Special Report

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Special Report

How to Do Effective Keyword Research to Optimize Your Content and Attract Your Marketplace

Introduction Dear Business Owner, One of the keys for a successful website content strategy is creating content that appeals to your specific marketplace. You need to create content your prospective customers are actively looking for.

How do you know what they are looking for? The answer of course lies in doing effective keyword research. While you should always focus your content primarily on providing value to the visitor, you use the results of your keyword research to optimize the content for search. In doing so, you can have long-term content assets in the search engines that continue delivering quality leads to your business for years. For example:  Content created on the vWriter blog1 - using the keyword research strategies shared in this Special Report - helped increase traffic from search by 1,465% in 12 months 2.

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http://blog.vwriter.com http://blog.vwriter.com/how-i-grew-my-organic-traffic-655-in-12-months/

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 An older blog, which no longer has fresh content created for it, continues to attract thousands of visitors every month thanks to content created years ago. That content was created based on keyword research that ensured the content was targeted effectively for the visitors I wanted to attract. In other words, learning how to do keyword research for SEO is one of the best investments you can make for your business. You continue to attract traffic, at no further cost to you whatsoever. Achieving the same traffic from paid advertising would suck up thousands of dollars a month. And content found organically often achieves higher conversion rates. This Special Report aims to show you exactly how to approach keyword research, and find out what your market is interested in. As you'll see, it's relatively straightforward and simple. What's more, you can do all the research you need using freely available online resources you can freely access right now.

Shall we get started?

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What Is Keyword Research? Keyword research mainly focuses on two main elements: 1. Demand - how much demand is there for a particular keyword term. 2. Supply - how many pages are supplied as a match for the same keyword term. By analysing supply versus demand, you can get an idea of potential traffic levels along with your chances of visibility in the search engines. From this information, you can determine the most suitable keyword to focus on when creating content. In other words:  Is there a good chance your content will rank high enough for the keyword to attract search engine traffic?  Do the potential traffic levels make it worthwhile to focus on the keyword? Is another keyword more suitable? It’s often beneficial not to focus on popular keywords with high traffic levels. This is for two main reasons:  The competition levels can be too high to rank effectively and attract any meaningful visibility and traffic.  Such keywords are often too broad to be meaningful for your business. For example:

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 The keyword fly fishing has tens of thousands of monthly searches, and tens of millions of matching pages. However, people searching for this term have a wide variety of motivations and it would be a poor keyword to focus on.  The more targeted long-tail keyword fly fishing tutorial has 100-200 searches a month, and under 10,000 matching pages. You know exactly what the person is looking for, and you have a much better chance of ranking and getting traffic. Yes, the potential traffic per keyword is lower. But you have a much better chance of actually getting some of it when you create quality content focused on the keyword in question. The magic happens when you have dozens of content items you’ve created over time (preferably via a blog) focusing on different keyword terms in your niche. The traffic can really start to mount up. Plus, all that content has a multitude of benefits for your business. Here are just a few ideas:    

Keeping in touch with your list. Communications over social media. Building your authority and credibility, which further helps attract your market to you. Repurposing content into different forms and adding to other sites to attract whole new audiences. For example, videos, presentations, teleseminars, podcasts, guest blog posts, and so on.  Offline, printed publications. Effective keyword research allows you to achieve maximum long-term value out of content you create. The following pages show you how to actually do it, by determining the levels of demand and supply for relevant keywords for your industry.

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How to Determine Keyword Demand Google of course powers the vast majority of searches online, and this Special Report focuses on using their data. To determine demand levels - in other words, the number of people searching for keyword terms – Google provides a Keyword Planner tool within their Adwords advertising platform.

1. Log into Adwords3 Alternatively, sign up for a free account if you don’t already have one. You don’t have to pay for advertising to use their keyword research tools.

2. Access the Keyword Planner Go to Tools and Analysis from the Tools menu.

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http://adwords.google.com

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Note: Don’t worry if certain parts of this tutorial look a little different within Adwords. Google tends to change things around fairly frequently.

3. Start searching for keywords Click to Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category.

You’ll see a number of options through which you can get keyword ideas for your content.

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Try for example:  Entering your product or service (i.e. what do you do – for example, financial planning, sell light bulbs, whatever your business is).  Entering the URL for your website, or a particular page on it.  Selecting your product category. To keep things as straightforward as possible, we’ll be sticking with the first option in this Special Report. But of course feel free to explore the other options as you increase your familiarity with the tool.

Example Keyword Search Let’s run through a quick example, using dark chocolate as the product. So enter the product and click the Get Ideas button:

You will then be given a list of keyword possibilities.

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You’ll see a couple of tabs as follows:  Ad group ideas: groups similar suggested keywords together.  Keyword ideas: lists the keywords in a more conventional fashion. Explore both options in time, but for this Special Report we’ll focus on the former. If you hover over the listed keywords in each group, it will show you all the keywords it has grouped together as shown:

You can then click through on any grouping to get individual details for all the keywords in that group:

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And this is where it starts to get interesting, and the real research begins. You can see:  Exactly what people are searching for, related to your business or industry.  The number of people conducting those searches each and every month. One important note.

You can ignore the Competition column completely. It relates to the advertising competition level within Adwords, rather than organic search competition levels. You’ll see how to assess organic competition levels shortly. Before that, we’ll focus on the keywords themselves for a moment longer. Scan down the list of keywords in the Keyword Planner, and you’ll see a huge amount of data.

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You can drill down into each keyword by using it as the basis for a new search. The possibilities are endless. However, you’re primarily looking for long-tail keyword terms to use as the basis of new content.

Let’s say you sell a premium dark chocolate product. You would want to attract people conducting dark chocolate-related searches. To do so, you would need quality content to show in the search listings for related keywords. For example, your keyword research might lead to the keyword dark chocolate benefits, and associated similar keywords.

A range of suitable content could be developed on just this topic. You could also take it further, and devote a whole area of your site, such as a blog category, to the keyword. Over time, you would likely attract hundreds or more to your site each month.

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Such content also means you would be soft-selling your products by extolling the benefits of dark chocolate. More directly, you can also build sales by:  Inviting them to opt-in to your list. Lead magnets might include exclusive new recipes, discounts, special videos and so on.  Tagging the visitors with a special code for remarketing, so you can show them ads of your products, your email list or more content after they’ve left your site.  Encouraging them to connect with you on social media and build your relationship with them further over time, while building your own authority and credibility. Keyword research also often provides ready titles for content, or with only minimal adaptation required. With this example niche, some possibilities include the following:    

Is Dark Chocolate Vegan? – 1K to 10K searches/month History of Dark Chocolate – 10 to 100 searches/month Dark Chocolate Nutrition - 1K to 10K searches/month Recipe ideas, such as: o Dark Chocolate Brownie Recipe – 100 to 1K searches/month o Dark Chocolate Mousse Recipe - 100 to 1K searches/month

When you are doing keyword research in order to uncover content ideas, remember you're not particularly seeking keywords containing 'buyer' or 'money' words in them. An example would be buy dark chocolate. Instead, you are looking for informational topics that content can be created about.

Such content helps market your business - in other words, content marketing.

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The content is designed to appeal to people looking for information on a particular topic. In so doing, such people raise their hand as having an interest in your niche. You can then further market to them, and build the relationship with them over time from one of prospect to customer. In other words, your focus isn't on the immediate sale, but on acquiring a long-term prospect who may become a long-term customer in future. Each piece of content created, and optimized for search, as a result of your keyword research is effectively a lead generation tool for your business. For more information about how all of this works, see the Content Authority Formula4.

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https://www.vwriter.com/caf

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How to Determine Keyword Supply For any keyword you might be interested in, you need to judge whether it's worthwhile creating content optimized that keyword. To do so, you assess the level of competition for the keyword in question. That involves determining the number of competing pages in the SERPs 5 ranked for that keyword.

The reason is obvious. It's infinitely harder to rank for a keyword with hundreds of millions of competing web pages, compared to a keyword with just a few thousand competing web pages. In practice, it's not that difficult to rank well for a keyword where the number of competing pages are a few million or fewer. Most of those pages will be focused on other keywords entirely, and just happen to have the keyword in question on the page somewhere. So the actual competition level will be far less than might appear to be the case at first. Competing pages will generally consist of pages from sites where the site owner is:  Not even trying to rank for that keyword.  Unaware their pages are ranking for the keyword in question.

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Search engine result pages

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So How Do You Assess Competition Levels? You can do so using Google's search engine directly. Wrap the keyword in quotation marks, and Google will tell you the number of other pages containing the same exact phrase. This is your competition level.

With a single keyword, there's no need for the quotation marks. But, as you can see, trying to rank for a single worded keyword is rarely a good idea. The competition level will simply be too high.

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By getting more specific and focusing on longer tail keywords, the possibility of optimizing and ranking for a particular keyword become more realistic:

This illustrates just how valuable keyword research is. As shown above, the same keyword has up to 10,000 searches a month.

In other words, thanks to keyword research, you have the basis of a content item - or perhaps several, and across multiple content platforms - that could attract dozens, hundreds, even thousands of visitors to your site a month. Here's another...

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So dark chocolate nutrition has just over 20,000 competing pages. For SEO purposes, that's still very low and relatively easy to rank for. So you can use these keyword research techniques to create and optimize content that appeals directly to your target market. However, don't forget to always create content primarily for the visitor, not for the search engines. Optimize the content for search, but never at the expense of the consumer of that content. Providing as much value as you can in your content is a key SEO factor. It helps ensure positive SEO signals such as social sharing, linking and time spent on your site after clicking through from search.

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Other Factors for Effective Keyword Research So you are now able to assess both keyword demand – the number of people searching for a particular keyword – and keyword supply – the number of web pages on Google for the keyword in question. There are however a couple of other factors to be aware of before deciding on a keyword to base new content on and try to rank for.

Advertising Levels For some keywords, there are now multiple ads above the organic search results that mean any organic listings are pushed beneath the fold. In other words, visitors would have to scroll down to see your page, even if you are on page #1 for the keyword. It means that even if you manage to rank #1 organically, you can in effect be #4 or #5 on the page. This significantly reduces the traffic you could otherwise achieve if there were no ads. It’s not just advertising either. Some keywords have a featured snippet that appears in the results (you’ll see an example shortly) and also serves to push the organic listings further down the page and reduce likely click-through rates. This needs to be factored in when assessing the keyword demand levels.

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The good news is that for many long-tail keywords, there is often little advertising. For example, the is dark chocolate vegan keyword has no ads at all.

However, that’s not always the case. See the following example for the keyword the healthiest dark chocolate. It not only has ads, but also a featured snippet. The organic results don’t even start until halfway down the page.

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However, the impact of these horizontally-aligned product-based ads are mild compared to other ad formats where the ads are vertically listed down the page in the same way as the organic results. Let’s imagine you’re in a completely different niche, and you’re researching wedding-related keywords. You’ll see an example shortly. The keyword how to plan a wedding on a budget attracts up to 10,000 searches a month:

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In terms of supply, there are under a million competing pages.

It is a little high and would be more difficult to rank for, but still has potential. You would need to assess the keyword further. On searching for the keyword without quotes6, there’s an obvious problem. As you can see below, there are:  Three vertically listed ads (often there are even more).  A featured snippet that pushes the organic listings even further down the page. It all means the first organic result is way down the page. Even if you are in the #1 position organically, you would still only be in the same position as a #8 or #9 result on a page without ads.

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This is of course how most people use Google. We only needed to use the quotation marks to assess the number of competing pages with the same keyword. We now want to take a look at what the real results will look like for users.

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In other words, even if you ranked organically on the first page, the potential traffic would be just a fraction of what it otherwise might be. You would need to take this information into account before creating and trying to rank content for the keyword in question.

You can be pushed even further down the page by:

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 Image suggestions

 News items

 Suggested queries

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The Nature of Competing Pages In addition to the issue of ads and featured snippets appearing on the page, there’s one more factor to bear in mind.

Not all web pages are created equal. Sounds obvious, right? But some pages are going to be far easier to usurp from the rankings than others, depending on the authority of the site in question. It’s going to be a lot easier to compete against another standard website than the likes of authoritative sites like:        

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Wikipedia Popular news sites Amazon Quora Wikihow eHow Forbes …and various others.

For example, let’s say a potential keyword for your niche was how to publish an ebook on kindle. Your research showed it had up to 100 people searching for it a month:

And less than 6,000 competing web pages, so in theory easy to rank for and some easy clicks every month:

But then you check the nature of the competition and find a range of issues that make the keyword a non-starter:

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Apart from four ad blocks and a featured snippet, the top four organic results are all from Amazon and would be very difficult to compete against.

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With just 100 or so possible searches a month, attempting to optimize and rank content for the keyword is unlikely to prove worthwhile.

To Conclude As you can see, it’s not enough to just assess keyword demand and competition levels based on raw numbers alone. It’s also essential to look at the nature of the competition, and whether it’s going to be worthwhile trying to rank for the keyword in question. Ideally, you’re looking for keywords, not just with reasonable search levels and relatively low numbers of competing pages, but also for which the results pages have minimal or no ads, and no other intrusions in the organic listings that would push your own potential listing down the page and reduce clicks. For more information on using content effectively to build authority, influence and visibility, see the Content Authority Formula7.

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https://www.vwriter.com/caf

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