Whether you’re you building a site or a blog, keyword research is definitely the first thing you need to consider. You can be sure that if you target the wrong keywords, you will fails for sure. The information presented in this guide will help make your keyword research easy and fun. We’re going to concentrate on the main factors to which we need to pay special attention.
There are two types of optimization: On Page and Off Page. But, before thinking about On Page and Off Page optimization, you have to research your keywords. There are two types of keyword research. The first type is for SEO purposes, the second type is for PPC purposes. Here, we’re only going to discuss keyword research for SEO purposes. Although there are similarities between keyword research for SEO and for PPC, they aren’t exactly the same. Actually we will talk about where we want to rank, not how to not how to optimize a site.
First, let me explain you what is the difference between main keywords and long tail keywords. Most of you in the SEO business will already know about these terms, but we’re going to start from the beginning, so I’ll be explaining them again.
Main keywords are words such as, “money”, “business” and other. In most cases, these keywords have a lot of traffic, but the problem with them is that they aren’t very targeted. The main problems with these keywords are:
- It’s not exactly clear what people are looking for when they search for these keywords.
- It’s not easy to rank for these keywords because of all the competition.
Long tail keywords are phrases such as, “how to make money online”, “how to make money with paid surveys”, and “legitimate paid surveys” and other.These types of keywords are different from main keywords.For these keywords we know that:
- They are easier to rank for.
- They have targeted traffic because it’s clear what people are looking for when they search for these keywords. For example, if someone types “money”, it’s not clear what he’s looking for; however, if someone types “how to make money with surveys”, it’s obvious that he’s looking for a way to make money with paid surveys. I can guarantee that you’ll make more leads, sales, or Adsense clicks per 1000 searches if you rank for long tails keywords instead of ranking for main keywords.
- The only one problem with long tail keywords is that they don’t have too much traffic. It’s obvious that you won’t drive a lot of traffic from one long tail keyword phrase, but you can target a lot of long tails. You can target 100 or 1000 or even more.Believe me, you won’t be making a mistake.
Now, I’m going to give you an example with my blog, which discusses online surveys for money, so you can see how this works. In this example we will use it to analyze the situation.
I know very well that I can’t rank for search term like “surveys” and “paid surveys” because they’re too competitive, but I CAN rank for keywords like “legitimate paid surveys”, “surveys for money legit”, and so on. These are long tail keywords, and if you check them, you’ll see that I rank for them in top 10. They don’t send me insane amounts of traffic, but I DO make money because they have traffic and it’s clear what people are looking for when they search for terms like these.
Site Structure
Let’s talk a bit about site structure before we continue with keyword research because site structure and keyword research are closely related. Before you think about your keywords, you have to think about the structure of your site. The best way to structure your site is to optimize your main site url for your main keywords and your pages (or posts in my case) for long tail keywords. As I have mentioned, ranking for main keywords is much more difficult. The right site structure is to target your main keywords on your home page and your long tail keywords on your pages or posts.
If you check my blog, you’ll see that the main blog url doesn’t rank very well, but my posts do. Let’s check one of them: “3 Reasons You Should NOT Pay For Surveys”. It can rank for “legitimate paid surveys”, “legitimate survey”, “surveys for money legit”, and so on, and THAT makes me money. Another post is optimized for keywords like: “how to avoid scams”, “ways to avoid scams”, and so on, and yet another is optimized for “paid surveys free registration”, and so on.
This is the right formula to make money.
Now let’s discuss how to find the right long tail keywords.
If you only pick keywords you like, you’ll be wasting your time. You have to understand what keyword factors to pay attention to, which we’ll be discussing here in detail.There are 3 main criteria that you have to use for any keyword:
- The number of searches from Google Adwords.
- The CPC from Google Adwords.
- How competitive the search term is.
The combination we’re looking for is ‘more searches, higher CPC, and less competition’.
The Number of Searches:
Log in to your Google Adwords Suggestion Tool and type in whatever keywords you like. There you’ll see Local and Global searches. Local means it’s only for the country you’ve chosen; Global means worldwide. Think about whether your business is targeted to a specific country or to the whole world. If you want to sell something worldwide, then look at Global. If you are offering something only for a specific country, use Local. The more searches you see, the better. This means you’ll get more traffic if you rank for those keywords.
The CPC:
This is what people pay per click on Google Adwords. This is a very important criteria for us to consider because it shows us how much money people are willing to bid for a keyword. Higher CPC means more money. Let’s say you see a keyword with 1000 searches per month and a CPC of $10. This will be much better than a keyword with 1000 searches per month and a CPC of only $0.30.
The Competitiveness:
Now we have to see how competitive our search terms are. This is probably the most important part of this guide because it’s the part where most people fail. It’s easy to find good keywords with good CPC, but if they‘re too competitive, then it may be impossible to rank in top 10 or, at the very least, it’ll take a lot of time and effort. This is why we have to understand how to check the competitiveness of a search term.
First, let’s talk about what criteria NOT to use.
Many people just type their keywords in Google and check the page rank of all sites that rank in the top 10 as well as the number of overall results for the term. Believe me, doing it that way will only waste your time. Don’t use Page Rank and the number of overall Google results because they won’t help you very much. Actually, if you see too big difference between these numbers, that may be considered a useful factor. However, it’s ridiculous to think that a niche with 1 million results is less competitive than a niche with 3 million results. The information provided below will help you to understand how actually to evaluate the competitiveness of every niche.
Here are the factors you have to consider when checking the competitiveness of a search term :
On Page Competition Factors
Go to Google and type: allintitle:Your Keyword
This shows us how many people have included that keyword phrase in their title. Why do we need to know this? Actually, from the stand point of On Page Optimization, we know that the title tag is one of the most important factor. If we know how many pages have included a specific keyword in their title, we can tell how many people are actually targeting this keyword. In the example I showed you above, it might be possible to see that the keyword with 1 million searches has 10,000 allintitle results, and next keyword with 3 million searches has only 1000 allintitle results. Try to run this search for your main keywords and any long tail keywords in your niche to see what a big difference there will be.
For example, try:
allintitle:surveys
allintitle:legitimate surveys for money
Do you see the difference? Do you see how many people are competing for “surveys” and how many are competing for “legitimate surveys for money”? It’s obvious that targeting “legitimate surveys for money” will be a thousand times easier than targeting just “surveys”.
Off Page Competition Factors
Go to Google and type:
intitle:”Your Keyword” inanchor:”Your Keyword”
By typing this, you’re able to see how many pages have this keyword included in their titles and also have links with this anchor text. Everyone knows that Google ranks sites based on the number of links these sites have. One of the main factors of these links is the anchor text. Actually if you want to rank for a specific search term, you have to get links with this anchor text. Running this test shows us how many sites compete Off Page for a keyword, how many of them have this keyword in their titles and as well as links with the keyword in it. Smaller numbers mean less competition.
Backlink Check of the First Results on Google:
The next thing we want to do is to check the backlinks of the first page of our search results. Just go to any backlink checker tool and check how many links the first several results have. Think about whether or not you can you get the same amount of links or even more.
Actually if you see too few results when running “allintitle” and “intitle inanchor” you may not need to check the backlinks. However, if you see a lot of results, you should check the backlinks.
Let’s say you check two niches that have similar numbers. Let’s say, they have about 1000 in allintitle check. From this, you can conclude that you can easily rank in the top 1000. All you need to do is to mention your keyword phrase in your title. But who’s gonna find us in the 1000th position? We want to reach the top 10 ranking, or even the first position. Let’s say, in the first niche, we see the top 10 ranking sites have almost no links; in the next niche, however, we see that all sites ranking in the top 10 have a lot of quality backlinks. This shows us that, although these niches have almost the same numbers of people trying to rank for them, but the second niche has 10 people who know what they’re doing and are doing it right. In this case, we’ll have to think more about how to beat these 10 people instead of focusing on the total number of sites. Probably 99% of these 1000 sites don’t know what they’re doing – but these top 10 people do know, and they’ll make it difficult us to reach a rank in the top 10.
What Kind of Link Ranks Are There?
Another factor that many people don’t consider involves checking what kind of links show up when you type your desired keyword. What do I mean by that? We know very well that Google gives a huge priority to your site’s main page, which means that if you want to rank for any competitive keywords you should target them from your main page url, not from an internal pages on your site.
So, if you see internal pages, articles, blog posts, and so on as search results, you’ll know that this particular niche is not too competitive. If you see main sites urls, however, this means the niche is more competitive.
Let me give you one last tip: Keyword research is not easy, and it requires time and effort. There is a lot of trial and error necessary before you find the right keywords for your site or blog. Nevertheless, keep trying different niches and you will succeed.
Article by Site ReferenceThe Ultimate Guide for Keyword Research
