Keyword planning and strategy go a long way.
Several tools will help you along the way to collect “all the keywords and combinations” you may imagine and probably even more.
The reality is that was the old-school thinking method used for years by SEOs.
But there was an evolution, and people realized that trying to do it all wasn’t good and almost impossible, and then they started to create buckets of keywords. That method limited and focused the efforts on the keywords with the largest volume of search and low competition.
That was an improvement of some sort but not really an improvement for everyone.
I’d been doing something completely different for years, which led me to get better results in a short period of time.
The Secret Souce for Keyword Research
Rather than aiming for humungous collections of keywords, aim to help your ideal customer find you and discover you before everybody else.
How? simple focus on the user’s journey, classify keywords based on the user’s journey phase and prioritize the keywords based on the desired outcome.
The user’s journey usually begins with a discovery phase, a comparison phase (validation), a decision phase and an action phase.
Let’s say that you are selling coffee products and want to ensure buyers find your coffee machine.
Now let’s add one customer that enters the coffee marketplace and is bored with drinking mediocre coffee and wants to reproduce the barista experience at home. This is your ideal customer a person who wants to buy a coffee machine to make coffee at home.
Her journey starts by looking for “coffee machines” on Google or Bing or her preferred Search Engine.
Once she narrows the machines, that would be nice to have.
Next is the comparison and validation: which one
After that is price/place finding.
With the coffee machine model she decided to for, she is now trying to find a supplier based on delivery, price and trustworthiness (the action phase)
And the winner is the one that is the most trustworthy in her eyes.