When you read the word “massive traffic”, what number would you equate to that?
- A 100 visitors everyday?
- Maybe a 1,000?
Whatever your estimate is, through proper keyword research (and equally proper content writing), your website can get an ever rising amount and break those numbers, even easily if you master this.
As someone whose site/s get that type of traffic daily, I think I know a thing or two about that so today, I’d like to walk you through how I personally research and find keywords by providing actual examples of from my own personal experiences.
Here is a summary of how keyword research is done to get a lot of traffic:
- Start with a niche. Keywords always come from this point.
- Know your niche. It’s easy to find keywords then.
- Make a list of keywords your niche types up (questions, subjects, ect…)
- Branch out from the keywords you found to get even more keyword ideas.
- Filter out which keywords so you know which ones have the most traffic.
- Create the content on the chosen keywords.
- Review products! Easy keywords, little competition!
- Use Google Alerts and Google Trends to constantly find more keyword ideas.
- Use YouTube. It’s awesome for profiting off keyword research!
The 9 key things required to master keyword research and get massive traffic explained:
Most people make the mistake of looking for keywords with traffic and thinking that is all it takes to get success, but if there is no knowledge on the keywords or the niche, then none of that potential will ever be realized. So in order to find profitable keywords, there is a specific starting point you need to begin from and it’s from the niche itself. The keywords come from that.
So that being said, here is how it starts:
1) Always have a niche audience in mind.
Every website I have, has it’s own specific niche audience that is being targeted. Without this starting frame, you are wasting your time because there are literally an infinite amount of keywords out there you can find, but the ones which will get you the traffic and make you the money are those that are specifically targeted towards a niche audience.
2) Know the niche audience. And I mean really, really know them.
If I understand my niche well, then brainstorming keywords is simple. That’s really why you want to know it. For example, if you look at any of the 50 niche ideas listed here, if you know a lot about them, then finding keywords that people search for, in each niche is simple.
Examples of what “knowing your niche” really means:
Think of yourself as someone who owns a store that sells specialty items, say emergency items in the case of blackouts, disasters, ect… That’s quite the niche (and I actually discuss this one specifically in this list of 10 niche markets).
But let’s imagine a customer walks in and asks you (one or more of the following questions) what you would recommend he or she buys for their home that’s of a certain size, certain amounts of rooms, that would help them maintain their home in case something happened (maybe keep the power on), products or tips for maintaining their food should the power shut off, ect…
These are all niche specific questions and you as the store owner and technically the expert in this niche, should easily be able to answer ALL of these questions.
You are doing the same thing with your website and the keywords you are aiming to rank for. You are establishing your knowledge in the niche you chose and from there, the keyword process is simple.
3) Now we focus on keywords and we’ll start by making a list.
Remember that store owner who was ready to answer all of the customers questions? How do you think they were able to do it? They knew their niche, that’s how!
And when you know the niche audience, you’re easily able to write down all of the possible questions and topics they can come up with.
From there, the key is to list them out and for that, I will use my own personal example on THIS website. Now as the technical “store owner” of a niche site that has to do with making money online, what types of questions/problems/topics have I personally experienced and have seen my niche audience write about often?
Here’s a few things which came up:
That’s some pretty common stuff people look up online. They are topics, they are all keyword and they are all niche relevant, at least to me. But that’s just 5 terms and while they all work and I know about each and every one of them, we can and should go deeper.
4) Take the terms you found and see if there are “branches” to them available.
The terms I used above are very vague. One of the key points further down below will be about filtering out the many terms you find so that the ones you keep have low competition and high search volumes and in the case of the terms above, you’ll probably have one thing (visitors) but not the other (low competition).
In those cases, you have 2 options:
A) Find a LONGER version of the said term, aka long tail. So in this case, I’d just add a few more words to the terms above until I’d get it to a point where when I’d research the terms, I’d get both a good traffic number for it and low competition.
B) Branch out…look for much more specific terms related to…say the ones above. For example:
Sometimes, there will be terms you find that are general (red) and sometimes it will be necessary to go deeper (branches). Either way, EVERY single thing I listed above can be a keyword, can be blogged about, ranked for and attract visitors.
5) Filter out the keywords. We only want the best ones!
With the whole idea of knowing your niche, keywords and their branches, there’s really a whole bunch of opportunities available, but your time should be spent chasing the terms you find which can yield the greatest return and many of the terms you find, while they may seem logical to YOU in that other people will type it too, just will not get much traffic.
So how do you filter it out? Well as I said above, you need traffic and low competition. What kind of numbers do I look for? Well here’s my assessment:
Now right here I need to stop for a moment because there will be those of you who question my position on the low traffic numbers. Why should I aim for 10 or more, why not aim for a 100 or more? Maybe a 1,000 or more?
Well no one is stopping you from doing that. In fact, you should look for terms that big first, but consider the following position:
Your blog has to grow to get visitors. It has to target search term after search term. It’s difficult enough to find 100 search terms which get big search traffic and when you exhaust them (meaning you wrote about them already) and need to find others, but have a hard time finding the big ones again, you need to broaden your parameters.
In my case, after writing over 500 articles, I had to look for lesser popular keywords. But you know what? Most of them had such LITTLE competition that ranking on the first page was NO problem. So don’t always go for the biggest terms you find, go, basically for ANY that get traffic.
6) Once you filter them out, it’s time to rank for them by writing content.
I don’t really care much about competition because if you follow this strategy, you are targeting niches, and typically the keywords in niches already have low competition. But I disgress:
This is where we get into content creation. Your keywords and content work together to attract Google to your site and thereby making them rank you and give you traffic on the other end.
Now I have an awesome article written up on what to blog about to make money online here and you’ll find that I use these exact principals there to never get stuck with writer’s block! The more content you’ll be able to create on your website through the intelligent keyword research I just taught you, the better your traffic results will be!
7) Bonus: Product review terms = easy keywords to profit from.
There will MANY keywords you will always be able to find via products that come out and are associated to your niche topic. In the case of these products and the keywords, it’s really simple:
Add the word “scam” or “review” to most product review keywords to get them to a low competition and high traffic level. Most product reviews and their main terms generally have a high traffic and are themselves a HIGH competing term to rank for, but simply adding “review” or “scam” to said product makes the term much less competitive and much more “Rankable”.
Want to know how to write a profitable product review? That link will show you.
8) Use Google Alerts and Google Trends!
If you select a niche topic, you can use these 2 free services to see what is trending and on the news through Google. Typically news events get listed on these 2 places and if you find them, you can write an article for it, get listed on Google for the keyword or the news event with little or no competition and get a lot of traffic faster.
9) Make YouTube videos targeting the same keywords.
YouTube is awesome for this exact purpose and you can easily use the above 8 points not just to write content on but make video content on as well!
My final thoughts:
I used to think that using keyword tools was all it took to succeed, but the internet, Google’s ranking factors and how people look for stuff online has greatly changed and the old traditional ways of just chasing keywords doesn’t work anymore.
However, if you follow the 8 point plan I just gave you, consequently, you’ll be able to create great content and intelligently find keywords your audience will want to find you for and that is how you’ll get massive traffic to your site.
I like how you explained how to get keywords, it caught my eye because sometimes i have trouble thinking of new keywords to use in the xbox one niche so this post definitely gave me some insight on how to find new keywords but anyway thanks for posting and have a good night.
I’m sure the Xbox one has troubleshooting issues you can talk about in different articles. Since you review games, why not do videos on YouTube for them?
Your post has answered a few questions for me. I like the way you explained how to branch out from a keyword phrase to dig up extra keywords. There is a lot of sound advice in your post. I think really knowing your product and your niche audience is the most important things we need to remember.
Well if we don’t, how can we provide the type of content people will actually read Margaret? This is why people need to pick niches they know about 🙂
I like what you wrote about low-competition keywords, Vitaliy. I would much rather rank on page 1 of Google for a keyword that gets 50 searches a month than on page 50 of Google for a keyword that gets 10,000 searches a month.
If someone were using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, do they need to worry about competition, or is that only for free traffic?
The competition you see through typical keyword research only applies to organic searches Andy. PPC has a different approach to this. The Google keyword tool for example will show you how many organic searches a keyword gets while the competition number is actually the amount of advertisers there are trying to run ads for the said keyword.
Others like Bing will typically not show you how many other advertisers are trying to run ads for a keyword/s, but they will give you a price estimate of what you’d have to pay for each click to have your ad show on page 1.
In short, if you do PPC, you should follow this guide I wrote. Typically they’ll want you to spend more but you can absolutely have your ads show up on page 1 for less than your competitors are paying IF you follow certain rules they have.
Hey man,
I just wanted to say that you did a really good job outlining all the different components that make up good keywords and good articles. This has answered a lot of the questions I had on the topic.
Thank you for that. I now know that the amount of content that you have plays a vital role. Does the frequency at which you post affect rankings as well? If so, how many posts do you recommend for a one week period?
Keep up the good work,
Johel
Yes it absolutely does Johel, this article will help answer your question. Long story short, the more frequently you blog, the better.
Vitaliy,
Your article on keyword research comes a good time for me. I have quite a few post on my website that do not get any traffic at all. I was thinking that I need to review my keywords for older post. You method will help me change some of the content without changing the title of the post.
Do you think it is a good idea to review keywords that you have used that are over a year old. Are their any more steps that you recommend that I will have to make to get some traffic from these old post.
John
Hi John, I’m afraid I don’t follow the question you asked regarding the age of keywords. If you are referring to articles which you wrote a year back and if it’s worth going back to them, I’d say yes in 2 circumstances:
1) You did an update to the information you originally posted so it would benefit you to add that new content to the old post (you can also do a followup post where you explain this).
2) The content wasn’t ranking well so by adding more content to the old one, you improved the chances of it ranking better. If this is the case, I’d also consider aiming to get more comments.
Without a doubt a great breakdown on keyword research. There are so many takeaways from this post its tough to know where to begin. The niche group you mention is by far and above, in my opinion, the most important part an internet marketer needs to be aware of. What niche are you marketing to? You definitely spell it out loud and clear how to do it! Great job and great post!
Well on this site, the niche crowd is basically the basic one which looks to make money online and all the subset niches thereafter of people who would benefit from working from home.
Hi there!
Thanks for the post! This is very well written and has some great info for all of us just starting off.
I really appreciate how you explain things as someone who has been through the early learning stages. You write to my level and not to the expert’s level which I find very engaging!!
Do you have any advice for those of us with writer’s block? With so many possible keywords out there sometimes it is overwhelming and hard to start…
Thanks again for the post, it has inspired me to get motivated again!!
The idea is to brainstorm the ideas first and think of topics, then find corresponding keywords. Don’t think you have to find keywords right away Brian, the topic ideas lead to the keyword searches.
This can certainly cause writer’s block but if what I suggested is not enough, try this.
I found that what helps me the most is actually being my audience. Not only am I the so-called expert but I am, or was at one stage, looking for the information that I provide. So in the end I naturally come with keyword ideas just being engrossed in my niche. The people coming to my site essentially have the same goals so I base my keyword research like that, what do you think?
Hi Ryan, being an expert in the niche does indeed involve you being a part of the niche audience. How can one help people if one didn’t go through the same problem they did? That’s how you become an expert. If you managed to fix a problem that a niche audience has, you lived it, you beat it and now you can help them do the same.
Thanks for sharing your techniques for doing keyword research that works. I really think that going by your own formula would help me keep my focus on my audience instead of search engines.
I know good keyword research is vital to traffic and traffic is vital to a website.
And I appreciate the bonus about adding scam to product review keywords.
Thanks
Hello Vitaliy,
Thanks for a very well written article, it made thing a lot more clear for me.
I now have upgraded my Jaaxy account and I am starting to find my way in it.
I also seen your answer about changing existing content, wish I had learned this before! This is exactly what I have done!
As long as you didn’t change the permalink, your rankings will eventually return back, so I would not erase them anymore. Worst case, just add NEW content to the old article.
Very good description of keywords and keyword research. Do you use only Jaaxy? How effective is i compared to the WA keyword tool? I use that one because I do not want to pay for Jaaxy – do they work the same? Thanks for the article thoiugh, the tree/branchs metaphor for getting long tail keywords was spot on.
Hi Alex, I have used both those keyword tools and I actually compare them both here, check it out.
Good post but I have some questions:
1. Should you keep targeting the same keyword to build authority for that keyword. What I mean is should you write a number of posts on the same keyword? I would have thought this would make your site very boring.
2. What about backlinks when you’re trying to rank a page. On Warrior forum everyone is always talking about the need to get backlinks. I know you shouldn’t get bad ones, but getting strong ones when you’re just starting out is virtually impossible.
Hi Deb:
1. No you only need to target 1 keyword per post. There is no need to write more articles targeting the same term unless there is some sort of update on the matter. Say for instance you target a keyword on some software program and you review it, then later on a new update is released, in that case I would target the same keyword in a new post, title it version 2.0 or whatever the new updated software is called and place a link from the OLD article you wrote to the new one.
Otherwise keep finding new keywords and writing about them, as well as interlinking your site. Generally if you wish to have a specific post with a keyword you really want to rank high for, actually rank, it is best to get that post comments, links from other internal pages on your site through interlinking (here’s all you need to know) so a lot of traffic flows there, leaves comments and this will show Google that the targeted post is of high value and help it rank better.
2. I would honestly not listen to people in the Warrior Forum, many of them are stuck in the old days of backlinking and hustling to make it in the world of online marketing. Most of the things I see there continue to push old, shady ways of making money, most of which are dead anyway.
Backlinks are things I do not take seriously, but allow to happen naturally and I do that by the following strategies: Socially sharing the page, making videos linking back to the page and letting others share my content. This is natural link building at it’s best in my opinion.
Hello Vitality
Thanks so much for a post so well explained, so well written.
I have not considered branching out with keywords in the past, I guess I did not understand it very well. I always thought a keyword let`s say “selling on Amazon” is targeted, but reading your post, I realize it is not targeted at all or could be more targeted.
You are so right about “running out of keywords” I feel this only happens when one is looking for keywords with hundreds of searches per month, but if you settle for 30, 40 searches per month and have high-quality content every week, I feel in the end it comes to the same number than publishing a single article a month with 150 search terms or whatever.
Really enjoyed your post and learned something very useful.I never leave comments on sites but I just had to. Thanks for sharing
Hey,
This just answered my question to your previous article. Thank you.
My site mainly focuses on reviews and after writing about 30 plus reviews, I tried to rephrase the title in a way that it would not have the word “review” in the title without affecting the number of searches per month as well as maintaining the low competition.
It can get “boring” if your site reviews have the word “review” in all the titles. It’s a challenge but I think can be done.
Regards,
Pitin
Hi Pitin, on one hand you’re right, but I would keep your titles as is because changing existing content, even in the title can cause the page you originally had ranked and possibly getting traffic get re-indexed which can take a longer time to go through.
Furthermore, because the title of the post will now have a phrase other than review in it, the whole article can rank for something else. Use the word review in your articles where it fits, but also use other related keyword terms related to the topic/product WITHIN the post itself.
I am new to online business and you have very interesting information in here about how to really cover everything in your specific niche. Gathering questions others may have, and then branching off of them is a fantastic idea! That way, you assure yourself you aren’t leaving anything out. Thank you for this help I truly appreciate your work! Keep it up!
Cheers
Stephen