There’s A LOT of over-thinking that happens in SEO. Especially at the strategy phase.
And I’ve been one of the most guilty, especially in one major area:
Keyword research.
To get results with SEO, you need content. To know which content to build, you need to do some form of keyword or topic research, otherwise you’re just blindly guessing.
But that’s where the problem pops up…
The problem: Spending 10x more time for 10% better forecasts
Here’s what the “entry-level SEO” approach to keyword research looks like:
Pick a keyword, create a page to target it, repeat.
Simple and straightforward. You can do the initial research in literally 60 seconds (pick a keyword) and be ready to start producing content right away.
Meanwhile, the “midwit” approach looks like this…
- 10,000+ keywords in a sheet
- Grouped into 1,000 clusters
- Advanced models and forecasts
All based on estimated data that’s looking at trailing 12 month data (and missing trends). All clustered based on moment-in-time overlap in the SERPs.
Is it BAD to be clustering terms, building massive topic maps, and modelling performance?
In a vacuum, no.
But the issue is—doing all of those things requires time. Lots and lots and lots of time. And in the end, your strategy often ends up over-researched and bloated. That 10,000 keyword topical map sounds awesome in theory, but in practice—it’s a firehose. It’s tough to actually use. As a result, those deep research docs just collect dust.
And at the end of that research journey, what happens?
You create pages to target those keywords. And in almost every case, you end up with a “primary” keyword you’re building the page around, and “secondary” keywords you’re hoping to scoop up at the same time.
But wait…
How much control do you actually have over how well you rank for the “secondary” terms anyway? Does adding them to a spreadsheet increase your chances of ranking any more than just… accidentally targeting them would?
My take is no.
All you really need is a primary keyword you’re building the page around, and tools that can surface secondary terms for you as you’re building the page and help you weave them in.
In the end, the content asset will be virtually the same with each approach.
The only missing piece by skipping the deep research?
You don’t have an estimated performance forecast in a spreadsheet.
Is that… a bad thing though?
I used to think so.
My thinking was that if you didn’t have a 36 month forecast (again, based on lagging, estimated data) then you couldn’t possibly implement a plan.
I’ve changed my mind.
The solution: Simplify with rough assumptions instead
To frame it as simply as possible…
Pick a keyword, create a page to target it, repeat.
What if instead of granularly trying to pull in 1000s of keywords that Ahrefs says get 10 searches/mo—which again, is just rough estimates—we just pulled the volume for the top-level, primary keyword and use a multiplier to roughly factor in the secondary terms?
Taking that approach, rather than spending hours finding, cleaning, clustering, and projecting literally 1000s of keywords—you just need to find ~100 big topics that matter.
Your forecasts are going to be rough estimates either way.
Why spend 10x more time building your rough estimate when you could instead spend that time, you know, building and shipping content?
How to make this work in practice
First, let’s break down “keyword research” into two major steps:
- Identify primary keywords.
- Identify secondary keywords.
First you figure out the big topics, then you find all of the other ways people search for those topics and nest them underneath the primary keyword.
If you build the ENTIRE topical map upfront, by definition that means you have to first find all of the primary keywords that matter and then also find all of the secondary terms.
All before you start producing a single asset.
What if rather than tackling both steps upfront—you deferred step two?
You still do the upfront research to find the primary terms and topics you’re interested in, but rather than pushing off implementation even further until you’ve also built out the massive web of secondary keywords—you jump straight in.
The process would look like this:
- Identify primary keywords.
- Produce content assets.
And as part of step two, you’ll also be tackling secondary keyword research just for the topic you’re writing about. Which is something that a qualified content production team is going to do anything, regardless of whether or not this research already happened upfront.
The result: 10x less time spend “planning” while your competitors push out content
Rather than watching from the sidelines in planning-land as competitors ship content and win rankings—you get to start producing content much, much faster.
And the sooner you start producing, the sooner you’ll see results.
Less time spent “playing” strategist—more time spent doing the damn thing.
