Find The Cash Sucking Keywords That Will Bring You Loads Of Targeted Traffic! – PART 1
Catchy title for my post, huh?
If you are just arriving here, this post is part of a series of posts where I show you, step-by-step, what I do to put together a profitable campaign. To start at the beginning, GO HERE.
This post is kind of long so bear with me!! I am breaking it down into 2 posts so you can digest it all.
OK, so we have decided on our niche, and now we have to find the keywords that are going to bring us traffic from the search engines. In other words, we want to rank for these keywords, on the first page of Google, to get natural, organic traffic.
And keep in mind that we will initially get traffic from articles for these keywords, but the whole goal is to get our pages ranked. Articles will most likely die off, so we want our real estate (our sites) to gain value and go up in the search engines.
Here is exactly how I do keyword research, and the reasons I do it this way:
1. First, I open a new Excel spreadsheet and I list out in column A all “buying” keywords. Buying keywords are the ones that I feel people would type in to the SE’s if they want to buy a product. They typically include 1) the product names I am promoting, and 2) combinations of the words “buy” “purchase” “review” and “reviews.”
So, for example, for one of the guitar products I will be promoting, Jamorama, I would type into my spreadsheet:
jamorama
buy jamorama
purchase jamorama
jamorama review
jamorama reviews
2. Next, I go to the affiliate sections of the vendors sites I plan on promoting. Most vendors will have a fairly good affiliate section full of banners, sample email templates, other graphics, and yes, keywords. Take these keywords with a grain of salt though because I have found that they are generally just generic keywords.
I take these keywords from each vendors site and I paste them into my Excel spreadsheet vertically in column A below my keywords in Step 1.
3. I then go to the Google external keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and I do a “Website content” search for EACH of the vendors websites.
I take every one of the keywords I get and paste them into column A of my spreadsheet.
4. I then go to SEObook at http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ (register for an account, it’s free, and a great keyword tool) and I type in my “root” keywords. The root keywords are my main important keywords.
I am focusing this campaign on learning the electric guitar since it is a little more focused than just “learn guitar,” so I type in “learn electric guitar” into SEObook’s keyword tool. I take these keyword results and paste them into my Excel spreadsheet like the other lists.
Don’t worry about search volume or anything like that yet.
5. I then go to Micro Niche Finder and do the same keyword search as I did in SEObook. If you are not familiar with Micro Niche Finder, it is a keyword tool that you have to pay for. In my opinion, it is well worth the money, but it is not necessary to do the keyword research I am talking about here.
As a side note – any tool you use in IM should be judged on 1) whether it saves you time or 2) it helps you accomplish your goal. Like any tool I use, Micro Niche Finder saves me a ton of time and gives me some great keyword ideas.
If you have the time, do it by hand and save your money. If you don’t have the time, get Micro Niche Finder or another keyword research tool to speed up the process.
I take the keywords I get from Micro Niche Finder and paste those into my spreadsheet.
So, now I have a really healthy list of keywords.
6. I then go back to the Google free keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal but this time I do a “descriptive words or phrases” search with my newly generated keyword list.
I simply take my list from Excel and paste all of them into the Google Keyword tool search box.
7. This filters out all of the duplicates and gives me a nice keyword list, with synonyms, to work with. I take this list and export it to a new Excel spreadsheet.
8. I then do a couple things. I create a couple column headers titled as follows (right next to the search volume column): 1) Quotes, 2) Revised Quotes, 3) Intitle 4) Intitle/Inanchor, 5) Average Page Rank, 6) Social Page 1.
Here’s what they mean -
- Quotes - this is the number of search results when I type in the keyword with quotes
- Revised quotes – this is going to the end of the search results found in number 1. For an explanation on this, read THIS POST.
- Intitle – this is the search results, in quotes, with typing in the “Intitle” operator. This tells me how many pages have my certain keyphrase in the title, in that order
- Intitle/Inanchor - this displays the search results, in quotes, with typing in the “intitle” and “inanchor” operators. This tells me how many search results there are for my search term in the title of a page and the anchor text of a page. This gives me an idea of how many pages are actually optimizing for my keyphrase. An example of what this would look like is as follows:
intitle:”jamorama review” inanchor:”jamorama review”
- Average Page Rank – this is the average page rank of the web pages in the top 10 (first page) search results on Google (searched without quotes or any operators). You can download a pagerank toolbar for free at SEObook.com (the same site with the keyword tool) to easily tell the pagerank of websites.
- Social Page 1 – this means when you do a non-quote and non-operator search in Google, are there any social sites, like Ezinearticles, Go articles, Articlesbase, Digg, weebly, etc. on Page 1 of the results. If there are, this is a great indication that you can get on Page 1 fairly easily. If you notice that most of the 1st page results are authority sites, like Amazon, Ebay, Wikipedia, etc., you’ll have a much harder time competing.
9. Now, I take my big list of keywords and I sort them according to search volume. I only pay attention to the Gloabl Search Volume and not the Local Search Volume. So, just delete the “competition” and “Local Search Volume” columns.
10. Next, I get rid of all keywords with less than 500 searches per month. You can adjust this as you see fit, but I have found some great, low competition keywords at 500 or so searches a month that have been goldmines. Some people go lower than 500, some go higher.
11. I then scan my list for any keywords that “look good.” What does this mean? To me it means they make sense and sound like someone who is looking to spend money. For example, if I am targeting people who want to learn the electric guitar online, “learn electric guitar online” is a slam dunk keyword for me to target. But, “learn acoustic guitar online” is not a good one. Make sense?
I highlight these for further research.
12. I also get rid of all the “junk” keywords or keywords that don’t make any sense. For example, one that showed up for my guitar keywords was “guitar learn online.” In my opinion, this is jibberish. It may show that it gets 10,000 searches per month, but it does not make sense that someone would type this into the SE’s. So, I just get rid of them.
13. I try to find 10-20 (or more, if possible) good keywords that fit my target market. Once I identify these, the real fun starts!
In my next post, I reveal how to look at each of these keywords we just found to narrow them down to which ones we think will make us a bunch of moolah and which ones don’t have a fighting chance.
Stick around, it’s awesome having you here!
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6 Responses to “Find The Cash Sucking Keywords That Will Bring You Loads Of Targeted Traffic! – PART 1”
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Ok this is awesome…I came out with 20 keywords out of about 50…this is the best blog in the world…thank you so much…I can not wait to learn what I do with these keywords…am I suppose to be filling in the other columns? The ones you had us make or just wait
Hey, thanks Phill.
Yeah, the next step is filling in the columns so we can further refine our list. This is the step that we find out which ones will most likely rank and which ones won’t. Probably THE most important step.
Filling them in and interpreting the results is what I am going to post about next…should be in the next day or so…
here are some stats…I am assuming these key words are not going to work…but at what point do u know they will not work?
Quotes revised quotes intitle intitle/inanchor Average Page Rank social page rank
252000 384 485 1 6 0
12500 434 24000 7 6 0
19800 554 236000 6830 4
Hey Phill, I am just getting ready to post my next steps…it should answer your questions
here are some stats…I am assuming these key words are not going to work…but at what point do u know they will not work?
Quotes revised quotes intitle intitle/inanchor Average Page Rank social page rank
252000 384 485 1 6 0
12500 434 24000 7 6 0
19800 554 236000 6830 4
Hey Amy, it’s hard to tell because of the formatting, but as an example, is the 1st one listed 252000 in quotes, 384 revised,485 intitle, 1 intitle/inanchor, 6 avg PR and 0 social sites? If so, the intitle/inanchor looks attractive, but the high avg PR is really high. What kind of sites are on the 1st page when you do a search without quotes? Are they high authority sites?