Search Engine Optimisation SEO for tourism businesses – Part 1
Right, Good Morning everybody my name is Andrew Craig from VisitScotland and welcome to this I think it's now we're on the fifth in a series of webinars that are being delivered by VisitScotland in conjunction with Business Gateway’s Digital Boost program and part of a program a recovery package of webinars aimed at supporting tourism businesses as they reopen. On today's webinar which is entitled search engine optimization for tourism businesses part one very exciting title and today we're joined by Gary Ennis from NS design in Glasgow that's a company that specialises in social media and digital skills training and Gary will be leading two sessions on seo and search engine optimisation one today and then a part two on august the fourth at 11 30 on august the 4th you can sign up at details and it will be later on but you can sign up for that on the business gateway website on the event section visit Business Gateway website just a quick reminder that all attendees are you're all in microphone off and webcam off mode so you can only see Gary and i today and we'll be distributing a link to the pdf slides presentation at the end of the webinar as well as asking for your feedback by a link that will distribute via the chat and due course and i'll be on the screen as well if you do have any queries about any aspects of search engine optimization today please ask them via the questions tab that you'll see in your go to webinar and control panel and we'll spend 10 to 15 minutes at the end so remember this is a one and a half 90 session so around about 12 15. Gary will come to a close and we'll spend 10-50 minutes then discussing those questions we're also going to running a few a couple of polls today at different various points throughout today's session and Gary will introduce them and i'll bring them up in this community of course again and then finally we are once again offering the opportunity to participate in free VisitScotland digital review with one of our industry relationship managers the only caveat i would put there is that it's free for tourism businesses you need to be a tourism business to participate in one of these VisitScotland digital reviews and these reviews are designed to assess elements of your digital output including i suppose not limited to your social media presence online booking bookings your presence on search engines and your overall website performance as well so there'll be an opportunity at the end as soon as you leave today's webinar there'll be a little pop-up message that appears on the screen asking if you'd like to and participate in a free digital review if you're already if you've been on our previous webinars and I’ve already signed up you don't need to sign up again we have your details and you'll be contacted over the forthcoming weeks and probably months of school there's a quite a number if you've signed up for them so you will be contacted by one of their industry relationship managers to organize that digital review if you haven't yet signed up though simply take the little box that says yes i agree to participate in a VisitScotland digital review so that'll appear once we finish the session today it'll also there'll also be an opportunity to sign up if you miss it today in the post webinar email that will go out tomorrow morning so you'll have another chance if you miss signing out up today and then before i hand over to Gary just a screenshot of the digital boost home page this program is a quick round that delivers free a lot of free services including up to 21 hours of one-to-one specialist digital support and a number of workshops including seo part two and webinars at the moment you can go and make a booking business gateway bgateway.com digital boost is the address to go to and as well as that online guides on 21 digital topics and a number of video tutorials on digital topics as well so without any further ado enough from me i'll pass things over to Gary who is here today representing ns design and he's going to lead today's session so Gary i'll just make sure that you can present your screen thank you for you now and i'll switch my own webcam off until you've finished your presentation for today thanks Gary great can you just confirm you're seeing the agenda screen at the moment Andrew hopefully everyone else is as well that's good thank you very much thank you well good morning everyone thank you very much Andrew for the introduction there i do a lot of digital booth sessions i'm very much looking forward to doing this one and of course next week's session as well hopefully you're all booked up for session two certainly by the end of session one i hope I’ve not put you off booking up for session two i'm sure i won't today's agenda it's quite simple we're going to talk search engine optimization primarily we're going to introduce the topic of seo search engine optimization never good to use a jargon and acronyms on their own without quickly explaining what they mean just in case people don't know we'll talk about why seo matters we'll look at some of the tools and systems available to help you specifically around carrying out what we call keyword research and being aware of what these words and phrases that we will need to optimize for we'll get to all of that good stuff very quickly and then of course how to actually make some changes to your website to be better featured and be ranking higher on google itself there'll be a couple of wee polls just to get you interacting with me as we go and also as Andrew has already said if there are any questions feel free to ask these in the question section of go to webinar and Andrew will flag these up to me and we'll either deal with them as we go if we've got the time or indeed we will have plenty time for q a at the end as well okay what is seo well first of all on a kind of technical level there are various different types of seo some of these you'll have heard of some of these maybe not the big one we're going to talk about today the main focus of today's webinar on page seo and that really means the changes you can make on your individual pages what you can do tweaks and changes content updates keywords etc on the website itself next week we will be looking at most of the other aspects of seo the off page backlinks technical local mobile side of seo but today we're starting with where we should start because arguably is the kind of foundation of seo which is the tweaks and changes you can make on your own website to get your website ranking higher and here is the very dull boring Wikipedia definition of search engine optimization they say it's the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines seo targets the unpaid traffic today we're not going to talk about the paid side of it and we're going to talk about the organic side of it the natural organic results rather than the direct or paid traffic so that's the kind of Wikipedia definition i prefer to supplement that with my own in other words so for me seo is about convincing google to return our websites higher than the rankings when target customers search for things relevant to our business why so that we get more clicks for free meaning the possibility of increased revenue increased business increased bookings whatever it is we're actually trying to achieve now before i move on from this particular slide let me just label the point a little bit it's about convincing google to get our website higher when the right customers search for the right things which benefit our businesses it's actually dead easy to be top off google for the wrong things and this is just my cue to kind of give you all a warning and i'm sure none of you would but run a mile from any of those emails that promise you top of google for 50 pounds and i always jokingly say i'll get you to the top of google for five pounds but it will be you know for the wrong words for the wrong phrases for the wrong type of customers for the wrong audience which doesn't actually do your business any good so it's about it's important that we very much focus on you your business your customer their behaviour what are they looking for that's the benefit of search engine optimization the right customers the right relevant products and services and the right level of increased business that comes hopefully as a result again i'll kind of keep harking back to that a little bit as we go through the session you've probably heard me say in the last slides already that it's a google i keep mentioning google rather than just saying generic search engine and we say google for a reason and that simply is because they have the share they have the market share of the search engines quite significantly if you are in the uk then google currently have nearly 93 percent of the market while some of you guys may be using Bing or yahoo or dot go and if you're not familiar with what duck goes and I’ve never heard of it then just do some reading actually a very good search engine but while you may use another platform what we need to always remember when it comes to search engine is think like the customer so while you might be a Bing user the chances are they will be a google user google has all the people google is where and the search engine activity happens and that's not just in the uk as per the graph on the right of the screen that's very much across the board across the world and we're pretty much every country in the world bar Russia and china Russia just under half using google china hardly any using google and that's because arguably in both these countries especially china google is banned so again the good news is if you are targeting foreign traffic and visitors from abroad as many businesses in the tourism travel hospitality food and drink as many businesses and tourism do then good news is google is still the place you need to focus on albeit maybe we're not quite attracting quite so many visitors right now from abroad given that a horrible thing that shall not be named i'll probably name it later on okay if you did need a few more google statistics just very quickly and again i'm not going to read out all nine of these bullet points you can do that yourself I’ve got lots more that i want to get on with and get to the good stuff three and a half billion google searches made every day and 93 of all online experiences begin with google 81 of people performing some sort of google type search before making a large purchase and i would certainly include most purchases in the world of travel and activity booking and things to do with the family this weekend as potentially large important purchases so very much google playing a role there and 31 35 of product searches may be relevant to some of you and let me just jump down to 0.6 75 of people never scrolling past the first page hence why it's so critical to know about optimization to know how to begin to optimize to start creeping up these pages depending on where you are right now there's a very bad notice i'm putting in my disclaimer straight away there's a very bad joke in my geeky industry that basically says where do you hide the dead bodies page two of google i did warn you it was a bad one my apologies so again it's important that we get as high up these rankings as possible 0.7 is an interesting one we're now six years beyond the point of when mobile searches over to desktop searches that's important we'll come back to that certainly more next week as of today 0.8 54 of web usage carried out on a mobile now here's the thing
54 on average people using their mobile to use google and to search for things compared to their desktop that differs in different sectors different endings industries different stages of what we call the user journey so if i am out visiting high five if i'm on location if I’ve booked a holiday if i'm at the destination and i'm thinking of something to do to find the activity to go paddle boarding to a day out with the family most of that will be happening on a mobile that's making a cue back to some of the previous webinars that the VisitScotland the digital boost have organized over the last few weeks for you there was a session done just recently on analytics by the wonderful Brian Tate and you guys should know because you should be looking at your google analytics what percentage of mobile visitors do you have because it's critical in your thinking critical in terms of your website in the first place and how people search for things when they're on their mobile when they're out and about compared to when they're at the research stage of the kind of sitting at their desk thinking about what they might like to do well i'm here i'm ready to do it and we need to adapt our websites accordingly we'll get to more of that shortly okay let's move on and answer this big question which i still get asked these days you know i keep mentioning optimizing the website do we even need a website i get asked still a lot by especially small businesses especially start-up businesses do i need a website Gary I’ve got my Facebook we've got loads of engagement there we put videos onto YouTube we do fun stuff on Instagram do i even need a website i would categorically say absolutely your website is the home of your content other platforms and Facebook it's not yours Instagram is not yours your website arguably is yours so you're in control of it you control what goes on it the information you choose to put there not what is dictated by Facebook and its algorithms etc you could fall foul on Facebook tomorrow you probably won't and hopefully never happens but i know plenty businesses where it has who suddenly suspend your page and your whole internet presence if it was based on something just like Facebook now at risk and the last thing i'll say especially with regard the seo side of all of this google would rather link to you than link to Facebook or Instagram or any of these types of platforms google prefers to return back independent websites not big bad Mark Zuckerberg platforms and i joke when i say that but google and Facebook hate each other with a passion they are they are not the best friends so google much it wants to be a platform to give customers direct access to you and that's why ultimately you still need a website it needs to be optimized you need to be claiming the google ranks and it will help drive business for you for your product for your services for your bookings for whatever it is you're trying to do so the main thing we're going to talk about in detail today is this concept of on-page optimization and by that we mean the keywords what do i mean by keywords well the first thing i'm going to get you to do i'm going to get you to watch a little video and i'm going to play this through the webinar but what i will say is because webinar and videos are sometimes a little bit a little bit buffery i don't know if that's technically a word but we'll run with it a little bit clunky sometimes the audio lags and that type of thing and depends on your bandwidth my bandwidth if this video for whatever reason isn't exactly the clearest i'll paste in the link to this video into the chat box just at the end of it so bear with it give it a watch we're going to talk just about a couple of things about this video i'm not going to play the full five minutes by the way don't worry but i want you to hear from google themselves you know how google works every day billions of people come here with questions about all kinds of things sometimes we even get questions about google search itself like how this whole thing actually works and while this is a subject entire books have been written about there's a good chance you're in the market for something a little more concise so let's say it's getting close to dinner and you want a recipe for lasagne you've probably seen this before but let's go a little deeper since the beginning back when the homepage looked like this google has been continuously mapping the web hundreds of billions of pages to create something called an index think of it as the giant library we look through whenever you do a search for lasagne or anything else now the word lasagne shows up a lot on the web pages about the history of lasagne articles by scientists whose last name happened to be lasagne stuff other people might be looking for but if you're hungry randomly clicking through millions of links is no fun this is where Google’s ranking algorithms come into play first they try to understand what you're looking for so they can be helpful even if you don't know exactly the right words to use or if your spelling is a little off then they sift through millions of possible matches in the index and automatically assemble a page that tries to put the most relevant information up top for you to choose from okay now we have some results but how did the algorithms actually decide what made it onto the first page there are hundreds of factors that go into ranking search results so let's talk about a few of them you may already know that pages containing the words you search for are more likely to end up at the top no surprise there but the location of those words like in pages title or in an image's caption those are factors too there's a lot more to ranking than just words back when google got started we looked at how pages linked to each other to better understand what pages were about and how important and trustworthy they seemed today linking is still an important factor another factor is location where a search happens because if you happen to be in Ormeau Italy you might be looking for information about their annual lasagne festival but if you're in Omaha Nebraska you probably aren't when a web page was uploaded is an important factor too pages published more recently often have more accurate information especially in the case of a rapidly developing news story of course not every site on the web is trying to be helpful just like with robocalls on your phone or spam in your email there are a lot of sites that only exist to scam and every day scammers upload millions more of them so just because instantvirusdownload.net lists the words lasagne recipe 400 times that doesn't mean it's going to help you make dinner we spend a lot of time trying to stay one step ahead of tricks like these making sure our algorithms can recognize scam sites and flag them before they make it to your search results page so let's review billions of times a day whenever someone searches for lasagne or resume writing tips or how to swaddle a baby or anything else Google’s software locates all the potentially relevant results on the web removes all the spam and ranks them based on hundreds of factors like keywords links location and freshness okay good time to take a breath right i'm going to pause it there because it is as they say indeed a good time to take a break okay what i'm going to quickly do just in case you want to revisit that watch that in your own time and if it was just a little bit on the low quality depending on your own internet speeds and all the rest of it and there is me pasting in the link into the chat box so you can feel free to click that bookmark it watch it later on if it helps and i do recommend you watch the remainder of the video cracking a little video from the word of google themselves how does google work and just to recap a little bit on what they talked about there and she said there are hundreds of factors about how google rank you including keywords the main thing we're going to talk about today links location freshness again some of these other things we will talk about going forward and into next week as well so keywords the things people search for what is a keyword examples being Scottish tour tourist Scottish gin distilleries 10 most famous historical tours of Scotland Scottish tours near me these are all examples of what somebody might stick into a google search and all we mean when we say the word keyword is we mean the word or phrase which somebody has searched for when somebody sits down in front of google and types in those are what we call the keywords what we then do is take those keywords and optimize our web pages for them let's get those paid those keywords onto our pages we'll come to the detail of that shortly again as per the words of google it's no surprise that websites containing some of the words and phrases used by the person searching appear higher in the results and now again while we might say keyword or keyword plural it means it can mean singular it can mean multiple words it can mean a phrase it doesn't really matter so the thing to remember especially when it comes to the world of tourism and often you know on other digital business webinars i will talk about the customer journey ironically the journey when it comes to tourism you know yes it's kind of conceptual and it's on digital and it's also an actual journey as they come and visit you partaking your activities and so when it comes to the journey we need to think about what stages do they take in the journey now this slide here is a little bit wordy and i won't read it out word for word and a little reminder you will get a link to all of these slides later on i urge you to take more time going through them an awful lot of them have links to additional valuable content that we are suggesting you read this one in particular take you to an article and visit Scotland which is very much about the customer journey process but in summary they suddenly they start at the top where they're dreaming of somewhere to go on holiday now this is quite a specific example but play along i then go into the planning mode where i think about various options what could i do should i go an adventure holiday should i go a relaxing holiday should i stay at home should i go abroad what are the covert restrictions etc so we go through a whole period of dreaming and then planning in a little bit more detail each time getting further down that journey i then kind of almost narrow it down to some decisions right i'm going on an adventure activity up in the north Scotland i then begin the booking process i think about booking i think about booking the accommodation the how am i getting there the bus the plane and then once i'm actually on site on location i'm there i'm still on part of a research journey okay what can i do today and maybe i've booked it in advance maybe i haven't maybe tomorrow is raining so my plans are up the spout so i'm now looking to boot different activities and experiences while i'm there also while i'm there i'm loving it i'm taking pictures i'm sharing them i'm doing my social media a lot of the things that i know maybe Renee spoke to you about again all of the previous visit Scotland webinars have all been recorded you can revisit these later on if you didn't get a chance to see them live Renee Looper was speaking about the value of social media and how other people will say great things about you if you treat them well on this journey so the point of search engine optimization in the journey is that they search for different things depending on where they are in this journey and the thing that we maybe need to keep in mind more than ever that we maybe didn't need to do a couple of years ago regrettably but true we now need to consider the impact of covet different people have different concerns yes hopefully we're seeing a bit of light at the end of the tunnel many of us now going or going to level zero but it's still there it's still very much the elephant in the room some people are concerned some people want to know what you are doing in terms of your cleanliness routine for your small b and b some people want to know what you're doing in terms of social distancing and limiting numbers in terms of your paddle boarding activities so we need to better understand customer behaviour listen that is the core to seo full stop at the best of times but now especially and again i would point you to the really wonderful resource on the VisitScotland website which really breaks down they can have different customer segments based on attitude to covert and the point is if you're not aware of these attitudes you might not be putting any content out there on your web pages on your social kind of responding to and resolving and answering some of their questions they might not ask directly but they're thinking about it they're worried about it they're searching for it i will show you some of this live very shortly so we need to understand the customer our customer behaviour the stage they are in the journey and then we actually just answer three simple questions okay seo is actually quite simple question number one who am i targeting my business who does it who is the best typical customer for me who is my target market and which stage of the customer journey are they at now they might be at various stages at any and all times but let's take them one by one okay i'm targeting that type of customer at the very start of their journey the dreaming stage they they're thinking about a relaxing family summer holiday because we're all over Dublin etc okay knowing that question two what words and phrases what which keywords are they going to search for in google or may they likely search for in google to achieve what they are trying to do at this stage they're just dreaming they're just thinking about options further down the journey they're actually thinking about booting they're thinking about covert they're thinking more specifically but this early stage they're dreaming and now that i've worked out or considered what some of their words and phrases might be i ask myself question number three the important one are these words even on my website if google and google said this to you earlier on the premise of seo at the base level the words they are using are they on your website and if they are google maybe give your website back to them to consider if they're not you might have to work incredibly hard to get any chance of appearing on the google results or maybe never appearing there at all so who are the customer what words are they going to be using and are those words on your website it's not actually rocket science this is what we call keyword authority and i've chucked this onto the slides just in case you hear this elsewhere because it's often used in the kind of seo industry you know having authority and all that really means is does google think that you are about the thing they are searching for okay so they've typed something in google says do you have authority are you about that thing that topic that location that activity those words they used are you and it are you about them and it basically says are you about them do we know this because those words are there so again a wee reminder we'll often hear words like short tail keywords these are kind of short snappy keywords Scottish tour holiday hotels now again very few people are using short tail keywords because they know that they get an awful lot of results back what they tend to do more of a search for longer tail keywords so two of Scottish gin distilleries is a longer tail a little bit more specific results in less results come back because there's more intent there's more kind of specific nature behind it if they're maybe looking for visitors guide to Edinburgh tools then they're maybe looking for a very specific thing a product or a service and again google tries to work out the intent behind what they're searching for and a lot of these searches we welcome back to this next week i promise is the whole geography the geolocation side of it the near me type search and how google starts to dictate whether you are near them or not but again we'll come more to that later on so let's go back to this customer journey let's get back to some of the longer tail keywords that they might actually search for and again at an early stage they might be short-term just testing the water trying a number of things considerations as they go into the customer journey they start going into the consideration phase they're now looking at you know options could i go on an outdoor activity holiday should i do a relaxing beach break should i do a staycation and they go through this these kind of periods of these kind of circles of discovery circles of research again there's a link to the the the the illustration on the right of the screen right now i again i urge you to collect that one later on it's a lovely article on customer journey in the digital world and then ultimately they go through purchase and come out of that into post-purchase however let's look at some of these and potential customer searches and in particular let me show you a business the iron here is a really great business i i've seen unicorn paddle i've experienced them i've heard other people talk about them let me do this live actually let me just bring up unicorn paddle in my browser bear with me and let me just show you what again without kind of giving the game away where it can all go wrong with search engine optimization so early awareness customer decides i want a holiday in Scotland okay i don't know what holiday in Scotland i'm thinking about right now but i'm doing some of that dreaming and i'm seeing what comes up to kind of spur on some other ideas i then get further into my chain of thought and i think right you know what i want something fun now so i'm now gonna search fun outdoor activities in Scotland there's maybe my early consideration type of search a loose idea of details not specific yet i'm still researching i'm then further down that customer journey and i've i'm almost decided what i'm looking for what will be best for me in the family i'm now looking for water sports activities in the Scottish highlands i haven't decided where i want to go i just know i wanted to be in Scotland up somewhere in the highlands and okay i'm almost ready i've pretty much narrowed it down i'm almost good to go i am now looking for beginner paddle boarding lock moment maybe that's the focus of the whole holiday or maybe that's just something i want to do while i'm there so there are some typical searches and you need to do exactly this for your business what are the typical searches the keywords the phrases that a customer of yours might search for at the different stages of the customer journey so let's go and look at unicorn paddle now again i always feel a little bit bad i'll before i do this a little demo i will repeat that these guys are a great business they are simply missing out on potential traffic through google because of maybe not being as optimized as they could be going to introduce the simplest way to start checking your website for particular content and that is to do the control f if you bring up any website including your own control f just brings up the find box okay this is what you get on a word document or in a web browser just brings up the fine box and if i search unicorn paddles home page for the word holiday as you can maybe hear by my speakers going Bing zero mentions of holiday this this this business which specializes in activities for maybe people on holiday probably a good chunk of their audience and it doesn't mention the word quality surely it mentions the worst Scotland now yes it does but it only mentions it twice now we'll come to this again in a week more detail in a minute if you are truly about something you might want to try and strategically mention it a little bit more than once or twice now don't keyword stuff in there i don't have Scotland mentioned 26 times we'll come to that later on that's a no-no but if you naturally are truly about something if google says oh you have very much have some authority for some of these words and phrases it's usually because you're about them and you talk about them they only mention Scotland twice what about the word fun it's mentioned twice great okay what about outdoor the word outdoor isn't mentioned at all what about activity activities mentioned twice what about water sports well the word water isn't there so the word the phrase water sports isn't going to be there and i thought you know paddling and paddle boarding well surely that's you know the kind of categorization of that before we get to the deep water sports what about the highlands well maybe not maybe they don't deliver in the highlands maybe that's a little bit unfair but the big one the big one i wanted to make the point on paddle boarding paddle boarding paddle boarding isn't there at all as a phrase now this company specializes in paddle boarding but what I’d like to flag up really for the benefit of all of you to go and be critical about your own websites and how you do things one of the things they do have is sup mentioned 11 times sup now if i am truly if i truly am a beginner paddleboard or do i really know that it's called sup is the kind of jargon it's the industry term it's the acronym it's the thing that maybe not everyone knows it's called that that's what you call it and if i'm coming along and i'm looking for beginner beginners not mentioned lessons is mentioned five times they actually do specialize in beginner paddle boarding lessons but because paddle boarding isn't there because they go with sup multiple times there may be maybe only ever attracting the people who know that that's what it's called listen when i get into my part of boarding when i get good at it when i begin to love that maybe i'll call it sup as well but for now there's a real danger that we only think in terms of what we call it not what the customers call it so there's again just a very quick practical example of unicorn paddle and maybe missing out on quite a lot of customers at different stages in the journey because simply the words aren't there we're not thinking about them and the words they use i hope this is all making sense i hope this is all resonating i hope this is already getting you thinking about your own websites and what you're doing on them let me move on and talk about okay if the right words are so important well where do we find all of these words where do we get confirmation of which keywords we should be using because otherwise we just make assumptions and business owners making assumptions is sometimes a very dangerous thing to do if you get the keywords right if you work out what your customers are indeed searching for you'll get more of that right customer onto your website who will hopefully convert do the thing you want them to do get it wrong maybe they're never finding you maybe the wrong customers are finding you and that's certainly not going to lead to the potential of increased traffic visitors bookings etc so just a quick question please yes absolutely under the question somebody's asked and then i thought it was pertinent probably to bring up just now somebody said are capital letters important when searching the searches within inverted commas come up with different results okay good question somebody who clearly knows a little bit about the kind of more geeky or technical side of google first of all capitals don't make any difference okay google pretty much matches content whether it's capitalised or not really doesn't make much difference at all and in terms of using quotes around things you know they kind of and you can even go further and you can be very geeky and you can start doing what's called Boolean searches which is ands and ors or whatever but if you put a quote around a phrase google is trying to match that exact phrase so if i just did a google search as a user as a consumer for holiday in Scotland in theory now wouldn't do this because Google’s far more smarter but in theory it could match content for holidays in Scotland it could also match holiday content for anything to do with the word holiday it could also match content for anything simply to do with the word Scotland whether it's a holiday or not now it's not going to do that because it looks at the whole thing but if you want to guarantee a phrase gets a better match then if you put the actual phrase in quotes or you put the plus symbol before some of those words it guarantees that it matches against those things so yeah good geeky question there i like that we're getting into the kind of right technical side of google for the majority again while some of us might do that again i would stress and i mean no disrespect to the general public the majority of the general public just do basic searches they just stick in the words that come to mind the phrase that comes to mind and again depending on where in that customer journey they are okay i hope i've answered that well enough for whoever asked a question and we're going to move on and do a poll actually we're going to take out get more of you engaging with us here i've just mentioned we're about to carry out some keyword research and i'm going to show you some tools that allow you to do that prove what words people use we're currently running a poll i'm asked we're asking you a question do you currently carry out any keyword research and if you do I’d like you to say yes and choose the tool that you are currently using we've got a few to choose from there google keyword planner SEMrush ubersuggest and if you don't click no and if you're using one of the two a tool that isn't mentioned just say yes i do but i use a tool not listed okay i'm seeing the results coming in right now i'll let this one for just another 10 seconds or so on the whole and no surprise no surprise because well hey you turned up on today's webinar you know that you're looking to do better when it comes to seo so most of you seeing yeah i think if we just display those results now hopefully you can all see that i'll certainly tell you what they are most of you saying no 77 of you saying no so keyword research among most of you not something you do okay for those of you who are doing it what did we get we got seven percent saying google keyword planner five percent saying semrush seven percent saying uber suggests and twelve percent saying another tool and apologies we weren't able to list every eventuality there and the good news is i will introduce keyword planner and uber suggest to all of you in just a second but the point is good that most of you will gain benefit from really better understanding keyword research and why it's important okay let's move on let's do some actual keyword research let me show you some of this this is all about proving what your customers say if you can prove the words and phrases which are actually searched for by your typical customer then you can take these words and phrases and optimize better for them we'll get to that part shortly and let's just spend another 20 or so minutes talking about keyword research going to start with the simplest way to do it and it really is painfully simple but it's a fun one i like to demonstrate i'm going to bring up a google incognito browser here bear with me google incognito some of you will be familiar with that basically kind of logs you out of google and it doesn't kind of use any of your previous searches i wouldn't go down the route of why some people use google incognito that would be highly inappropriate today but for these purposes it's really valuable because the problem is when you are on google knows it's you so the results are always tailored and tweaked towards you so if you go incognito it makes it a little bit kind of more what the general public would see so the first one i want to talk about is Google’s auto predict feature when you start typing something into google you will know that google starts to predict things so if i simply go and search for you know what let me just do covered then look what google is suggesting the most commonly searched for stuff around covid is covert vaccine covert symptoms covered vaccine booking covered cases these are the kind of this is google hinting to you at what people are actually searching for so you can simply start typing something related to your business and it will auto complete giving you ideas for this is these are maybe the words and phrases i should be using not because they're random because people are currently searching for them these are live google predictive results based on actual user behaviour so let me just do what i'll do i'll do hotel let me just do hotel in Scotland with okay what comes up what would you pool hot tub spa balcony let me show you what i call a a google alphabet search in terms of your keyword research you just start a phase and then you finish it with a aspar r open b balcony beer taps in the room wow clearly people looking for a good holiday right now c castle interesting d dog friendly Edinburgh clearly a kind of hot hot destination right now f for sale random g golf g h hot tub you know right now if you are indeed in the accommodation world i i urge you all to promote your hot tubs if you have them because believe me hot tub searching is rife right now why who knows but this is based on actual data i j jacuzzi l luxury m n or you can start to do a predictive kind of alphabet search listen don't just go all right let's get all of these words onto my website which is what we're going to come to show this is just influence this is just ideas this is just a nice starting point using google also autofill auto predict and playing with what are the top searches could you then start using some of that as content on your website because this is google telling you this is what people search for now let's move on to the second research tool that first one just a nice beginner tool to play with dead easy be influenced yourself every time you use google about what it's suggesting to you let me show you keyword planner now i'm already logged into this let me just very quickly bring this over onto the main screen be it with doing all these live demos always seems like a good idea right so this is what google keeper planner looks like now i will warn you it is part of google AdWords so google AdWords being the paid side of running google adverts to use google keyword planner you will need a google ads account unfortunately that does mean logging a credit card against it and setting the thing up you don't actually need to go ahead and run any ads but you will need to kind of almost have done that get you know setting things up so that you can actually use the free once you're there keyword planning tool and as pair of the pole many of you already use this for some of you know exactly what this does let me just show you can again there's the slides that we have available for you later on give you detailed instructions about doing all of this I’d rather just show you as a live demo we can click into discover new keywords and there's two ways to do it you can either start with some initial keywords so you might go right I am a b & b holiday rental cottage company up and alt b i'm going to test the phrase holiday cottages okay holiday called it because that's what i think people are looking for right there's my assumption and once i hit go and tell it to go and get results it goes and says right okay let me just move this one bigger onto my screen let me just zoom in on this just a little bit so you can see a wee bit easier holiday cottages the good news is absolutely people do search for that up to a million searches every month in the uk I've got my details set to the uk here but a bit of a problem with it i say that i'll mention this i'll explain it in a wee bit of detail kai competition so i'm i i'm maybe now at the moment my website mentions hey are you looking to bigger holiday cottage or cottages blah blah blah but maybe there are alternative or better or different keywords i should also be using or should be using in place of holiday cottages and keyboard planners suggest lots of other things to me so what about there we go straight away in with the hot tubs hot tubs right now i do not know why but they are they are searched for they are massively in demand lodges with hot tubs maybe i'm not a lodge so i couldn't quite use it but look further down cottages with hot tubs is also being searched for not quite in the same volume but clearly anything with a hot tub is of interest right now so i maybe i maybe think about well there's up to a hundred thousand searches for the free holiday lettings do i do i do that could i could i call myself that should i be changing the words and language i use up to a hundred thousand searches for people searching for dog friendly cottages that kind of number i guarantee you has gone up over the last year why customer behaviour way more people purchase dogs during the last year of covert etc therefore now need more need for dog friendly cottages hotels places to stay etc so the point is you've started with a gut feeling it's confirming the kind of volume of searches that happen giving you a wee hint at how competitive it's going to be to rank for some of these things in an ideal world what we are looking for is keyword suggestions which have high search volume and lower medium competition now the reality is without kind of giving the game away here now more than ever years ago much easier now more than ever most things are in high or medium competition very relatable you see a low and usually it's for a term which is rarely searched for that's just the volume of people now on google more than ever before so you start with a keyboard it gives you loads of other things to consider again i am not telling you just to go and grab every word on the screen and stick it on your website okay this is about you making conscious strategic decisions could you use some of these things should you try and introduce some of these words and phrases to your website because you are indeed about that topic that word that location that thing you do indeed have hot tubs and you've not actually thought about mentioning them you're prominently on your home page or on the details or whatever so keyword planner is just a lovely way of doing exactly that what you can also do with keyword planner and i'll just kind of show you this i mentioned this i won't i won't spend the time showing you can also discover new keywords by starting with an existing website so if i wanted to go and if i was a brand new paddle boarding company and i wanted to go and see what the other paddle boarding companies were better optimised for than neo you can just stick in a whole website in there and it will go and analyse their content show you what roughly what volume of searches for some of those words and phrases on that website are actually potentially getting as well as take that content as the starting point for here's a whole load of other stuff you might want to consider relevant related topics products locations etc so google keyword planner is pretty much considered a bit of an industry tool you know the kind of standard for keyword research it's from google themselves from Google’s mouth here are words volume etc another tool which you might want to look at again i'm just going to keep this nice and brief i'll bring it up i won't actually show you it in any great detail it is a tool called uber suggest now what uber suggests looks like if i just show you this live is this notice you do need to have an account with it so i'll just quickly click on sign in and i'll sign in with my google account bear with me should have done this in advance my apologies and once you're there you can start tracking your own website for particular keywords etc for free you can also use the keyword analyser which is very similar to what i just showed you on on google keyword planner now the challenge with google keyword planner as i mentioned you need the credit cards use an account with them you don't actually need to run any adverts but it can be a wee bit clunky to get set up ubersuggest does very similar things you start off with a keyword suggestion you type it in it gives you the volume the alternatives the how competitive the phrases again it's just you trying out certain words and seeing what else it suggests very similar to keyword planner but completely free now i say that it's one of these freemium tools they'll give you a good few searches for free if you want to use it extensively today and i'm always a little bit wary about using it during a live demo because i've probably used it already that day it wouldn't usually flag up Gary you've used your free searches your cheapskate pay for an account which i never do i just keep waiting for it to time out and give me additional free searches so uber suggests definitely one worth trying google search console i'm not going to talk about in too much detail i know having seen the presentation i know that Brian Tate in previous session around analytics has talked about search console search console is very much about google telling you proving to you which keywords are already being used to find you so it's not actually researching what you could be using it's about confirming what keywords are currently driving traffic to you that's really good to know hopefully it's the right keywords if it's the wrong keywords at least you're aware you can tweak you can change you can make it better you can be surprised by some of the things driving your traffic if you didn't know about them that's what search console will give you i because that was certainly mentioned and demonstrated in a previous webinar i won't waste your time with that again today go and look at some of these earlier webinars one on analytics in particular one i wanted to show you and again i know that you have already been introduced to it but i love it one of my favourite keyword research tools is the tool called google trends it is so simple it's so simple that what i'm actually going to do is type it into the chat box for you and if you want while i'm talking to you right now you can play with it yourself google trends first thing you could do is just scroll down google trends and start to see some of the currently trending topics on social on google sorry anyone said on social media there but of course it's not as google it's what and weirdly and i don't know why these are trending right now Craig David and Susannah Reid and Paris Hilton and Flora Duffy i think Flora Duffy was one of the Olympic stars so it will show you kind of current kind of trending big topics and some things are some interesting things in there just to give you an overview what is the world talking about what is the world searching for but how i like to use it is i call it my keyword thesaurus okay so i use it to work out how to say something if i'm going to say something on my website and there could be an optional different way of saying i want to use the way of saying it which gives me the best possible return i.e the most people searching for it so let me quickly give you a demo on this and it's nothing silly if i'm currently you know a travel agency it's tough and silly but play along i realise very few of you will be if i'm searching for my help if i spell it right foreign holiday is md right now in the uk looking for foreign holidays the reality is they are so here's the last 12 months can search volume of foreign holidays listen let me go back to the last five years because again one of the beauty of google trends is the historical and changing nature you can find out in real time you can find out what used to happen so if i'm trying to optimise my website to sell my foreign holidays then good news is that there is certainly some interest but if i may be searching for i wonder if more people right now are searching for holiday at home well of course they are aren't they due to this covert thing look at this almost let's just say double the volume of searches on google for holiday at home compared to foreign holiday so if i've got an option for which one i should be talking about more right now if i can tweak and change my website to contain the right words based on current user behaviour then maybe i should certainly be mentioning my opportunities to holiday at home more and actually once i've realized that then you can start to go well actually what's the right word to use for holiday home and here's the here's my maya if you are not there we go look at the growth of that hopefully you can see that over the last five years if i did if i narrow this down to just the last 12 months just to show you this even there we go staycation if you are indeed a business which you know will be attracting people who are looking for staycations holidaying at home activities to do near them because there is no foreign travel right now okay it's opening back up thankfully but if you know that well okay previously i mentioned this but now i need now i need to mention staycation now i need to mention holiday at home you need to adapt your website your website is something which isn't done and dusted and then finished it should always be up to date it should always be changing it should always be relevant to what customers are looking for so there we go that i again let me just i'm guessing that you know the word staycation outperforms the phrase holiday at home by you know let's just say 10 times as much something similar to that ratio so if you are indeed providing staycations but weirdly not saying the word staycation you're missing an easy trick it's such an easy win again without being too critical to them if you're providing paddle boarding activities and you call it sup and not paddle boarding the chances are you're missing an easy trick it's about the right words to attract the right people okay what did the people search for those are the words and phrases you start to need to use again i hope this all makes sense let me very quickly because it makes me laugh and let me quickly show you not exactly relevant to the world of tourism or travel or whatever but I’d like to show this demo if i was a hair care business and prior over the last few years we are maybe very much focusing on our hair straighteners because they are the product that give us the biggest return on investment and the other products we make the most profit from and over the last five years well loads of four are indeed searching for hair straighteners look at the spike every year that's the Christmas by the way that's the that's the gift market again understanding user behaviour maybe what i should have done at the kind of middle to end of march 2020 is actually starting mentioning here clippers because again the data doesn't lie at the start of the pandemic everyone started looking for hair clippers as they realised what do you mean no trips to the hairdressers what am i going to do and here clippers became like gold dust anyway just a fun silly example use google trends play with it get the right words you know base your sum of some of your words and keywords and the way you describe things on based on the actual keywords people are using it's not rocket science it's not difficult it's just clever use of these free tools which are there for you there's other tools like keyword density tools whereby actually counts the words on your page remember earlier on when i just did ctrl f and i started searching in individual words to see how many times they were mentioned if you want to do that quicker simple easier use what's called a density tool a density tool is simply analysing all of the content on any page it could be yours it could be your competitors that's often how i'll advocate you use them go look at your competitors what words do they talk about the most and that can give your ideas you might realise wow they mentioned Scotland eight times on their home page i only mention it once that in theory means that they will probably be a little bit more keyword authoritative for that word than me now it's not about just stuffing in the words it's not about them saying multiple times when i use phrases like keyword density i don't just mean keep saying it i mean say the important words a little bit more don't stuff them in don't try and get them crammed in density tools allow you to do a little bit of that and the last two which again i think you may have had introduced to you i think it was maybe Rainey introduced this one to you when he was talking about conte ideas for content for your social media and this one's called answer the public and again it's a fun tool you should definitely have a play with it you basically stick in a word or a phrase and it gives you the actual questions people are asking about that thing so you know how i would use it regularly i know my business specialise in digital and social media training so i want to know what people are actually asking about social media so a quick search and answer the public and you get all of these wonderful questions you know things like will social media go away is social media bad can social media cause anxiety why is social media abandoned china etc and all of this is ideas for content for me you know maybe things like blog posts we'll come back to that right at the end today maybe this is ideas for social media and maybe this is just that you know if these are important if i am actually about some of these things again it gives me just a steer on the words the phrases the what is the customer's behaviour right now what do they want to find out what answers do they need and these are simple free research tools that will allow you to do all of that and more so again as i said to you that was just a quick demo of them all there are slides in these in this presentation i won't spend time on them just now which basically walks you through how to use all of these tools how to kind of you know what to expect from them how to go and kind of consider using them better the point is go and do some keyword research 77 if you said no we don't do keyword research you absolutely need to increase business on your website so i'll just come in there with a quick question on the stuff you've been discussing somebody's asked a question that relates to what you've just been discussing around plugins and they've said does Gary recommend or would you recommend plugins like yoast seo for WordPress would that would they offer a sensible advice something like that absolutely okay so question easy answer to this one especially because the person has asked specifically about yoast for WordPress is a content management system it's the system i use for my own website it's a very good content management system what you can do is make it even better with plugins etc and yoast is indeed the seo plugin that i use myself now there are many seo plugins there are many kind of additional things you could do and choose for me yoast is kind of almost the industry standard it allows me great control over as we will come to right now it's almost like this question was perfectly timed because i'm about to go into this you know how to make tweaks and changes to certain parts of my website yoast will give you some of that capability as well as try and evaluate it and score it and kind of give you almost like a red amber green are you doing this well is it okay or is this a warning so yoast as a plugin for WordPress is great so again hopefully that's that specifically answers that one listen let me move on and take that whole question a little bit further because the point is up until now it's all about be working out where those what sorry what those words and phrases were and once we worked it out through our keyword research and we suddenly realised dude i don't mention Scotland enough i don
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