Why is search traffic hidden in keywords?

It is important to dig out keywords, but the most important thing is to dig out the keywords that truly reflect user needs. We also call these keywords that reflect user needs precise keywords. This public account has written about keyword mining methods and tools before, but first of all, do you understand what keywords are?

1. What are the keywords?

If you ask anyone who has just started learning SEO, they will know that it is the word that needs to be ranked. For example, I used to help my old employer sell hairy crabs, and built a Baiyang hairy crab website. Then, the word [hairy crab] was the keyword.

I will add a new angle to this article so that even novices can understand it. Before I start, let me answer the question in the title first, so that you can pay more attention to the value of this keyword and read every word behind it carefully.

2. Why is search traffic hidden in keywords?

To answer this question, I will talk about it from the following three points.

First, understand what search traffic is.

Search traffic refers to whether it is on PC or mobile, whether it is in China or abroad, whether it is in the form of text, symbols, voice, or pictures, whether it is on Baidu, APP, Taobao, or WeChat, as long as the user actively searches for what he wants and clicks on any result, this is search traffic.

Second, more than 95% of searches are conducted in text form, whether it is in English or Japanese. Even though many middle-aged and elderly people do not know how to type or use voice input, they can still use automatic voice recognition to convert the search into text before searching. The proportion of image search is even lower.

Third, although its official name is keywords, if viewed from a business perspective, it should be called [user needs].

To supplement, the keywords here include main keywords and long-tail keywords. In order to find what they want, users will continue to increase the detail of the word. For example, they want to know which brands of cashmere scarves are available and which one is better. He first enters cashmere scarf brand, and then finds that there is nothing he wants. Then he will continue to enter words such as which cashmere scarf brand is good and the ranking of cashmere scarf brands.

When we were building the website, we found that 80% of the traffic coming from natural searches on the website came from long-tail keywords entered by users. This is why I said above that search traffic is hidden in keywords.

You may also ask, the traffic where I placed my advertisement is not there, right? If you are investing in search traffic, you still need to analyze and research precise keywords within the keyword range.

3. Understand the root of keywords

[Root] I have not mentioned this word much in my previous articles on the official account, only two or three times in total. For SEO newcomers or laymen, they don’t even know what the root word means, so how can they understand it?

The root of a word, in plain language, is the root of a word, just like the root of a tree. For example, I like you. It is composed of I/like/you. If it is a search engine, it will be divided into I/like/you.

Here comes another term [word segmentation]. The so-called word segmentation mainly refers to a method of Chinese word segmentation in search engines.

Can a root word be just one word? No. For example, Huawei mobile phone, the root words here are Huawei and mobile phone.

Why do we need to get the root first? That’s because it’s convenient to dig out more desired words, and then find the words that users need. Here are some examples:

For example, if I am currently working in the wedding industry, I would like to find more precise keywords about users’ wedding needs. What should I do?

For example, if I find the best wedding blog in the industry (to avoid being accused of advertising), I can go directly to the homepage and find many of its keywords from the top navigation and sidebar navigation (as shown below).

For example, wedding hotels, wedding strategies, wedding photography, wedding planning, wedding photography, etc. Then, we can extract root words such as marriage, wedding banquet, wedding, wedding dress, etc. You may ask why it’s not wedding, gift, or car? I’ll explain it in the following phrases later, hahaha.

If that’s not enough, there are still many more in this marriage guide, as shown in the picture:

If this is not enough, you can use its business to find other websites on the Internet that are similar to it, and extract the business that is not on its website. Try to find as many as possible, and the more detailed the better. If it doesn’t work, you can search for this product on Taobao or JD.com, there are a lot of root words there.

4. Understand the key words

The phrase here refers to the combination of words. For example, the wedding dress in the picture above on JD.com is a product, but there are dozens of types of materials, and any combination of them can form a new word, such as lace wedding dress and satin wedding dress.

If I add the brands to the combination, it can be Antarctic Lace Wedding Dress or Antarctic Satin Wedding Dress. Now you can understand the phrase.

After we organize the keywords into phrases, we can then dig out the long-tail keywords that users need. Here I take the 5118 tool as an example.

You will definitely ask, why use 5118 again? In fact, no matter it is 5118 or anything else, because you need to find accurate long-tail keywords to generate traffic, there are really many tools for keyword mining, and they make profits from it. And because 5118 has a large amount of data in its vocabulary, more people use it.

For example, I want to know what words users usually search for lace wedding dresses. I use the 5118 long-tail word tool to mine the following:

If you only want to know the user's question words, you can click Question Extraction, as shown below:

Of course, there are two points here:

First, to download these, you need to become a paid member, and the most basic one costs 280 a year. If you don't want to spend money, you can use the Baidu drop-down box and related searches to collect them, or find some free tools.

Secondly, when collecting these phrases, the most important thing is that you must be clear about the business. For example, if you are selling wedding dresses, words like how to wash a satin wedding dress are basically not something that can be done based on Bai Yang's experience. Why? Just like when I used to sell hairy crabs, when people searched for words like "how long to steam hairy crabs", it basically meant that they had already bought the hairy crabs.

Therefore, before you understand how to combine keywords to find user needs, you must also have a deep understanding of your business. It’s not that you have to do it just because this word has traffic. It depends on whether the traffic from this word is useful to you. The prerequisite for accuracy is that you find the words accurately.

5. Understand the keyword database

Vocabulary, this is another very high-sounding noun, isn’t it? The first time I heard about it was probably six or seven years ago when Mr. Zhang Guoping gave a presentation at NetEase’s headquarters in Binjiang, Hangzhou.

I believe that many SEO newcomers, including those who want to enter this industry, often hear some people who work with traffic say how many vocabulary bases they need to build. What exactly is a vocabulary base?

The so-called vocabulary, if we compare word roots and phrases to grains, then the vocabulary is the warehouse for storing these grains.

There is a saying on large websites that if you want to increase traffic, add a vocabulary. Why can adding a vocabulary increase traffic? Because the strategies of big sites in the past were not like our small sites (mainly referring to general corporate sites, or sites with less than 100,000 pages) which mainly relied on external links or updated content.

One of their core strategies is to use thesaurus to optimize the site and use thesaurus to combine into multiple pages. Every additional word you add means adding to the page, and then you can find a way to improve the overall inclusion of the page to get more traffic.

You may not understand what I said above. Let me give you an example.

Because it is a big site. The reason why big sites are big is that they have enough content. Whether it is B2B content that was crawled in the early days, compiled and edited by portal websites, or uploaded or published by UGC users themselves.

So, for example, if there are 1 million original content pages, it is difficult for a user to find what he wants. Although many websites are large, the on-site search is not very good and the user cannot find what he wants. So we can consider using keywords.

For example, my old employer, Wikipedia, has very detailed categories on the homepage and the second level.

For example, click on a rigid-flexible composite board in PCB, and then look at the popular product recommendations on the right.

Look here, he combined all the pages of the soft mica board, including some, into a new page, as shown in the figure:

You may have two questions in your mind: One is why can't small websites do this? The second question is how to deal with the similarity of this page? Will it be included?

Small websites cannot do this because there is not much content. Even if more phrases are put in, there will be a lot of repetition. More importantly, there may not be much content under certain keywords, at most one article. Search engines do not like this.

Similarity of big sites. In fact, in addition to the keyword library strategy mentioned above, another SEO strategy in big sites is page template adjustment. What I mean is that I can optimize the richness of this word aggregation page. If there are multiple word libraries aggregated, then each word library section can be adjusted.

If you are really interested in this, you can pay attention to Ctrip.com and its various channels. A good friend of mine used to work in a channel of Ctrip for several years, mainly doing this kind of on-site optimization.

At this point, we all know that thesaurus is very important, but basically all the tool thesaurus on the market costs money, and 5118 is not cheap, to be honest. When I was in charge of the Japanese website, I wanted to buy a vocabulary database, but there were no good vocabulary databases on the market at that time.

Generally, the vocabulary library needs to be crawled using technology, which is PYTHON which has been very popular in recent years, but I don’t know how to do that hahaha.

What does the vocabulary look like? Let’s take a look at 5118, as shown in the picture. For example, the guitar has more than 1 million words.

If you want to display all or download, you need to buy this, 3699 a year, this is the highest. I currently only have the enterprise version, and it was also upgraded for me during our previous cooperation.

6. Understand the core of keywords

What is the core keyword? How to analyze keywords? How to mine keywords? How to find more keywords? How do you create a keyword database of millions? How do you put the words in the layout? Neither.

The key to understanding keywords is to understand that users behind keywords on different platforms use them differently.

And this is also the biggest self-trapped problem of doing SEO. They think that SEO keywords are the only way to go anywhere, but they ignore the fact that behind the keywords are actually user needs.

How to understand it? The user demand search for the same keyword is different on each platform. How to find out? The simplest way is to enter the keyword "website design" in Baidu, WeChat, and Taobao, and then you will understand what I mean by looking at the related search prompts.

If we think about it more deeply, it is because the platform attributes are different, so users have the same needs, but then have different needs later. For example, people generally search for simple questions on Baidu. If you want to go deeper, people who know the answers will go to Zhihu or even search for some in-depth articles on WeChat.

Attached is a keyword mind map:

Author: Bai Yang

Source: Baiyang SEO Optimization Tutorial (baiyangseo)