Why you shouldn't chase keyword search volume

This podcast is inspired by a conversation I had on the live chat of KeywordsPeopleUsecom with a new customer . This customer is somebody who's starting out on their journey of building their own website and trying to build their own business . They're starting out looking to come up with a keyword strategy .

Their first question to me was do we provide information on keyword difficulty in search volume ? This is quite a common question . We get a lot People want to know , for all the questions and all the keywords that we find in our tools , what's the search volume ?

Now , the straight answer is , for most of these keywords and questions that we come up with , all the search volume tools and all the search volume estimators will say that there is almost zero volume for these keywords , which puts a lot of people off , a lot of people who have listened to other gurus out there who say you know , you must target high volume

keywords or you must find high volume keywords with low competition , which almost don't exist , because if there's a high volume , people will chase it . If these tools say it's high volume , people will chase it .

So these tools , everybody's running around chasing a small set of keywords which they think have got high volume , and to me it's the wrong way of going about setting out your keyword strategy and what you're going to achieve with your website . Your website shouldn't just be about hitting high volume keywords .

Your website should be , first and foremost , actually useful . How do you make a website useful for people ? You have to make it answer people's questions , because when people search , they're trying to answer a question .

So I explain this concept to the customer that the idea is you answer all the questions around a topic and doing so , you'll start to rank for many more keywords than the original question and that we know all the questions that we surface with people are actually those that people actually use because we get them from Google and other online sources .

So the customer's question back to me was how would we know which ones to target then if we don't know how many people are searching for the question monthly ? So that's a good question , reasonable question .

So I explain back that the concepts is to target your building topical authority and to do that you need to cover a subject in depth by answering as many questions as possible . And again they sort of challenged me back and said but if you have a new blog and want to spend your time targeting the low difficulty , high search keywords , what do you do ?

And I mean to this really I had to answer there's no shortcut . The method that this person was looking at is a different one to building topical authority . So at this point the customer said to me quite rightly have you got a blog or a site you've done yourself along the principles you're talking about ?

So I said yeah , go and look at Broadbanded Code at UK . That was a site that I launched , built and sold and that follows this exact same principle . And they went along Hadlock and they said oh , I see what you mean . It's a tiered , interlinked site .

And I said exactly , you know , that's a way we've built a site there that's built to build topical authority , to answer people's questions . And in answering all those questions and linking the pages to each other in a sensible way that matches the content and the intent of all the content , then that means that we started to build topical authority .

We ranked for all sorts of keywords , not just the questions we were answering . By answering the questions , you start to hit other keywords just by dint of answering those questions . You build a whole corpus of content that covers an area in such depth that it starts to pick up all sorts of keywords just naturally .

And that's the best way of picking keywords up naturally as you write about a subject and answer those questions and go in depth , you start to pick up those keywords in a way that isn't forced , that isn't just targeting them based on volume . You will start to pick up volume keywords just by accident .

And that's the right way of doing it , because if you do it in a natural way it looks better . It's actually naturally organic and your site is just more understandable and fits the mould neatly , rather than trying to force in keywords just purely based on volume and ignoring low volume stuff . Because why ?

Because something's low volume doesn't mean it shouldn't be there , so to ignore it , ignore low volume stuff , would be nuts . Now , after this , we went into more depth on the actual niche that this person's trying to get into . There area of expertise has actually qualified qualifications in this area , so they're a really perfect author to be doing this .

But they were getting really overwhelmed about how to set a site up , how to get it so that , what the content strategy was going to be , how to do the hierarchy , and all these things . That are legitimate questions . But I said you've got to take a step back . You can't do it all at once .

The most important thing is to actually just get started , because while you haven't got a site and there's no content published , you're not getting anywhere , whereas if you just start okay that beginning it might not be brilliant , but that's fine , because the only way you get better at something is by starting , carrying on and improving , and anything that you do to

start with that you're subsequently not happy with , you can just come back to edit , delete , update , whatever you need to do with it , but the key thing is to get going .

So you might not have the perfect hierarchy to start with , you might not have the perfect content plan , you might not have everything in place that you want to , but the key thing is just to get started .

For example , if you go back and look at archiveorg , at any big website or any successful website , if you go back a few years and look what it was like when it first started , you will see there will be content gaps . You will see that it was not perfect . In many cases it might be awful , but the fact is they got started and they improved over time .

And that's what you've got to do with your sites . You've just got to get started . Just publish anything , because you've just got to start using those muscles that create and publish content . And if you don't start using them , then you'll never improve . It's like expecting to go to the gym and you know , to be an amazing bodybuilder in day one .

No one starts like that . Everybody goes into the gym in the first instance unfit . It takes time , it takes repetition , it takes dedication , it takes learning to get that improvement , to get to where you want to be . And it's the same thing with building websites . You just have to get started . So pick your niche , pick your subject .

Whether it's one you're passionate about , qualified in , you're just interested in whatever , I don't care why you pick it . But once you've picked it , just get that , start building . That's the only way you're ever going to learn . Don't get so bogged down in the analysis and the planning that you never actually start , because then you've got nowhere .

The key thing is just get going and improve as you go on . So I'm going to leave the last words to the person who I had the chat with the other day and they said you're a vice that you can't cover it all . Don't overthink or overplan it , just start has been valuable , thank you . Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe , share .

It really helps . Seo is not that hard . It's brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUsecom , the solution to finding the questions people ask online . See why thousands of people use us every day . Try it for free at KeywordsPeopleUsecom . If you want to get in touch , have any questions , I'd love to hear from you .

I'm at Channel Five on Twitter or you can email me at podcastkeywordspeopleusecom . Bye for now . See you in the next episode of SEO . It's not that hard .