'Secret' Keyword Research Tip - This is VERY Eye Opening!

Isn't that just like a man, Jill? Offer a guy cookies one time and look what happens - you never live it down.

:p
Tina

This is where you have to do a lot of math, much of it is based off of
previous results. It's way too involved to get into here and is only going
to confuse the hell out of everybody.

So let me simplify it, though this doesn't do justice to the whole principle.

Let's say you know, from past experience, that a keyword that has 2,000
monthly searches brings you 200 visitors a month to your site, or 10% of
the total volume.

Let's say you convert at 2%. That means those 200 visitors bring you
4 sales.

If you want to make a sale a day for your product, or 30 sales a month,
you need a little more than 7 times that volume of searches or about
15,000 searches a month. That means you need about 7 or 8 phrases
of 2,000 searches each to achieve this.

That is NOT easy.

Again, I'm talking a sale a day of say, a $25 product. That's $750 a month
income literally from organic traffic, which isn't asking that much.

Want to make $7,500 per month?

Do this for 10 niches.

The trick is finding enough of them with enough long tail keywords fitting
the criteria AND a product that converts at 2%, for this specific example.

Naturally, EVERYBODY'S mileage will vary as different products convert at
different rates and different searches produce different amounts of
actual traffic to your site, depending on where on the page you rank.

That's why I say that a lot of this, at the beginning, is trial and error and
THEN, applying those stats to future niches.

And even then, since each niche behaves differently, you are taking a
best guess with data that may not be all that reliable but is really the
only thing you have to go on. The more niches you do, the more you will
see patterns and get a better feel for how much traffic you can expect.

Now, if you're only looking for $300 a month, then you don't need as many
keywords. And of course this is providing that this is ALL you do and
nothing else...which is not advisable.

Anyway, hope this helps, though it's probably confused you even more.

Thanks a million times it was an eye opener.

I know in my head that you are right to do so Pat. It would be hard for me to leave what I am used to keyword research wise. I think I start suffering withdrawal symptoms of some sort if I start ignoring that nice competition number Google gives us. I just have to weene myself away from that number!

It's just so hard to not peek at it though. I keep thinking that I am missing something by not looking at that number LOL. I guess in time and with more experience it will get easier to ignore that number.

Carlos

Yes, a lot depends on the niche. You're going to get more SEO savvy webmasters in some niches and not very many at all in others. But again, this is about correlation between the final competition numbers and typical Top 10 or 20 strength. I usually find that correlation to be strong. If a keyword has 200 competing pages in the final analysis, almost always its Top 10 or 20 will be much less optimized and much easier to crack than the Top 10 or 20 for a keyword that ended up with a lot more competing pages. Not always and yes, it is niche dependent for sure, but it's still a very good predictor (in my experience).

Yeah, the drop off for clicks is quite significant after the first page. See stats below. These are for AOL but I've seen Google stats that are very similar.

Nice post!

SEO clicks by position (source: AOL)
Ranking Number 1 receives 42.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 2 receives 11.9 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 3 receives 8.5 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 4 receives 6.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 5 receives 4.9 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 6 receives 4.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 7 receives 3.4 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 8 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 9 receives 2.8 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 10 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs.

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I see a definite correlation between going through the process I show in the video first and the relative competition in the Top 10. Yes, you can just make a list of keywords and go immediately to the Top 10 to check competition. Nothing wrong with that. But I find that it saves me time in the long run to do this simple step first. Almost always I find that if the numbers tell me to expect easy competition, they're right. Not always, but it sure does weed out a lot of dead ends.

John

I'm going to jump in here with my guess that this was not exactly what Lisa was asking. I think her point was, Why do we search with quotes when what we really want to know is who appears in the results as potential customers see it? (Being that most don't use quotes when they search.)

Yes, ultimately the Top 10 results without quotes is your competition. But if you look closely, usually you'll see that they optimized for that phrase on the page that was ranked when it's a phrase with higher competition levels. Now, what you'll also often see - and this is the really telling part - is that some positions in the Top 10 for lower competition keywords were not optimized for that phrase. They just sort of slipped in there because Google couldn't really find something better in the big scheme of things. That's the telling factor. When I do what I showed in the video, then go do the Top 10 search, if I see even just 1 or 2 slots taken by pages that were clearly not optimized for my phrase, I hear a little "Cha-Ching!" go off in my head. MONEY!

Because phrase matching isn't as precise for our purposes. It will include our exact phrase, but also when it appears within longer phrases. So you may well end up counting as competition pages that were actually optimized for other parts of the longer phrase and not your target phrase.

Let's say I'm checking out the competition for "bark collars." I want to know search volume numbers for people who searched that phrase only. With Phrase Match, you get search volumes for searches done for both the target phrase by itself AND when people used your target phrase in longer search phrases.

Example:

Search volume for "bark collars for small dogs" (exact match) = 1,300
Search volume for "bark collars for small dogs (phrase match) = 1,900

That makes sense, because more people will search for phrases that just include our target phrase within a longer phrase than will JUST search for our target phrase and no other words in their search.

I want the exact match search volume because that's telling me more precisely what kind of traffic numbers I can expect, depending on where I rank. Phrase match is less precise because it's harder to divine what the searcher is really after. I hope that makes sense.

John

Oh yes, it's true. Not in 100% of the cases, of course, but more often than not for sure. Let's take the example long tail keyword in my video: bark collars for small dogs. If you search that without quotes, you'll see three interesting things about the Top 10 without even really digging in very far:

1. There's a Web 2.0 property in the #6 position (ehow.com). That's user generated content and it's a great indicator of vulnerability in the Top 10 (usually).

2. If you look at the other Top 10 properties, they're almost all deep inner pages. I only see one TLD. Another excellent sign that the Top 10 is vulnerable.

3. No page in the Top 5 has a PR higher than 3. This is not as solid an indicator as it used to be (in my opinion) but still does carry some weight.

So there are 3 good reasons to believe that keyword can be conquered, and it took all of about 1 minute to determine. Now, to be sure, there is more you can and should do once you get serious about a niche. You need to try to figure out the number and strength of backlinks, for example, and how well optimized the competing pages are in terms of on-page SEO (title tags, h1, content, etc.). But to do this quickly, I've just learned basically all I need to know about the target keyword to move ahead.

To address your point directly, yes, this pattern holds true most often when you do what I show in the video and then look at the Top 10 results. The correlation is high.

John

Most likely it's to lessen the page load time both for your benefit and theirs.

If they allowed you to view 1000 results on a page it would a greater strain on their server.

And Google has always been about simplicity and fast load times.

In fact it appears that they will be putting more emphasis (your ranking) in the future on how fast your page loads, they have always considered this but it will be even more important to your ranking going forward.

Slow, graphically heavy sites beware!

I've only been using this method for about 2 months. But it only makes sense (to me anyway) that if the pages being listed in the top 10 have low PR that it would be easy to rank for. No matter how many competing search results there are.

There's one keyword I found using this method that has over 800k results (without quotes). When I first looked at this keyword I thought NO WAY!

But then I added up the PR of each page being listed and it totaled 10 PR. So I went for it and built links targeting the keyword and now I'm ranked #1 for a keyword I would have never attempted.

I don't think it's a fluke because I've checked dozens of other high search results keywords in this way and did back link searches on the top 10 sites using (link: "sitename.com") only to find that some of the sites being listed had little to no back links at all.

I'm really not in favor of this, unless someone has done a lot of recent analysis of many random niches/keywords to back it up. PR is so much less predictive of rankings than it used to be. I'm leery of using anything based entirely on PR math to decide whether to go for a keyword or not.

I like MNF too...when it works. I find I have to open my browser and log in to my Google Webmaster account first or it won't work. Do you guys have to do that too?

Support hasn't been much help on this issue for me. They'll respond to a trouble ticket once, but then don't follow up when I answer the questions they ask.

LOL, I've done this too. Got up out of a warm bed to go check out a niche I just thought of...

Keyword research is about getting an idea about competition and then (if possible) to outrank this competition using on-site SEo techniques and off-site SEO, like backlinks.

Yo have a point! allintitle: is not the "ultimate" indicator...for example wikipedia and whatever other "authority site" could very well rank for keyword WITHOUT the phrase/KW in title.

But its still better than simply looking at indexed pages, IMHO.

There is a chance that you can outrank those sites because YOU will do proper on-site SEO, YOU will have it in title and will optimize your site.

The number of sites which come up without having the KW in title have a disadvantage because they are not SEOed for that keyword. Thats how i see it.

But, as said, there is still more to it. It will still be hard to outrank eg. wikipedia and other authority sites.

Thank you, Dennis. I guess I used to know that, but haven't even thought about it in a while, but it is a VERY good suggestion.

I have a SEO question. When looking at those top 10 competing sites how do you discover their "SEO" savyness (Is that a word lol) - Do you look at their keywords in the page source, etc?

I was researching a niche I am interested in and the competition seems pretty tough in the top 10 but very few of them have the actual kw phrase in their title or in their KW's?

Just wondering if I am missing something LOL

Belinda

How do you know this is accurate or in other words THE REAL NUMBER?
It's kinda confusing...like everything 'the gurus' taught before is suddenly wrong

Excellent point you've made...and it makes lots of sense, certainly, up to some level and for certain things.

It is not exactly the same, but similar to the better results you'd get on AdWords if you will bid to target the #3 spot and NOT the #1 spot...
That's just human nature, he, he... we praise the winners, but we secretly hope the challengers will win?

Now, I feel I should add something here. As with anything else SEO related, there is no such an absolute answer, rather a highest chance to be true answer. And of course, all comes from us not knowing the exact Google algorithms (plus that they change those from time to time) so that we can only observe and guess.

For instance, almost everybody teaches one should research to find if it is possible to rank #1, because that is where the gold is.

But I found a very useful other tactic... Just find the few interesting long tail KeyPhrases that people DO search for and do not worry so much for the competition on them, but rather on the number of searches.

You see, if the KP is long tailed enough (4 KW+) there will be very few webmasters to optimize for that one anyway. Almost no one will buy a 4-5 KW rich domain name, not to think about 10 competitors doing so... all in all, maybe some blog posts and some articles having that as a post title...

You stand a very good chance to rank high for that particular KP... but do not stop here. Think outside the box.
If you're gonna write a blog post or article with that title, do not stuff it with that KP but instead use it sparingly and rather add LSI-worth other (even shorter KP's) inside the text.

After indexing your content, especially on a website you own and build (like self hosted WP blog < recommended) SE's will soon rank you very high for many, many other KP you have not even thought of.

Study THOSE - if they are not crazy long, write and optimize content for that stuff (in fact you already rank well for it, without trying!) and soon you will have enough content to dominate a few related long KP's...
Then magic will happen.

You will get far better rankings for other shorter KP's as well.

You see, we are sometimes carried away by trying to technically write stuff for quick indexing and getting high SERP's for 'making money' reasons < whatever they are, when in fact Google is all about relevancy.

My advice is to forget about using SEO for quick rewards, but rather for building a very solid business on the medium & long term.
For quick results, better use paid (ads) traffic or reciprocal traffic (JV's, promo's, etc..) - but this is good subject for another posting...

Steve Lorenzo SEOVirtuoso