ranking for these terms, and if you ranked a little bit higher, you could be getting a significant amount of traffic.

I recommend opening up the queries report in Google Search Console, look at the last three months, and sort by impressions. If you've never done this before, you are going to see a treasure trove of opportunities to get real search traffic to your website. Start looking through these keywords, figure out which ones are relevant, and then ask yourself, do I already have a page about this search term?

If the query would warrant an entire page to address the term, then you should have a page addressing it. Some queries, however, can be answered in a few sentences, and then you just want a section of one of your pages addressing it.

If you don't already have a page addressing this specific query, add that to a list of pages that you need to create. If you do have a page talking about the query, make sure you're optimized for that query. If the entire page is about that query, make sure it's in the page title called the H1, as well as the search engine title called the meta title.

If the query can be fully addressed in just a few sentences, make sure you have a section devoted to that query and that term is in the H2 or the section title. Of the hundreds of things we do to increase ranking for our clients, this activity is by far the highest leverage.