Seed and Stem Keywords – An SEO Strategy

From zero to an effective keyword set in less than 15 minutes. Development of a Search Engine Optimization keyword roadmap that will get you started on the path to generating quality organic search traffic.

Read the transcript:

Okay. So in this screencast, I am going to talk little bit about keyword research and we are going to cover a couple of topics.

Topic number 1 is seeding. Seed keywords.

Topic number 2 will be identifying what I call stem keywords and then the third one will be creating a targeted keyword list from those core seed and stems to break out a strategy around site design, content and basically all the other  activities.

So the first thing to do when we start and we are starting with Nudy Patooty as an example.

The first thing we start with initially with any of our clients is obviously the persona development. Now just as a very brief intro, persona development is a deep dive into social buyer.

Okay, so you would typically start with demographics which are the key customer profiles, the business is attempting to target. And then what we do is actually go a little bit deeper because we are interacting in a very different atmosphere on social, via email, one to one communication, on Twitter, all sorts of different channels are being used.

So we have to appropriately be able to talk to that person, so we need to understand who they are, what drives them, and their pain points.

So what we do is: we create a persona.

These personas come from talking to customers, former customers, they aren’t just coming from additional research. But we combine everything into one overall persona.

So in this case, we have Natalie Scott. There is Natalie’s statement. Okay, now from here we will get a list of what we would call core keywords that describe the product(s) being sold.

Okay, so in this case, Natalie’s a working woman, enjoys fashion, wants to wear stylish clothing and she is looking to save them, coat and cloth for special occasions.

She doesn’t want to damage clothing, in the workplace from things like perspiration, deodorant stains and just general wear and tear.

There’s also, she wants to find an undershirt to help extend the life of her favourite clothes, reduce dry cleaning costs and they have to be lightweight and discreet underneath work wear so it doesn’t distract overall style.

So you can see there, we are going to get a bunch of quality words that describe Nudy Patooty’s product. We also get her key characteristics.

And again, search is less about trying to stuff in keywords it’s about trying to get inside the head of the person that will be searching on a search engine or on social media channels. So that we can appear front and centre when that person has a high level of intent.

[bctt tweet=”Search is not about stuffing keywords or rankings. It’s about getting inside the head of the person searching.”]

Okay, so we certainly have a lot to work with here, this is one way to start (our SEO and PPC programs), basically what we are going to do is, we are creating what we call our seed keywords. And the second thing that we’ll do, now these exist here and in Nudy Patooty’s case, this is a good starting point.

The second thing that we’re going to do, and I am just going to switch browsers over here, is just going to search for the brand name and as you can see here, we’ve got a bunch of descriptions that we both updated but that we are going to break out and become a little bit more refined with.

So body slimming bamboo undershirts for women. Protects women’s clothes from everyday damage and reduces the cost of dry cleaning.

There, in that particular statement, we’ve got a number of different core keywords that we can turn to. So what I do is start out and, I’ve already done, this is a bit of an example here, so I am going to show you this. I just start by breaking out a simple list in a text editor, okay.

So bamboo undershirts for women. Bamboo fabric, bamboo undershirts, bamboo undershirts for women, reduce dry cleaning costs. Now in Nudy Patooty’s specific case, this is a very new market.

Bamboo fabric fashion.

Okay and we continue to create these seed keywords. Okay and a lot of times that content can come from, for instance, the key benefits.

So, protect your clothes. Body slimming fashion. Jump over here, Business travel packing, okay. So now I am creating my list of seed keywords. So this will form the seeds that we are going to use to then begin the process of stemming.

Now the idea with stemming is: it happens very quickly, and there’s a couple of key tricks that we can use to very quickly create targeted keyword lists and then research those keywords to identify our biggest opportunities, okay.

So let’s start with undershirts for women. So starting with the top, if I were to do this, a way to rationalize it, is undershirts for women.

Okay that’s one.

Travel clothing for women. And list them, like them list them in a priority, kind of most primary going down in that list. And then cleaning your clothes. I’ve already like I said this little block under here is already, okay.

Now each one of these, can you do this but write it slightly differently for Nudy Patooty in this specific case. They kind of start out at what you might consider the tail of search.

Tail of search is in fact more important (than ever) because of personalized search and also the fact that the major terms dry cleaning, undershirts are owned by places like Amazon, let’s check. There we go. Sears, Underarmour, Wikipedia, jockey.com, amazon.com. the likelihood of a site ranking against those sites, in a pragmatic sense, like Nudy Patooty is not going to be able to compete, so this is not even a keyword that we are concerned with.

So we try to be very practical about this, so we can show immediate results.

So undershirts for women. That’s going to be one of my seed. So what I am going to do is go to my web browser and then in order to remove any personalized results, I am going to start an incognito window in chrome. And I am going to paste my term and I am going to google it, okay.

So as you can see here, as one of our seeds, we still have jockey.com, hanes.com, marks.com. So these are pretty, pretty authoritative sites. But this is one of our seed keywords.

As you can see here, this is the process of stemming.

A little trick: Google provides stem and related keywords at the bottom of every search, whenever you search.

This is the core of our stems. So what we do here is we go undershirts for women modest. Google is ranking these according to how well related they are to the main term. Why reinvent the wheel. For trying to appeal to Google, we are going to use these ones.

Because Google is actually placing a high relationship between the seeds to these stems that you find at the very bottom of every google search page.

So jump back here, just jump back to wherever it is. There it is. Okay, so undershirts for women, undershirts for women modest and what I’ll do is, I am just going to grab all of these and then I am just going to filter them into my text editor here. Okay so I’ll do that and I am just going to be very general right now because you know we can always delete stuff. That’s kind of the idea.

Now we don’t do this entire process, the entire time, okay. But we certainly get it started this way.

Now once again we are using Google’s intelligence to give us the information that we want rather than trying to assume what Google would want. Google tells us what they want.

Okay so there we go, long sleeves undershirts. Under armour and long sleeves. Okay so we’ve got a bunch of stems here.

Now I am going to go to my next term. And again I am not going too deep into this because we are going to use the seeds and the initial stems to get the rest of our division of keyword terms and then actually do some more deeper dives, okay.

So travel clothing for women starts to bring up things that actually get, as you can see the brand of Nudy Patooty. Travel clothing for women lightweight. Travel clothing for women on a budget. Travel apparel. Travel clothing for women tips. Okay, and I am going to copy those and put them in my text document.

Now I am going to do save money and dry cleaning.

You can see, we got some great ones in here. I especially like the dry cleaning with vodka. Okay, save money on laundry, avoid dry cleaning, cut dry cleaning costs, home dry cleaning kits, we’ll get rid of those. How to save money on dry cleaning bills. So you can see it’s kind of becoming very apparent very quickly.

Cut dry cleaning costs.

Save money dry cleaning bills. So we are going to keep going. And eventually I might run out. As I get down to, kind of, tail of search. Google will stop giving me. Okay. So you can see here, we are getting some other ideas.

Potentially, this is a good one.

How much does dry cleaning cost. These are like informational things, we can use to drive traffic back into the website. That will allow us to begin nurturing leads. Here I am just going to do this. And I’ll delete them. Just in the interest of time, I am not going to go through every single one. But you can see how the process works. It’s pretty straight forward and pretty simple.

I’ve already done these. How to get yellow stains out of white shirts. So how to, how much, those are all good ones. Bamboo undershirts for women. Let’s go right into the bamboo fabric which is a kind of unique selling proposition.

Okay so the bamboo shirts. I am just going to keep adding these, so you can see undershirts for women long sleeves, bamboo tank tops. Not sure if that’s going to, okay. Organic, there we go.

So bamboo tank tops, bamboo fabric shirts. We’ll get to next one. There we go. So these, this is going to guide our site optimization, that type of content we are going to use, how we’re going to create it, what we’re going to say about it.

Once again, all directly from Google. So I am just going to do one more very quickly. And then we will jump into the next part of the screencast.

Okay, there we go some other good ones, undershirts sweat proof. And I like to keep the indents happening just to keep it a little bit organized and we know which terms come from the related searches. Okay, sweat resistant shirt is a good one. Now as we go through this, we are going to go do some additional research, once we have this to determine the volume of these potential searches and we are going to then craft the site and the content to appeal to these.

And because these are not highly highly competitive, we have a very good opportunity here to drive a massive traffic from significant body of terms and related terms. So once again, so body slimming fashion, I’ll do that just for fun. As you can see, we start with key selling propositions, we use Google’s related searches to build out the core of our list. These are called seeds and stems. Okay, so I’ve got a whole list now. Let’s just say, I’ve got a hundred and fifteen (115) keywords in two (2) minutes that we’ve been doing this.

It’s actually fourteen (14) minutes but that’s okay.

So that’s step 1. That Seeds and stems. In the next screencast, I am going to cover taking those seeds and stems and then building out further information and detail.