DAY 5: Evaluating Your Keyword Difficulty
If you haven’t completed day 4 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 4: Grouping Your Keywords before starting this post.
“Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.”
- Oscar Wilde -
Don’t bite more than you can chew!
This week, we have been working very hard on our keywords, from assessing our niche, building a keyword list, refining this list, grouping and classifying our keywords, there’s one last thing to do with our keywords, and that’s evaluating their difficulty.
Before you start, you want to make sure that you are going to optimize for the right keywords in the right order, or you may just fall into the swarm of sites that are never found on internet.
The truth is that 99% of those pages are no competition whatsoever to you, especially considering how well we already have prepared our keywords already!
Your competition lies with the other people with the same knowledge as you, the people in the “know” about SEO.
Forget about KEI
One of the most popular way people use to evaluate a keyword potential is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). That’s a huge mistake.
If the core theory of the KEI is correct, its real life application demonstrates that this index is very flawed.
Your “real” competition is not the number of result pages returned by Google during a search query, that’s only the “virtual” competition volume.
SEO 101
Anybody with basic knowledge of SEO is a potential threat to you, so you need to identify those people quickly.
In SEO it’s widely known that having your keyword in your page title is crucial and dramatically increase your chances to rank well in the search engines.
Your first task is then to identify those people, and for this, Google has a command line that makes this task a breeze: allintitle.
Since having your keyword in your page title is one of the most important on-page SEO factor, we must know who are doing so.
In the search field of Google, type the following command:
allintitle: “your keyword”
The number of results returned this time is the number of pages that have your keyword (in this example “nail polish”) in their page title.
Re-open your basic keyword list and add 3 columns:
- All In Title
- All In Anchor
- Difficulty
DAY 4: Grouping Your Keywords
If you haven’t completed day 3 of the SEO course, you can review: Qualifying Your Keywords before starting this post.
“If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.”
- B. C. Forbes -
Congratulation to you on your hard work
Today, we are going to use the nicely refined Keywords list we build yesterday and start to sort our keywords into different groups.
This task will give us a great head start as to how our site should be designed and which keywords should be optimized for, so be very serious with this task too.
Sorting Your Keywords by Search Volume
The very first step you should do with your list of Keywords, is to sort them by Volume.
In order to do that, just copy your keywords list into another spreadsheet with just the “keywords” and “Searches” columns as the picture on the next page.
The easiest and quickest way to sort your keyword is by using the sort & filter function of Excel.
Your keyword list should now be sorted from the keywords with the most search volume to the ones with the least search volume.
We now are going to create a new spreadsheet with 4 columns based on their search volume and copy our keywords in each of them accordingly:
- Over 100,000 – The main keywords for your site should be
within this category. - From 10,001 to 100,000 – The keywords that will define the
different categories for your site should be in this category. - From 3,001 to 10,000 – This category should contain potential
primary keywords for your posts or pages on your site. - Less than 3,000 – This category should contain potential
secondary keywords for your posts or pages on your site.
Now I understand that some niche will still be viable with a much lower traffic volume, if this is your case, just scale down proportionally the numbers.
DAY 3: Qualifying Your Keywords
If you haven’t completed day 2 of the SEO course, you can review: Building Your Keywords List before starting this post.
“High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.”
- Charles Kettering -
It’s now time to refine your keywords list
Yesterday, you have collected a list of keywords as per the suggestions of different tools and software. That’s good, but not enough.
There’s a fact that a machine is nothing more than a machine in the end.
Only you will truly be able to tell whether or not a keyword is relevant to your site or not.
Reality Check
The real success of a site doesn’t come from traffic, it comes from targeted traffic.
There’s no point to optimize your site for a keyword that has nothing to do or very little with your site, you may get some one time traffic visitors alongside suffering a loss of relevancy and credibility as per the quality of your content.
If you are offering medicals services in Denver, there’s no point optimizing for “medical services in New York” just because it’s suggested by a keyword tool.
Why Qualifying Your Keywords?
There are two major reasons as to why you should qualify your
keywords:
- As I just explained, to prevent time wasting by optimizing for irrelevant keywords.
- To reassess your “real” potential traffic volume within your niche.
How to Quality Your Keywords?
Start by opening the keyword list you built yesterday, remember your list should look like that:
DAY 2: Building Your Keywords List
If you haven’t completed day 1 of the SEO course, you can review: Analyzing The Viability Of Your Niche before starting this post.
“What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives following? The extra mile.”
- Gary Ryan Blair -
It’s time to get the keywords that go with your Niche!
Keywords are at the core of your entire SEO strategy.
No matter how much money or how much time you have on your hand, if you really want to get noticed in the search engines through organic search results (non-paid listings), then you owe it to yourself to have the right keywords.
Selecting good keywords for which you should optimize your site is the result of many different steps.
Without the shadow of a doubt, the first step consists in build a strong primary keyword list.
2 Keywords List Building Methods
There’s basically 2 ways you can build your keywords list:
- Manually for free (except for the time spent)
- Automatically with paid software or tool.
Honestly, which one is the right one for you depends of your involvement online I would say.
If you are only producing a few pages here and there from time to time, you may just do well by doing all the work and research yourself.
On the other hand, if you have hundreds or thousands of pages to work with, you’ll love the way professional software can simplify the tasks for you.
Now, even if you go for a paid solution, I strongly recommend you to learn how to do the research manually as this will help you build necessary experience in your keyword analysis to determine which keyword is the one you want to optimize for.
Either way, just remember that when doing online business, time is your most valuable asset, so use it wisely!
Building Your Keyword List Manually
Yesterday in our first lesson “Analyzing the Viability of Your Niche”, we managed to find or refine what our main niche should be.
Today we are going to pursue on this work with building a specific keyword list for our niche.
Yes, it’s true that there’s an almost infinite possible combinations and thousands and thousands of different keywords that we could possibly use to build our keyword list; however, doing the work manually our goal is to optimize our time and effectiveness, so we are only going after the keywords that have volume.
We’ll always have more time to chase after more keywords as time goes, but building the list of our primary keywords that will be used in the basic structure of our site is key for the moment.
How to qualify those keywords is subject to another lesson, today we’ll compile a descent list of keywords.
We are now going to learn how to gather keywords from 3 different sources:
- Google AdWords Keywords Tool.
- Google Wonder Wheel.
- Wordtracker Keyword Tool.
Also, in order to better organize our keyword list work, I strongly suggest you to use a spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel (or any software alike) and set a template design like this:
Google AdWords Keywords Tool
Ok, so let’s get started with the Google AdWords Keywords Tool we used yesterday to analyze the viability of our niche.
Repeat the same search process as we did yesterday, but this time using your “definite” niche search term.
DAY 1: Analyzing The Viability Of Your Niche
In the next 3 weeks, there will be a guest post series about Search Engine Optimization and how you can improve and optimize any niche website. It’s been a huge topic from within my membership course and it’s something that can be easily outsourced. So let’s get started…
“Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.”
– Zig Ziglar -
Learn how to pick your own battles.
This may sound like a joke for many of you, but this is the primary reason why many sites or online businesses fail online.
Having a niche marketing strategy, that is focusing on a specific topic rather than a broad query allows you to perform better as you are competing with much less other sites on internet.
Your visitors will be much more targeted and thus will convert better.
Getting yourself into an overly competitive market is a recipe for disaster and a way to ensure that your site will never be found.
On the other hand, entering into an overly niche market may result in insufficient traffic volume to monetize your site or store and ensure your survival.
Remember, because you think you got a great idea doesn’t mean that other people share your feelings!
In the end, it’s all about money
Depending on the nature of your site, the way you plan to monetize your efforts may differ from site to site.
However, as a general rule, you’ll be monetizing your site through one or more of those following methods:
- Ecommerce– selling products, be it physical or digital.
- Affiliate Marketing– selling other people’s product and getting a commission for it.
- Advertising– selling ads space on your site.
- Services– selling your skills.
Regardless of the method you intend to use, you should have a number in mind as to how much money minimum you expect or you need to make out of your website for it to be worth your time.
I won’t elaborate much on it as this goes with all the information you should have gathered already in your business plan. You have one right? It would be foolish to start a business without one!
Ok, for the sake of illustration, I’m going to say that I want to start a new business online selling “nail polish”.
After my estimation, I also know that I’ll be making $1 profit for each bottle sold, and based on the marketing strategy I have established, I estimate that I’ll be able to sell 2 bottles to each customer in average.
Now, based on my expenses and personal needs, I want $2,000 of net profit per month to make this project worth.
Till...
