Podcast Episode 55 – Revolutionize Your SEO with AI-Powered Keyword Research

In this episode of Website Success, Chrissy Rey explores the powerful combination of AI and keyword research for SEO. Learn how to leverage AI tools to streamline your keyword research process, save time, and uncover valuable insights for your website’s content strategy. Chrissy shares her personal experiences and success stories, offering practical tips for both beginners and experienced SEO practitioners.

Listen to the Episode

Show Notes

Chrissy Rey delves into the world of AI-powered keyword research, sharing techniques she uses for her clients and her own websites. She explains how AI can assist in defining website goals, creating detailed ideal client avatars, and brainstorming keyword ideas. Chrissy introduces various AI-powered SEO tools and emphasizes the importance of human expertise in interpreting AI-generated insights. The episode provides actionable steps for incorporating AI into your SEO workflow.

Key Topics Covered

  • Using AI to define website offers, goals, and target audience (0:03:26)
  • Leveraging AI chatbots for keyword brainstorming (0:06:40)
  • Exploring AI-powered SEO tools like Moz (0:08:39)
  • Balancing AI assistance with human expertise (0:10:58)
  • Getting started with AI in your keyword research process (0:12:04)

Resources Mentioned

Transcript

[00:00:09] Hey, everyone. Welcome back to website success. I’m your host, Chrissy Rey. And this week I am going to talk about one of my current favorite subjects: using AI. And specifically, I’m going to talk about using AI to help you with your keyword research.

[00:00:24] If you’re new to keyword research or SEO in general, then make sure you go back and listen to some of my previous episodes about getting started with SEO. And episode 53 in particular talks specifically about keyword research. So make sure you go back and listen to those episodes, or at least to episode 53 and then come back and listen to this episode because you’re going to need some of that knowledge about keyword research before you can really understand what I’m talking about when it comes to using AI to help you do it.

[00:00:53] If you have already done keyword research before, then you probably already know it can be a real pain in the butt. There’s a lot that goes into it because you do need to know as much as possible about your offer, your goals for your website, who your target audience is. You need to create an ideal client avatar or an ICA, and then after you do all of that, you need to try to figure out what keywords that ICA is looking for when they’re looking for your offer and meeting your goals.

[00:01:22] Then after you guess a bunch of keywords, you need to actually research them. You need to go through and figure out which of the keywords are going to give you the highest return on your investment of time for creating new content with them. So you need to figure out which ones are going to have a high search volume, relatively low competition, and there’s other factors that are involved with figuring out which keywords are the best ones to use.

[00:01:47] And then after you do all of that, after you’ve picked out the keywords that are going to work best for you, then you go onto the next phase, which is actually creating the content for your website. So there’s a lot that’s involved with the keyword research before you can even get to creating the content.

[00:02:01] One of the reasons that I use AI to help me with that process is because it’s going to save me a lot of time. And when you’re working on your own website, you know, time is money. If you save time on one aspect of it, you can spend your time on creating your content, or doing the maintenance on your website, or adding new features, or other things related to your website. Or you can spend that time on things not related to your website on things that maybe you would rather be doing than your website.

[00:02:29] Now, before I dive into the specifics of using AI to help you with your keyword research, I do want to mention that everything I’m going to talk about, they’re things that I do myself. They’re things that I do when I do keyword research for clients, and when I do keyword research for my own websites.

[00:02:45] So, I’m not just telling you to do these things because I read it somewhere, or I heard that using AI to help you with keyword research was a really cool thing to try. I’ve actually done it myself. And I’ve had some pretty good success with it, with data to back up that success. I’ve got clients who, when we did AI assisted keyword research, their impressions on the search engine result page went up, their click-throughs went up on their website for the content that we use the keyword research to optimize. Their impressions went up on that. And the techniques that I’m going to talk about in this episode are the actual techniques that I’m using with that keyword research that I’m doing for my clients and for my own websites.

[00:03:26] So what exactly am I doing when it comes to using AI for keyword research? The first thing is using AI to help me figure out the offer, the goals, the target audience, and the ICA for a website. And the way that you do this is going to depend on if you’ve already got a website or if you are still creating the website.

[00:03:49] If you don’t already have a website, check out my Website Success Blueprint, which is in the resources section at websitesuccessacademy.com. It’s going to help you plan out your website and help you come up with your offer, your goals, your target audience, and your ICA. And I recently added a set of prompts that you can use to get an AI chat bot like ChatGPT or Claude to help you identify all of those things. The prompts are going to walk you through identifying all of those things, and then also help you to create a really detailed ICA, which is going to ultimately be what you need to do your keyword research.

[00:04:27] So, for example, let’s say that you’re creating a website for a bakery. You would use the prompts to give the AI as much information as possible about your bakery and what your services and products are. And it’s going to use that to help you define your offer.

[00:04:44] And then once you’ve defined the offer, the prompts will also walk you through creating specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, or SMART goals for your website. It’s going to give you suggestions for it. And if you don’t like the suggestions, then you can prompt it to give you more suggestions until so you get the goals that you really want to work for.

[00:05:04] Now, if you do already have a website, you can use an AI chatbot that can browse the web, like Google Gemini, or ChatGPT to analyze the content on your website and document all of those things. And this is exactly what I do for my keyword research clients that already have a website. I use ChatGPT 4 to tell me what that client’s website says about their offer, their goals, and their target audience. And then after I have all that, I get the AI to help me use all of that information, to create a very, very detailed ICA.

[00:05:37] If you want to grab my AI prompts for that whole process, then you’re going to need to get into my upcoming SEO success club membership. I’ll put the link for it in the show notes, but if you’re listening to this episode, soon after it comes out in August of 2024, don’t wait too long to sign up because you’ll get the founding member price since I’m still building up the content and the membership. But trust me, just the prompts for doing this exercise are worth way more than the price of one month of membership. Just with the amount of time that it’s going to save you. So check it out again. It’s the SEO Success Club. I’ll have the link to it in the show notes, and you can also go to websitesuccessacademy.com, go to the resources, and look for the SEO Success Club in there.

[00:06:21] So let’s say that you used AI to help you create that detailed ICA. Now, what? If you listen to my Keyword Research 101 episode, then you know, the next step for keyword research is to brainstorm ideas and guess what’s good at brainstorming. That’s right. AI chatbots. They’re really good at brainstorming.

[00:06:40] So first you’ll need to tell the AI chat bot you act as an SEO expert. So give it a role and tell it that’s what it’s going to do. And then you’re going to give it all of the information you can about your offer, your goals, your target audience, and your ICA, which if you’re following my process, you’ve had the AI do for you, and tell it to use all of that information to come up with a list of likely keywords that your ICA is going to search for when they’re looking for your offer.

[00:07:10] You can ask it to give you short general keywords, which are also known as short tail keywords. And you can also ask for longer or more specific long tail keywords. So, for example, if you’re doing keyword research for your bakery website, the chat bot might give you some short tail keywords, like cake and cookies, but when you ask it for long tail keywords, it might give you some ideas, like best chocolate chip cookies near me and how many cookies should I buy for a party.

[00:07:38] I also like to get the AI chat bot to tell me why the user is going to be searching for a particular keyword. And that’s usually going to be referred to as the user intent. That can be really helpful when it comes to assigning priority for a keyword when you’re creating the content for it, because you need to know not only what the user is searching for, but why they’re searching for it and what they’re trying to do, in order to create the content that’s going to give them exactly what they’re looking for.

[00:08:04] If you’re not too sure about how exactly to walk the AI through coming up with those keywords and giving you the information again, I’ve got the prompts in my SEO success club membership. So make sure you check that out.

[00:08:17] Now you don’t need to limit yourself to just AI chatbots when it comes to doing keyword research with AI. There are other SEO tools out there, and some of them are AI powered. And one of the added benefits of some of these tools is that they’re going to give you additional information that can help you decide whether or not a keyword should be added to your keyword plan.

[00:08:39] One of my favorite SEO tools that I use all the time is Moz. You can find it at Moz, moz.com. I use it for a lot more than just keyword research, but one of my favorite features is the AI powered keyword suggestion tool. You just type in a keyword, so type in one of the keywords that the AI chat bot gave you. And it’ll give you a list of additional suggestions. Hence the name.

[00:09:03] The suggestions can be filtered and sorted by relevancy, the monthly volume, which is going to be the number of times the keyword is searched for in any given month, the difficulty to rank for the keyword, and also for the users intent. It’s also going to give you options for showing questions based on the keyword, which are going to again be long-tail keywords. So for example, if I asked for suggestions using the keyword “bread,” it’s going to give me suggestions, like “how long to bake a loaf of bread” and “how many cups of flour in a loaf of bread.”

[00:09:37] I can also ask for closely related topics. So when I search for “cookies, I also get suggestions like “cakes” and “crackers.” But I do also when I asked for that, I guess, suggestions for things like “web beacons” and “browser history,” which is for a very different kind of cookies. So you still need to figure out what you’re going to actually work for your website.

[00:09:59] When you find a good keyword in the keyword suggestion tool, you can add it to a keyword list, which is kind of like a keyword plan if you’ve been using Google’s keyword planner. And then you can use the data in that keyword list to decide which keywords you should actually use for content on your website.

[00:10:15] Moz has a lot more features, so I do encourage you to check it out with a free 30 day trial. They also have some free tools that you can use for a limited number of searches, but the keyword suggestions tool is only available with that free trial period or with a paid account. And I’ll put a link to Moz in the show notes if you want to check it out.

[00:10:35] There are a lots of other AI powered tools out there that you can use to help you with your keyword research. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to cover all of them because this episode would be hours long. But if you do have some time to research them yourself, make sure you check out SEMrush or S-E-M rush, , ahrefs, Surfer and Twinword. And again, I’ll put the links to all of those in the show notes.

[00:10:58] Now, before we wrap up, I do want to address a concern that I know many of you might have. You might be wondering, is AI going to totally replace humans when it comes to keyword research? And in the long run, it may eventually, but it’s not going to right now. AI is a powerful tool, but it is a tool. It can process a ton of data and it can uncover insights faster than any human could, but it does still need human expertise to interpret those insights and turn them into effective strategies. So if you remember my example of when I searched for cookies, In Moz, it gave me some relevant results, but it also gave me results like “web beacons.” A human might need to figure out which of those is going to actually work for your website. So you can think of AI as a really smart assistant, because it can gather the information, it can crunch numbers and it can make suggestions, but you’re still the boss, and you need to figure out which of those suggestions are going to be appropriate for your website. You’re the one that understands your business, your audience, your goals, and you need to figure out which of those keywords are going to work best to meet those goals.

[00:12:04] So don’t feel like you need to become a AI expert overnight. Start small, pick one or two of the AI powered tools and experiment with them. So if you want to just get started, maybe just use ChatGPT to tell it who your target audience is, have itelp you create an ICA, and then have it help you come up with a list of keywords. Have it help you with the brainstorming. So just start there, that’s all you really need to do.

[00:12:28] And if you don’t already have a keyword research process, make sure you start following me to get a peek at mine, because as you get more comfortable, you can gradually incorporate more AI tools into your workflow like I have.

[00:12:43] Remember the goal isn’t to completely replace yourself with AI, but to save you time so you can focus on what you do best.

[00:12:50] I hope this episode has given you some inspiration to explore using AI, to help you with your keyword research. Remember SEO is as always an ongoing process and incorporating AI into it is going to help you stay ahead of your game.

[00:13:04] If you found this helpful, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for more tips on all things website related. And if you have any questions about AI and keyword research, make sure you reach out. If you haven’t already, join my Website Success Lounge Facebook group, where you can ask questions and get support. And of course, check out website success, academy.com, go to the resources and look for the SEO success club membership.

[00:13:29] Until next time, happy researching.