Keyword Research Part 1 – SEO Unlocked – Free SEO Course

Welcome to another day of SEO Unlocked. Today is very exciting because we’re going to start the journey into keyword research. This is one of the most fundamental steps of SEO and the reason being is keywords is where it all starts. That’s how people find you.

____________________________________________

Are you getting the right traffic?

As I mentioned, picking the right keywords will make you more money and picking the wrong ones will hurt you

You can use Ubersuggest, It’s a tool I built, there’s a free version of it that anyone can go and use and you can get tons of keywords ideas and it breaks it down not just based on popularity, but also what’s most likely going to convert and generate you revenue as well. And there’s tons of reports in it and I’ll show you how to use it over the period of this course.

When you go to Ubersuggest on the left-hand navigation side, you’ll see a link that says Keyword Ideas. When you type it in a keyword that you’re trying to go after anything related to your space such as like shaving or razors, it’ll tell you what’s popular, the cost per click, the SEO difficulty, that’s the word SD you see the abbreviation there or PD is paid difficulty.

When SEO difficulty is under 40 it’s easier to rank for, when it’s over 40 it gets harder and harder to rank for.

And on the right side of the keyword ideas report, it shows you all the people that are ranked for that keyword. How many visits are roughly getting from that keyword? How many backlinks they have?

And this will give you ideas of if a keyword is good, right?

In addition to that, if you don’t want to use Ubersuggest there’s many other ways you can go and find keywords out there.

Things like Wikipedia or other content pages around the web that have really detailed content can give you keyword ideas as well because these articles are filled with lucrative keywords.

You want to rank because you not only do you want traffic, but you need to be able to solve the customer’s problem. If you solve their problem, you’re much more likely to rank.

There’s really five steps to keyword success.
The first is you need to build your keyword list, then need to research your target musketeer, then you need to understand the keyword metrics. Next you need to match the customer journey and of course, last but not least, you need to refine your keyword list.

So first building a keyword list, you go to neilpatel.com/training and you’ll be able to download the PDF there and it breaks down how you can use it and what you need to do step by step.

Second, you need to research your target musketeer right? It’s all about researching that individual.

The other thing that I like doing is Ubersuggest, right? It’s a tool on neilpatel.com you can go to neil patel.com/ubersuggest or in the navigation just click on the Tools link and then Ubersuggest type in any keyword on the left-hand navigation once you go to the Keyword Ideas Report, you’ll see a list of suggestions.

You don’t want to just be reactive as a marketer or as an SEO, you want to be proactive and going after areas that people are going to be more interested in in the future.

You can also correlate intent through prepositions. And these are all long-term opportunities that you should be trying to rank for because these long-tail keywords, a lot of people aren’t thinking about them and yes they don’t drive the most amount of traffic today but six months from now, a year from now, it adds up and it can drive quite a bit in conversions.

Then of course there’s Social Shares, so on Ubersuggest whenever you type in a keyword on the left hand navigation, there’s a navigation button called Content Ideas.

So people are like, Hey Neil, it’s easy for you but hey, when you’re a new website and even if you get 10, 20, 50, 100 visitors, hey, it shows up in Google Search Console.

The other thing that you can do and this is what I love doing, is I like setting up a project on Ubersuggest and I put in my own website or you can put in your competitor’s website.

Transcript

00:00
– Hey everyone, is Neil Patel
00:02
and welcome to another day of SEO Unlocked.
00:05
Today is very exciting because we’re going to start the journey
00:08
into keyword research.
00:09
This is one of the most fundamental steps of SEO
00:13
and the reason being is keywords is where it all starts.
00:17
That’s how people find you.
00:18
If you do it right, great, you’re not only going to get traffic
00:21
but you’re going to get sales.
00:23
If you do it wrong, you’re going to get traffic,
00:25
assuming you follow all the other materials
00:27
I’m going to teach you,
00:29
but if you do it wrong, you’re going to get traffic
00:31
but what you’ll find is you won’t get any sales
00:33
and I want to avoid you making that mistake.
00:36
In other words, you need traffic that converts into leads
00:39
or sales and that’s what this will teach you.
00:42
SEO Unlocked as a seven-week course, as you already know,
00:45
and we’re in week one so let’s dive into keyword research.
00:49
Are you getting the right traffic?
00:51
And here’s one of my favorite quotes
00:52
it’s from the CEO of Google and he says
00:55
“anytime you type in a keyword as Google, we have gone
00:59
and stored copies of billions of pages in our index.
01:03
We take the keyword and match it against the pages
01:06
and rank them based on 200+ signals.
01:10
Things like relevance, popularity
01:12
and how other people are using it”.
01:14
Google is looking at a lot of things,
01:16
so when you’re doing keyword research,
01:18
don’t worry about the 200 factors,
01:19
I know a lot of SEOs talk about them.
01:22
I’m going to break it down to as a simplest possible
01:24
and you don’t have to worry about each and every single
01:27
algorithm change or factor in the algorithm
01:29
because it’s just too complicated
01:32
and it’s just overwhelming.
01:34
As I mentioned, picking the right keywords
01:35
will make you more money
01:36
and picking the wrong ones will hurt you.
01:39
My last startup, I was getting roughly
01:42
four times more traffic than my competition.
01:44
They’re worth $800 million during their peak
01:47
and we weren’t even worth one tenth of what they were worth.
01:50
The reason being, I picked the wrong keywords
01:53
that just shows traffic isn’t everything.
01:56
Now, most people start off with
01:57
Google Keyword Planner, right?
01:59
It’s a free tool by Google.
02:00
You go in, you type in keywords and Google roughly tells you
02:05
how much traffic a keyword gets or what it costs,
02:08
but there’s something wrong with the approach.
02:11
What’s wrong with it is, it tells you,
02:14
hey, here’s a keyword it gets traffic
02:16
or it doesn’t get traffic,
02:17
but it doesn’t necessarily tell you the most important part
02:20
is that traffic where your audience is looking for?
02:23
is that traffic and it generate leads or revenue?
02:25
and that’s why I want you
02:27
to skip using Google Keyword Planner.
02:30
You can use Ubersuggest, It’s a tool I built,
02:33
there’s a free version of it that anyone can go and use
02:36
and you can get tons of keywords ideas
02:38
and it breaks it down not just based on popularity,
02:42
but also what’s most likely going to convert
02:44
and generate you revenue as well.
02:46
And there’s tons of reports in it
02:48
and I’ll show you how to use it
02:50
over the period of this course.
02:53
When you go to Ubersuggest on the left-hand navigation side,
02:56
you’ll see a link that says Keyword Ideas.
02:59
When you type it in and you type in a keyword
03:02
that you’re trying to go after anything related
03:03
to your space such as like shaving or razors,
03:07
it’ll tell you what’s popular,
03:10
the cost per click,
03:11
the SEO difficulty, that’s the word SD
03:14
you see the abbreviation there or PD is paid difficulty.
03:18
When SEO difficulty is under 40 it’s easier to rank for,
03:22
when it’s over 40 it gets harder and harder to rank for.
03:25
Typically when a keyword has a high cost per click,
03:28
it means that people are spending a lot of money
03:30
because it’s generating sales.
03:32
It’s very rare that companies spend a lot of money
03:34
to bid for that keyword in paid ads,
03:37
if it’s not generating any sales.
03:40
And on the right side of the keyword ideas report,
03:43
it shows you all the people
03:44
that are ranked for that keyword.
03:46
How many visits are roughly getting from that keyword?
03:48
How many backlinks they have?
03:50
Their overall site authority,
03:52
that’s what we call domain score,
03:54
it’s a metric from 0 to 100,
03:56
the higher the number like Google or Amazon
03:59
being like a 90 plus or 100
04:02
those sites tend to dominate and rank for everything, right?
04:05
When you see domain scores of less than you know,
04:08
40, 50, it means that a lot of sites
04:11
are ranking for this keyword
04:13
that don’t have that much authority
04:15
and it’s a much easier keyword to rank for.
04:17
And this will give you ideas of if a keyword is good, right?
04:21
Because you have the CPC data if it’s easy to rank for
04:23
because you have the SEO difficulty data
04:26
and you can also see on the right side who’s ranking for
04:28
and we’re seeing big brands going after these terms,
04:31
in many cases where even smaller competitors
04:33
that you know are doing well,
04:34
it tells you that it is a keyword
04:36
that you should be on the lookout for.
04:39
In addition to that, if you don’t want to use Ubersuggest
04:41
there’s many other ways you can go
04:42
and find keywords out there.
04:44
I recommend using a combination of all of them
04:47
because the more the merrier.
04:48
I love using Wikipedia, right?
04:51
On Wikipedia pages,
04:52
like let’s say if I looked up United States,
04:55
it’ll mention things like other countries
04:56
that are bordering us, like Canada or Mexico.
04:59
it’ll mention things like the statue of Liberty
05:02
or the Star Spangled Banner.
05:04
Things like Wikipedia or other content pages around the web
05:08
that have really detailed content
05:10
can give you keyword ideas as well
05:12
because these articles are filled with lucrative keywords.
05:16
So make sure when you’re reading content around the web,
05:19
especially on competitor sites,
05:21
look at what words are mentioning on a frequent basis.
05:24
At first you won’t notice them,
05:26
but when you have that thought in your mind
05:28
that your competition is using keywords,
05:30
you’ll start noticing what they’re mentioning
05:32
over and over and over again.
05:35
The concept of keywords is very similar
05:38
to the three Musketeers.
05:39
They have a slogan “all for one and one for all”.
05:43
And here’s what I mean by this,
05:45
we call it the musketeer intent,
05:47
but your intent, which is,
05:49
Hey, I want to rank high on Google for a keyword
05:51
needs to be similar to the customer’s intent, which is,
05:55
Hey, I’m looking for keyword because it solves a problem.
05:59
You want to rank because you not only do you want traffic,
06:02
but you need to be able to solve the customer’s problem.
06:05
If you solve their problem,
06:07
you’re much more likely to rank.
06:09
On top of that,
06:10
you also want to think about the influencers intent.
06:14
Why should people want to share your article
06:15
on the social web or link to it?
06:17
Because if you get way more people linking to you,
06:20
your rankings are going to be higher.
06:22
So in essence, when you’re doing keyword research
06:24
and creating content
06:25
and we’ll go into creating content upcoming weeks,
06:28
you need to make sure the intent aligns with
06:30
each of these three groups
06:32
and don’t worry about the details right now
06:35
we have worksheets and PDF
06:37
that’ll help break that all down for you
06:39
and teach you how to do it step by step.
06:42
When you’re going after keywords.
06:44
It all starts by understanding your goals.
06:47
Do you want to rank for the keyword cause you want more sales
06:49
or do you want your product or service
06:51
to generate more leads?
06:54
or do you want to feed different sections
06:56
of your sales funnel with more traffic?
06:58
Do you want to build awareness?
06:59
Do you just want that brand recognition
07:01
so everyone knows you like Nike or American Express?
07:05
or do you want all that organic traffic
07:07
so you can remarket to those people
07:09
and get them coming back to your site through ads?
07:13
A journey really looks something like this.
07:15
It’s all scattered, not everyone goes through all the steps,
07:18
but in essence someone’s out there, you know,
07:21
they may go to a website or see a TV commercial
07:24
or go back to your site or click on your ads,
07:27
but in general they’re going through a journey,
07:29
whether it’s opening up your emails
07:31
or reading the news and hearing about your company.
07:34
Eventually they all start at the same position
07:37
and end up at the same position, right?
07:39
They all start with having a problem
07:41
or looking for something
07:42
and they all end up at the same place, which is
07:45
they find the solution and they tend to do the transaction,
07:48
like they buy a product or they become a lead
07:50
to learn more information.
07:52
But you need to remember when you’re going through this,
07:55
your customer is a person.
07:57
They’re not a robot, they’re not a machine,
07:59
they’re real people.
08:00
Like if you’re selling beard products,
08:02
would you really target people who are clean shaven?
08:04
Of course not, and if you don’t understand your customers,
08:07
you’re going to be wasting a lot of time.
08:10
In addition to that,
08:11
you need to also think about authority, right?
08:14
Remember how I mentioned,
08:15
hey, it’s not just about you or the person searching,
08:19
it’s also about authority
08:20
because authority is what leads to more social shares
08:22
and backlinks and we’ll go over backlinking
08:25
in the up and coming weeks.
08:26
But if you’re not getting that authority
08:29
and going after the right influencers,
08:32
you’re not going to get the links,
08:33
which means it’s going to be harder to rank.
08:36
There’s really five steps to keyword success.
08:39
The first is you need to build your keyword list,
08:42
then need to research your target musketeer,
08:45
then you need to understand the keyword metrics.
08:48
Next you need to match the customer journey
08:51
and of course, last but not least,
08:52
you need to refine your keyword list.
08:55
So first building a keyword list,
08:57
you go to neilpatel.com/training
09:00
and you’ll be able to download the PDF there
09:03
and it breaks down how you can use it
09:05
and what you need to do step by step.
09:09
Second, you need to research your target musketeer right?
09:12
It’s all about researching that individual.
09:15
So let’s take an example, Dollar Shave Club.
09:18
They’re a company that offers shaving products
09:21
and their mission is to help guys take care of their minds
09:24
and bodies so they can be their best selves, right?
09:28
And they’re based in Venice, California
09:29
and their whole model was razors
09:32
and all these things are really expensive,
09:34
let’s just send them to people on a monthly basis,
09:36
make it really simple and make it really affordable.
09:39
So keeping the Dollar Shave example in mind,
09:42
there’s a few places where you can go
09:44
to really understand your customer.
09:47
You can go to places like Forums,
09:48
there’s forums on everything.
09:50
Just google your keyword plus the word forums,
09:54
or it could be you know, board as well
09:57
some people call them message boards or boards or groups.
10:00
It’s a great place where you can see
10:02
what problems people are facing
10:04
and what solutions they’re looking for.
10:06
It’s all about understanding people
10:08
because understanding them is what will help you
10:10
lead that visitor into a customer
10:13
once you get them to your site.
10:15
Wikipedia, this is a great place to go as well,
10:18
depending on what you’re looking up.
10:20
Even things like shaving,
10:21
they have different sections in there like,
10:23
shaving in religion or myths or history.
10:27
This will all tell you what people are really looking at
10:30
because the way people write Wikipedia articles
10:32
isn’t just Wikipedia article,
10:34
it’s a community.
10:35
Everyone’s adjusting it
10:36
and they’re adjusting that article
10:38
to be the best article out there
10:40
to really help people looking for information
10:43
on that subject and are looking to solve their problem.
10:46
Reddit’s another amazing place.
10:48
You can see what’s uploaded.
10:50
Things that are uploaded tend to be more popular
10:53
and this will give you ideas
10:55
on what more people are interested in,
10:57
which is great for you because the last thing you want to do
11:00
is create content and go after keywords and subjects
11:03
that people aren’t really that interested in.
11:06
The other thing that I like doing is Ubersuggest, right?
11:09
It’s a tool on neilpatel.com
11:11
you can go to neil patel.com/ubersuggest
11:13
or in the navigation just click on the Tools link
11:15
and then Ubersuggest type in any keyword
11:18
on the left-hand navigation
11:19
once you go to the Keyword Ideas Report,
11:21
you’ll see a list of suggestions.
11:23
What most people don’t do
11:25
is they don’t click on the Related Tab,
11:26
which I highlighted on this screen.
11:28
This will give you
11:29
the most amount of keyword ideas typically
11:31
and it sorts them by how popular they are,
11:35
other related terms,
11:37
shows you CPC data
11:38
that’s how much people are paying for them,
11:40
it even tells you things like paid difficulty ,
11:42
that’s PD how expensive it would be
11:44
if you’re going to to pay for that keyword.
11:46
I know this is the SEO course
11:47
but I thought I’d throw that in there as well.
11:49
And SD, which stands for SEO difficulty.
11:52
How hard is it to rank,
11:53
the higher than the number
11:54
which is from zero to or one through 100.
11:57
The higher the number,
11:58
the harder it is to rank for the lower the number,
12:00
the easier it is to rank for.
12:02
You can also use suggestions through sites like eBay,
12:05
Amazon, Google.
12:07
We pull a lot of this into
12:09
Ubersuggest as well automatically
12:12
so that way you don’t have to do much.
12:14
You can also look at questions
12:17
and questions are,
12:18
what questions are people asking around this subject?
12:21
Like can you bring a shaving razor on the plane, right?
12:25
That’s example of a question that someone may be
12:28
searching for that you can answer.
12:30
Another tool that I love, this is one of my favorite ones
12:33
and I use this like once every three days at least
12:36
it’s Google Trends cause you ca type in keywords
12:39
and it’ll tell you what’s trending
12:40
and this is great because
12:42
you want to know where the market’s going.
12:43
You don’t want to just be reactive as a marketer or as an SEO,
12:47
you want to be proactive and going after areas
12:50
that people are going to be more interested in in the future.
12:53
And Google Trends shows you that, right?
12:55
It shows you what’s trending and what’s becoming more
12:56
and more popular over time.
12:58
You can also correlate intent through prepositions.
13:02
So again, on the keyword ideas report on Ubersuggest
13:05
there’s a Prepositions Tab,
13:07
like shaving with razor bumps, right?
13:11
And these are all long-term opportunities
13:14
that you should be trying to rank for
13:15
because these long-tail keywords,
13:18
a lot of people aren’t thinking about them
13:19
and yes they don’t drive the most amount of traffic today
13:22
but six months from now, a year from now,
13:25
it adds up and it can drive quite a bit in conversions.
13:29
There’s also Quora,
13:30
it’s one of the most popular question and answers site.
13:33
You can see what’s popular, whatever has tons of answers.
13:36
People are probably interested in that subject
13:38
and are looking for answers as well.
13:41
I like Amazon Reviews as well.
13:43
This gives me an idea of what people think, what they like,
13:45
what they dislike, what I need to really cover
13:48
when I’m trying to find the right keywords
13:50
that appeal to my ideal audience.
13:53
Then of course there’s Social Shares,
13:55
so on Ubersuggest whenever you type in a keyword
13:58
on the left hand navigation,
14:00
there’s a navigation button called Content Ideas.
14:03
This shows you all the popular blog posts around the web
14:07
on that subject and it breaks it down by Social Shares
14:10
so you can see the ones that have the most Social Shares
14:12
at the top, then also looks at backlinks,
14:14
who’s linking to them and estimated visits
14:17
and the estimated visits is
14:18
how many visitors is this article getting
14:20
from Google specifically.
14:22
So I love looking at this because it tells me what traction
14:26
content has and it shows me that
14:29
hey, these keywords are better than others.
14:31
Hey, these keywords do really well for the social web
14:34
because there’s a lot of shares
14:35
and these other keywords do better for Google Search.
14:40
The results, right?
14:42
The other thing that you can do is just google for the term
14:44
and look at the results in the top 10
14:48
this will give you idea of,
14:50
hey, these are what people want to read about.
14:53
Because Google doesn’t just rank sites at the top based on
14:55
what keywords they put in
14:57
or what links are pointing to their website.
15:00
As the CEO of Google mentioned, they look at things like
15:02
popularity, experience.
15:04
So if a lot of people are reading an article
15:06
and they stick around for 10 minutes
15:08
versus they read another article from a competitor
15:11
and they stick around for two seconds and they bounce away,
15:14
what do you think’s going to happen?
15:15
Well, the one where everyone’s sticking around for minutes,
15:17
that one’s going to rank higher
15:19
but the one where people bounce away within two seconds,
15:21
it’ll tell Google that,
15:23
hey, doesn’t matter how many links this has
15:24
or what their contents about,
15:26
people don’t like this result,
15:27
so we shouldn’t rank it that highly.
15:30
Now, one thing I really want you to do
15:31
and this is one of my favorite tactics
15:33
but a lot of SEOs don’t do this,
15:35
I want you to set up Facebook a Audience Insights. Okay?
15:39
This doesn’t mean you’re going to be spending money on Facebook
15:42
or you have to run ads or anything like that, don’t worry.
15:45
See what’s cool about Facebook Audience Insights
15:48
is they’ll tell you exactly all the people
15:51
who are visiting your website,
15:52
what they like, what their interests are,
15:54
so that way you can do better targeting.
15:56
And the way you figure this out is
15:59
you can look at Facebook’s Pixel Guide
16:01
and install their pixel.
16:03
When you install their pixel,
16:05
what will happen is
16:07
they’re going to end up tracking the data on your website
16:09
and they’ll end up giving you like the demographic data
16:12
on the people who are visiting your website
16:14
so you can see their interests
16:15
and it’ll help you determine what keywords
16:16
you should go after.
16:17
So step one, log into Facebook and click on Pixels
16:21
and once you end up doing that,
16:23
the next step is you click Get Started.
16:27
And then from there, you know after you created your pixel,
16:30
then you want to name your pixel,
16:31
whatever you want to call it,
16:32
you can just name it the name of your site.
16:34
Then from there you want to email it to a developer
16:37
to install it or you can install yourself,
16:39
it’s kind of like installing Google Analytics
16:41
and then step five is View and copy the code
16:45
into the head of your site
16:48
and once you end up doing that,
16:51
you know you’re off into the races
16:52
and then boom, within time you’ll be able to see that,
16:56
hey, Facebook is telling me Audience Insights.
16:59
And if you want to track to see if you did it right,
17:01
there’s also a Chrome extension that you can install
17:04
and it’ll tell you if you did it right or wrong.
17:07
All right, now that you’re starting to collect data
17:09
on your ideal customers and the people visiting your website
17:11
so you can learn more about them,
17:14
you also want to check for
17:15
what keywords you already rank for, right?
17:17
You may be ranking for something already.
17:19
I rank for a ton of keywords
17:20
because I’ve been doing this for a long time.
17:22
So people are like, Hey Neil, it’s easy for you
17:24
but hey, when you’re a new website
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and even if you get 10, 20, 50, 100 visitors,
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hey, it shows up in Google Search Console.
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So you should be using Google Search Console, it’s free,
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it shows you that data.
17:35
The other thing that you can end up doing too is
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you can go to your competition or your own website
17:40
and you can type it in to Ubersuggest
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and go to the Traffic Analyzer Overview
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and when you click on the Keywords Box,
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it’ll take you to a report
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that breaks down all the keywords that
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that website ranks for.
17:54
And this is really useful because it’ll tell you,
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hey, this is a good keyword,
17:58
look at all the traffic they’re getting for,
18:00
here’s their position, here’s their search volume.
18:02
It’ll help give you more ideas as well.
18:05
The other thing that you can do
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and this is what I love doing,
18:08
is I like setting up a project on Ubersuggest
18:11
and I put in my own website
18:12
or you can put in your competitor’s website.
18:14
I generally recommend that you put in your own website,
18:17
it’ll show you their estimated organic monthly traffic,
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their monthly backlinks if it’s growing or declining,
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the referring domain names and what’s cool about this is
18:26
you can track their rankings over time
18:28
and seeing if they’re going up or down
18:30
and compare it to yours as well.
18:33
Now what I want you to do
18:34
is go back to neilpatel.com/training
18:37
and download the Customer and Influencer Personas.
18:40
Remember how we just break down
18:42
the musketeer profile, right?
18:44
“All for one, one for all”.
18:46
It’s about people as well.
18:48
You’re not just trying to please a robot
18:50
or a server or algorithm, you’re trying to please people
18:53
because that’s how you convert visitors into customers
18:56
and download this worksheet and go through it.
18:59
This will help you do keyword research the correct way
19:01
and this worksheet breaks it down step by step.
19:05
It shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes
19:07
and once you do that,
19:09
you’ll be then ready for the next lesson.
19:11
Thank you for attending this week’s class.
19:14
Make sure you go through it,
19:15
if you have any questions, feel free to ask us.
19:17
We’re here to help you succeed.