Online Marketing Art

Step 3: Find the winner keyword Apply the following criteria to pick top keywords Good keywords are: Relevant.  You need to accurately describe what you’re writing about because a high bounce rate will kill your ranking, even if you do manage to get on the front page. High (enough) volume.  For niche and specific topics, like  client onboarding , you’ll be lucky to find a relevant keyword with more than 30 searches per month. If there are two similar keywords with drastically different volumes, however, the higher volume keyword is the obvious choice (provided it passes the rest of the criteria). Low difficulty.  Putting it simply, a keyword with low difficulty has pages and domains with low authority on the first page. If you target the same keyword with better content and get a few backlinks, you can take that slot and  steal their traffic . So once you’ve chosen a few keywords from your list which are high enough volume and relevant, it’...

Step 2.5 Getting keywords ideas Use the Ahrefs Positions Explorer to grab competitor’s keywords The  Ahrefs Positions Explorer  offers a powerful way to get competitor information. Using the same competitors you used in Google Keyword Planner, search the URL to get a list of keywords. Positions Explorer is one of the best SEO tools I’ve used, and I’m always finding new uses for it! Check this out: Add any good fits to your sheet, and get onto the next step. Use this ‘lovely’ SEO tool (in name and design) to generate long-tail keywords One of the most unpleasantly titled tools I’ve come across is the surprisingly capable  Keyword Shitter . While it’s capabilities are a lot like UberSuggest, making it no more useful up until this point in the process, when you have a list of keywords already, it can yield some awesome results. Basically, you use your seed keyword (for example, ‘keyword research’) in the main box, then paste your list so far in the Positiv...

Step 2.4 Getting Keywords Ideas It’s time to fire up the Keyword Planner and snoop on your competitors One of the best hacks I ever heard from  Brian Dean   (a man of many hacks)  was what he called the GKP hack. Here’s how it works: Find competing pages. Finding competing pages is easy, because they have a lot of visibility. Put your high-level keyword in Google and see what comes up. Now, go to the  Google Keyword Planner . Click on the ‘Find new keywords and get search volume data’ option, and paste a competing page into the ‘Your landing page’ field. Here’s what I got back when searching for which terms Brian Dean’s guide ranks for: It’s as simple as that. Go ahead and any new keywords to your sheet, repeat as much as you like/need/can be bothered with, and let’s move on to the next step.

2.3 Getting keywords ideas Research how real people speak in their niche communities Aside from the huge hubs your target niche hangs out ( Inbound  and GrowthHackers  for marketing, for example), you can be sure that there is a group of people with questions that your content could answer on  Quora . The reason Quora is so important is because  you get an insight into the exact words your audience uses  when they want an answer you could provide them with. That makes it great for generating  content ideas  as well as keywords. First, do a search for your term in the search bar. If you’re lucky, there’ll be a whole section of Quora devoted to your niche. This is full of hot questions waiting to be explained which were asked by the Quora community because they were  not  answered properly with a Google search. For questions that definitely include your keyword, you’ll want to stay away from the Topic section and go to the ‘Searc...

Step 2.2: Getting Keywords ideas from Wikipedia and Google Suggestion Find a relevant Wikipedia article.  As it happens, Wikipedia is a wealth of succinct, well-written content that explains concepts in terms people understand and search for. For example, the Wiki article on keyword research gives you some ideas as to what’s important and the language the tribe interested in the field use to talk about it. This gives me a bunch of new ideas to add to the sheet. Once you’ve racked your steaming brain and done some real life reading with your real life eyes, it’s time to hand the job over to a machine. Phew, you get to automate this for a little while! Here’s what you’ve got to do next. Generate a huge list of suggestions from your most relevant keywords UberSuggest  is a valuable tool for keyword research. If used properly, it can give you some truly golden keywords. But with the wrong terms, you’ll get a load of rubbish so niche you’d need to calculate it’s volum...

Step 2.1 Getting keyword ideas Brainstorm for your ideal customer’s search terms Before getting any data on volume or competition, you’re going to want to think of every possible way your topic might be searched for. At the risk of starting out like a dense sociology textbook from the ’70s, I’ll work through this with examples. In fact, I’ll kill two birds with one stone and do the keyword research for this very post and guide you through how I did it. Write what the post is about.  This post is about keyword research. That’ll be my first (or ‘seed’) keyword. Put it in the sheet. Get more specific.  It’s not about the history of keyword research, or keyword research for eCommerce on-page SEO, it’s about the keyword research  process.  Put that in the sheet. Google it.  At the bottom on the page, you’ll see Google’s suggestions. They’re fine, but not the last word on the best alternatives. Note: the reason we can already see the volume and sugges...

Recently I came across an article from great SEO writer BENJAMIN BRANDALL about keyword research, and I think it is absolutely awesome.  The No.1 lesson I learned is "template it", you know what I mean. So I simplify his process to 3 steps and here it is: Step 1: Set up a spreadsheet template-- Very Important The first thing you’re going to have to do is set up a template in Google Sheets that you can use every time you run the keyword research process. First,  sign in to Google Sheets  and create a blank spreadsheet. Name it, then fill the headers in to match my example, like this: To make sure that you don’t treat your header as data when sorting your results, you should freeze the top row. Now you’ve got your spreadsheet, make sure you keep the link handy so you can create a powerful recurring process document later on using this guide. Whenever you research a fresh keyword, open up the link, create a copy of the template and name it the subject of...