Posts Tagged ‘Keyword Research’

Keyword Selection: Creating a Long Tail Search Vacuum

September 2nd, 2011  |  by Mark  |  Published in Keyword Research  |  2 Comments

Yesterday I talked about how The Keyword Academy will thrive in a post-Panda world – and that starts with totally rethinking our keyword selection process.

Our old method was built around the concept of “green” keywords.

In order to qualify as “green,” a phrase needed:

  • Adequate search volume: we discouraged people from pursuing anything with fewer than 1000 global and 700 local estimated searches per month (according to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool).
  • Income Potential: we combined the search volume estimate with Google’s estimated cost per click (CPC) to calculate a keyword’s “potential” – what it would pay us if we achieved a number one ranking and monetized with Adsense.
  • Limited Competition: we estimated the ease or difficulty of a keyword based on the Pagerank scores of the top four competing pages in the search listings for a keyword. If the collective Pagerank of those pages was too high, we scrapped the keyword.

The problem with the formula was its dependence on flawed data:

  • Google’s search estimates can be wildly inaccurate.
  • CPC estimates were even more screwy than search estimates, so we’d regularly hear from members who’d managed to get some search traffic, but instead of getting $1 clicks (as our formula suggested they probably would), they were getting $.05 or $.10 clicks. Pretty discouraging stuff.

The result? We funneled our members toward a relatively small group of “green” keywords. The total pool of greens might have been several hundred thousand keywords, but it seemed like every day I’d have another new member start a website around a phrase I’d seen several other members target. Not an ideal situation.

The worst part isn’t that we had groups of members targeting the same keyword phrases – the market is big enough to support them.

The real issue was the members’ lack of interest in their keyword set.

Internet marketing involves some grueling, tedious, day in and day out kind of work. It’s hard enough to succeed even if you really enjoy your subject matter.

If you hate your subject matter (ie you can’t bare the thought of writing one more article about “inflatable plastic rocking chairs”), the odds are that much more stacked against you.

To sum up the problems with our old keyword selection method:

1. It started with faulty numbers search volume and CPC numbers.
2. It closed off millions of viable keywords, based on those faulty numbers.
3. It created miserable work for the user, who was working keyword set because of faulty numbers instead of real interest in the subject matter.

(Did I day faulty numbers enough times yet?)

Ironically, the old method did work. We have nearly 150 people in the $1k club, with over 25 earning more than $5,000 and a growing handful who’ve passed $10,000 per month.

But we can do better. We can help a higher percentage of people stick with it and succeed.

What if…

1. We started by looking at subjects that held real interest for the user, making the day to day work less miserable (enjoyable even!)?

2. Instead of focusing on individual keywords, we acknowledged that most search traffic comes from the long tail? Which means we think about targeting groups of keywords with our posts (instead of trying to “win” individual keywords)?

By starting with genuine interest and working hard to turn our posts into long tail search vacuums, we eliminate every problem we had with the old approach.

Here’s an example of how I’m transitioning from the old approach to the new:

I have a site (BigEnoughBusiness.com) I’m using as a case study (it’s work in progress, as you can tell).

One of my keywords on that site is “carpet cleaning business.”

Under the old method, this was technically a green keyword:

Global Searches: 1300
Local Searches: 720
CPC: $3.31
Adsense Potential: $21.54
Competition: Easy (low collective Pagerank on competing pages)

But the approach I was taking would leave a lot of money on the table. My focus was on ranking for “carpet cleaning business,” but the fact is Google could be sending me traffic for hundreds of long tail variations:

  • start a carpet cleaning business
  • how to start your own carpet cleaning business
  • how to start a carpet cleaning business
  • buying a carpet cleaning business
  • marketing a carpet cleaning business
  • names for carpet cleaning business
  • marketing carpet cleaning business
  • how to run a carpet cleaning business
  • starting your own carpet cleaning business
  • how to market a carpet cleaning business
  • is carpet cleaning a good business
  • start your own carpet cleaning business
  • carpet cleaning business names
  • carpet cleaning business income
  • carpet cleaning business opportunities
  • start carpet cleaning business
  • carpet cleaning business plan sample
  • carpet cleaning business equipment
  • commercial carpet cleaning business
  • carpet cleaning business forms
  • starting carpet cleaning business
  • carpet cleaning business start up
  • how to start carpet cleaning business
  • business carpet cleaning
  • carpet cleaning business for sale
  • carpet cleaning business opportunity
  • carpet cleaning business plan
  • carpet cleaning business cards
  • starting a carpet cleaning business

I’m not saying I’ll try to shove every one of those phrases into a single post about carpet cleaning, but I will create a long, rich piece of content that lets Google know it can give me any and all traffic relating to the topic (which is something I’ll talk about in future posts).

Under the old method, I would have ignored 95% of those variations (as would most internet marketers), but in the long run the group will bring me plenty of traffic and earnings.

Under the new method, I’m not very concerned about estimated search volume, CPC, or individual keyword competitiveness. I’m throwing some carefully selected mud on the wall, building my domain authority, and letting Google do what it does best – send me long tail traffic.

On Monday I’ll talk about how we’re changing our approach to content development – the words on the page should be your biggest asset in growing your income! Hope you’ll check back.

How To Pick Your URLs For The Challenge

January 22nd, 2010  |  by Court  |  Published in Explanations, For Beginners  |  11 Comments

It seems like the most common question I’m getting so far with the new challenge is, “How do I pick the URLs to use for the challenge?” This is a good question because the people that have the best results are going to be the ones that pick the best URLs.

The most important aspect of choosing a good URL to use is making sure that it’s a URL that targets a keyword phrase that’s searched for in Google. The title of this post (How To Pick Your URLs For The Challenge) would ironically be worthless for this challenge. Think about it – no one will search for ‘how to pick your urls for the challenge’ in a million years so there’s no point in getting ranked for the phrase in Google.

Using a URL that targeted the keyword ‘bowling ball bags’ would be a lot smarter. Why? Because people actually search for ‘bowling ball bags’ in Google – 5400 times per month. This certainly isn’t the best keyword in the history of the universe but it’s much better than the alternative in this example.

What To Do To Get Started

The first step in getting started is to pick one URL from your portfolio that targets a keyword. This might be your home page or this might be a post page. Some of your have e-commerce sites so for you this might be a page that sells products. Any of these will do as long as they target a keyword.

Some of you may be new to making money online and for you, you may not have many URLs to work with. For you, you may need to do some keyword research, article writing, and publishing to even get started. This challenge will be extremely effective for you since it illustrates some of the important aspects of creating online profits.

Bloggers

Since many people who read TKA are bloggers, I want to address blogging specifically. This experiment/challenge can be extremely effective for bloggers but could also be a colossal waste of time. Bloggers traditionally have many, many URLs that don’t target specific keyword phrases. The post you’re currently reading is one such example. As a blogger you need to be especially careful to build your links to URLs that were created to target specific keywords. If you’re unfamiliar with this process I would highly recommend reading this post: How To Target A Keyword With A Post Page. The first step for you may be creating a keyword targeted post that you can then get some links for.

Keyword Research For The Challenge

Since many of you are quite new, I want to give some advice that pertains to keyword research. The TKA members know exactly how to pick the proper keywords – let me help you out a little in that arena.

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is your best friend when it comes to keyword research. You want to find keywords with decent search volume when the tool is set to exact match. <——- This is highly important. I would recommend finding keywords that have search volumes over about 3,000 and CPCs over $1. Once you have decent keywords you can target them with post pages.

You can also search for your keywords in Google, check the PageRank of the pages that rank up top if you want to get an idea of how strong your competition is.

Those who achieve the best results with this experiment will be those who choose the best keywords.

For Those Who Have Plenty Of Keyword Targeting URLs

Those of you who already have lots of keyword-rich content are ahead of the curve. I would make a list of all of the URLs you have that currently get little traffic. I would then choose keywords based on search volume and CPCs. Higher numbers in those two areas will provide you with more potential to make profits.

Another aspect that you can consider in this process is finding keywords that you already rank somewhere for. If you have a keyword that you rank on page 2 or page 3 for, this experiment will help you considerably.

The key here is to choose one URL each day, improve it, and then move on the next day to a new URL.

Make Money Online With 100 Blog Posts Update

August 3rd, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Keyword Research, SEO  |  34 Comments

For the last week, I have been working as much as possible on my new make money experiment. The point of this experiment is to create 100 targeted blog posts within a 30 day period while tracking my earnings.

The first step in the process was to plan out the posts. That actually took almost a full week in itself. After I had everything ready I started writing.

Results July 27 – August 2

So far I have been able to write 25 posts and they’ve been absolutely killing it. I didn’t in my wildest dreams think that they would produce $371.98:

As you can see, I’m monetizing with Google Adsense and am using two ad units on the posts. One of the ads is placed within the post and the other is placed under it.

Obviously anyone would be happy with these results. Assuming that I don’t improve over the next three weeks, this experiment will put an extra $1594.20 in my pocket.

Planning Is Everything

Honestly I couldn’t have done this without a lot of planning. You can’t just throw up any 25 posts and expect this to happen. Before I even started writing posts I found 100 keywords with two important characteristics:

  • They had the potential to make a lot of money.
  • They were somewhat easy to rank for.

In order to make good money with Google Adsense, you have to have a solid foundation of keyword research and SEO. If you can’t pick the right keywords, you’re not going to be able to make it work with Adsense. The days of throwing up content and making a lot of money are over. You have to be a lot more put together than you did in the past. Choosing the right keywords to go after is crucial.

You can use the Adwords keyword tool to check both search volume and CPC and with these numbers, the higher the better. I use a formula to calculate exactly how much I think I can produce with a keyword in a month and these 25 keywords are worth $7366.47 per month. I honestly didn’t think that they would start producing this quickly but if you consider the potential of the keywords, it isn’t too, too crazy.

We talk about using this formula in our members area to decide which keywords will be worthwhile.

The Next Week

During the next week, I’m going to try to finish at least 25 more posts. The strategy is obviously working and I don’t see any reason to change it. I’m secretly hoping that I’ll be able to finish more like 35 posts but we’ll see how much time I have. Life is pretty busy right now!

Note to TKA members – watch for an update in the forums within the next two hours.

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