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Got roasted by a stranger at a Columbus SEO meetup and it fixed my whole keyword process
Went to a small SEO meetup in Columbus last month, maybe 30 people in a rented room above a bar, and I mentioned during the Q and A that I build keyword lists by pulling terms straight from client intake calls. This guy in the back, older, gray beard, just says "so you're guessing with extra steps" and the room laughed. I was annoyed but he was right, because I had never once checked whether those terms had any real search volume behind them. He walked me through how he validates terms against actual query data before he ever touches a page, and it's a 20 minute step I had been skipping for two years. Next week I ran it on a client in a boring niche, industrial fasteners, and found that half the phrases I'd been targeting got under 20 searches a month. Killed those, moved the effort to 6 terms that had real demand, and organic traffic went from 400 to 1,100 sessions in about 6 weeks. So my question is, does anyone here still build keyword lists off gut feel and client chat, or did you all figure this out way before I did?
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reese_anderson8d ago
Guessing with extra steps is basically my whole process, so thanks for the hit. But yeah, pulling from client calls is fine as long as you check the volume before you commit, which apparently took me years to learn.
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