How Often Should You Revisit Keyword Research?

Find out how to repeat keyword research effectively to enhance your SEO strategy and optimize existing content.

Video Transcript

David: All right, next up, Dave, you’re asking about keyword research after doing several rounds of keyword research. Talk to me.

Dave: Well, yeah, it’s basically for a client. I’ve done several rounds of it, and we’ve done a bunch of blog posts and expanded pages and all this stuff. I’m just wondering if there is a difference… I mean, how would you go about doing keyword research when you’ve already got hundreds of keywords, and you know where you want to really target, and you have. What’s the best generic approach?

David: Yeah. So, I don’t keep track, nor do I recommend you keep track of keywords for which you want to rank. That’s such a false positive. We want to do keyword research to understand how customers are looking for something that the client has to offer. So, I don’t have a long list of keywords for all my clients. Right? Because I also don’t want to have the focus on the rank. I want to focus on the conversion.

Dave: Yeah, we don’t report that.

David: So, first of all, do you have your SEO blueprint for this client?

Dave: Yeah.

David: Okay. So that would have each page with a keyword topic/idea/focus on that. So, then, what I do on a regular basis is go through the SEO blueprint. You’ll notice that there are two columns in my template for the SEO Blueprint. One is first time updated, and the other is last time updated. Right? So, I’ll sort them by the last update. So, it’s the oldest last time updated first. I’ll put that URL into search console under the pages report, and I will enable impressions, clicks, and rank there. And I’ll put the URL in that report. And so, what it’ll show me is all the phrases for which that page is showing up in the search results. And I will look at not only impressions but clicks and potentially the rank in search console to say, “Oh, I thought this word was the word customers were looking for.” But Google has found either another word that I’d rather look at or it’s ranking 2.6 for something, and I have the whole page optimized for a different phrase. So, if I actually go back into the page and better optimize it for whatever ranks 2.6, which is potentially what I didn’t necessarily have as the phrase, I could potentially take that page and make it more successful for the client. And so, you go through the optimization process of okay, rewrite the title tag, rewrite the meta description, rewrite the content in light of the new phrase. What I like about doing this regularly is that Google is always testing phrases, which is why we don’t want to look at rank. But if I start to see in over a couple of months, go back to this one month, it’ll be optimized for this phrase because it looks like the best opportunity, and then it’ll improve. But then, the next month, it might say a different phrase. So, I’ll kind of optimize it for the new phrase, which ends up as I’m kind of tweaking the content, I’ve accidentally then incorporated all these very, these varied phrases on the page because two months ago I optimized it for this and I’m taking that same page and now I’m optimizing for a new keyword. That doesn’t mean I remove anything. I just add to it. And what I find is you accidentally then start showing up for stuff on that page. So that’s one of the things I’ll do on a page-by-page basis. If I know that I’ve done my keyword research, I’ve divided out my pages, I know what each page is focusing on, I will go through that blueprint on a regular basis, and then I’ll be like, okay, well, this month I think I have the bandwidth to write about three or four different landing pages, or at least rewrite or optimize them. And so I will pick the four that do not seem to perform as well as I’d like, and I’ll go back to those and kind of optimize them again based on the blueprint. Then, the next month, those being the most recently optimized, push to the bottom, and I do the next three or four or whatever I have bandwidth to do for a month. And you kind of go through the optimization process. So, rewrite the title tag, rewrite the meta description, and look at the content. Is this a page that you kind of cut corners on? You know, we all do it. We only wrote 300 words on this page. Okay, let’s bump this up to 600. Right? Or maybe it’s already got 800 words, and it’s got all the best practices, sub-headlines, and bullet lists. Maybe you need internal links at that point. So, you’re going through the process on that page to ask what this page is missing? What could be better? Is it internal links? Am I linking to this from any of my blog posts? Do I need to scroll through my blog and find opportunities to link to it? Whatever it might be, I just kind of go through that. Is this page performing poorly in the web core vitals? Do I need to improve that?

Dave: Right.

David: Apply it to that page in light of that. I don’t know if I’m answering your question because you’re really asking about the overall keyword research, and I’m talking about optimizing pages. I guess I’m answering your question about more keywords. First, make sure your pages are well-optimized before you keep adding more keywords because the potential volume of keywords is really infinite.

Dave: Yeah, right.

David: We could drive ourselves crazy by, what about this keyword? What about this keyword? In reality, we don’t go back to square one to say what is Google sending people to this page for? Is that what I’ve tried to optimize for? Or is Google wrong? Like, oh, crap, they totally misunderstood the intention of this page. Okay, well, guess what? We’ve got to rewrite that. Or, wow, this is a much better word than I could have thought of. Thank you, Google. Now, I’m going to really double down on that idea. So that’s what I’ll do. But I recommend redoing the keyword research process as a whole every six months.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, it’s time for me to do that.

David: Part of the reason for that is because usually, six months into a client, I’m really starting to understand them. When I first did a keyword research process, I kind of didn’t get it. I had a client that when I first started keyword research, I was not getting it. I felt like I didn’t understand the client. The client had a hard time explaining to me what they were doing. Well, six months later, I totally get it. I understand it a little bit better. So, one of my clients, for example, does this really niche stuff for industrial plants. So, I optimized everything in light of industrial. And then, that little task on my sheet said, redo your keyword research. It’s been six months since you did it. That nagged me. And I went back, and I started looking at their data in search console, just overall data coming in, and saw it’s not necessarily industrial. It could be plant maintenance. Not as in organic plants, green, but like industrial plant maintenance stuff. And so that gave me a whole new idea, and I did the whole keyword research process for the client, but in light of the word plant rather than industrial. And I found, for some of these things, I think it was masonry. They’re not looking for industrial masonry. They’re looking for plant masonry but not plant masonry in terms of growing things. So that pause every six months using the search console data because that is what Google is sending people to the page for… That’s what Google has said. We think this page is about this, so that’s a great place to brainstorm. Combine that with the fact that I understand this client a lot better than I did six months ago because I’m writing a couple of blog posts a month for them. They’re pushing back. That’s not really what we do. Okay, great. That’s really valuable information. And that’s going all in the queue. So that’s why every six months, it’s great to revisit. Because sometimes you’ll be like, “Oh, I can’t believe I used to think they did that.” So that’s where I’ll revisit.

Dave: But once you understand them, you have to go through them and keep looking at the pages. What is Google saying? Are they saying the right thing? Are they sending the right traffic? That kind of stuff?

David: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah. Okay.

David: And as part of that process, you may discover new ideas. The brainstorming process, which is part of the keyword research process, could potentially help you say, I don’t have a page about this yet. Again, because you’ve learned more and you’ve seen, for instance, that Google’s sending a lot of traffic to this page for different phrases that I’ve not thought of, but they’re kind of different. And your SEO intuition will kind of tell you that’s really a different idea. And it’s a great conversation to have with the client. So, tell me the difference between plant masonry and industrial maintenance masonry. They explain it, and you’ve learned. It can be a really great way to identify gaps that you might have missed in your first round. But I like looking in search console data for the brainstorming opportunities there at that point because, after about six months of doing SEO, you’re going to have some data in there to work with. Does that help?

Dave: It does.