Lesson 6: Keyword Research Simplified
The key to most of these traffic methods is proper keyword research. If you don’t take the time to research your keywords carefully, you aren’t going to have a very good chance to get a level of traffic that will help your site make good money.
Fortunately, keyword research is a relatively simple process. If you know what you’re doing, you can research plenty of good keywords for your niche in just a few minutes.
When it comes to keywords, there are head keywords and what are referred to as “long tail keyword phrases”.
Head keyword terms are typically shorter phrases such as “weight loss”, while tail keywords consist of multiple keywords that describe a market or niche, such as “weight loss strategies for seniors”.
For the most part, head keywords are always targeted by a greater number of competition as they are a short‐form description of a market, and long tail keyword phrases will generate less traffic, but are much easier to dominate within the search engines.
Savvy marketers focus on long tail keywords and gauge their exposure by a COLLECTIVE count of all traffic generated from multiple long‐tail keyword based campaigns.
You will find it much easier to position yourself in the top search engine results if you primarily focus on injecting long tail keywords into your traffic generation strategies.
Consider the fact that it could take you months to rank for the term “weight loss”, however if you set up a dozen different campaigns targeting long tail keywords including “weight loss after pregnancy”, “how to lose weight quickly”, you would generate steady traffic from all campaigns, collectively giving you MORE exposure than a competitive keyword that you are consistently struggling to rank for much less maintain your position.
You can quickly conduct keyword research for you rniche market just by using free online services, including:
- KeyCompete.com
- WordTracker.com
- Compete.com
- Google's Keyword Utility
For the most part, I use the Google keyword tool, simply because it’s very fast and easy to use and is absolutely free.
The information is also pulled directly from Google’s database providing you with a more accurate overview of specific keywords than many of the other keyword tools found online.
Visit Google Keyword Suggestion Tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
In order to conduct keyword research, you have to begin by entering in what is referred to as a “seed” keyword, basically a starting point to your keyword research.
The seed keyword is a short term describing your market, niche or potential products you are considering promoting.
For example, if you were interested in promoting the product “Acne Free In 3 Days”, you could enter the seed keyword as “Acne Free In 3 Days”, or if evaluating the acne market altogether, begin by entering in “acne”.
Next, click “Get keyword ideas”.
On the next page, you will see the results of your search.
NOTE: Your results won’t be sorted by traffic, so you need to click “Global Monthly Search Volume” at the top of the results. This will sort the results by traffic volume from highest to lowest.
The first column provides you with alternative keyword phrases that you could use within your content as well as with search engine optimization or promoting your product within PPC marketplaces.
The second column indicates the level of competition, and in our example above, nearly all of the featured keyword phrases are being heavily targeted by competitors.
The third column indicates the estimated number of searches for each particular keyword, based on monthly volume.
You want to look for keyword phrases that receive at least 300 searches per month according to the tool. Each phrase could receive a lot more or a lot less than the tool shows, so keep that in mind.
You also need to check to be sure the phrases you’re targeting don’t have so much competition that they would be extremely difficult to rank for.
You then want to turn to Google’s main search engine at Google.com to complete your keyword research.
You begin by entering in each keyword phrase, directly into the search engine, wrapping your entire phrase in quotes, like this:
“golf swing techniques”
The reason it’s so important to contain your search query in quotes is due to keyword proximity, relevancy and to make sure you are given an accurate idea as to the overall competition of the keyword.
Google and other search engines give more weight to sites with an exact phrase quote than when the words aren’t in such close proximity, so by wrapping your text in quotations (example “dog training tips”), only pages that feature your entire keyword phrase will appear within the search results window.
What I want to find out is how many people are using this exact phrase on their sites? So I simply go to Google and enter the phrase in quotes, like this:
“golf swing tips”
Then I see how many results I find:
Ideally, I want this number to be as low as possible, preferably under 150,000. The phrase “golf swing tips” currently has about 169,000 results in Google, so it’s fairly competitive.
What you really want to look for is a good balance.
The ideal numbers are 300 or more monthly searches and 150,000 or fewer competing pages, but you have to look at the overall ratio as well.
A phrase with 300 monthly searches and 75,000 competing pages isn’t as good as a phrase with 25,000 monthly searches and 150,000 competing pages. The ratio is important.
Of course, the ratio isn’t going to matter much if the phrase has so much competition that it would be practically impossible to rank for it.
If you find a phrase with 1,500,000 searches per month and 3,000,000 competing pages, it would have a great ratio. Unfortunately, ranking number one for a phrase with three million competing pages would prove extremely difficult.
Always go after the keywords that have little competition and a good balance between traffic and competition first, then you can go after the more competitive phrases later.
