Keyword Research and Competition Analysis for Beginners by a Beginner
- SEO |
I've been seeing a lot of question as of late about this topic. As I my self am a newer internet marketer and SEOer I am hoping that writing this not only helps organize my own thoughts but can help other newer people get a feel for keyword research as well. If you have any suggestions or anything for me to add to this please let me know. I will add it! You will be helping both my self and other beginners who will read this. Also if I have anything wrong I would like to know so I can fix it. Thanks!
Keyword Research - Keyword research is the single most important part of building a niche site or trying to rank in Google for a specific keyword or phrase. That and competition analysis for those keywords. For someone just starting out it can seem like a daunting task. When I first started out I found that having something to follow like a guide, reference or cheat sheet really helped me be more productive, organized and through. That’s essentially what this post is about. To give you something you can follow when doing this for yourself. Using these methods below I have built two niche sites (only 2; I am still a beginner = ) ) that are doing decently well I think. Once you have done keyword and competition research more and more you may not need to continuously reference each step of the process. I still like to keep my notes open though.
Note: This guide is based on the approach of going after low hanging fruit. Going after low search volume keywords that coincidentally have low competition.
1.) Brainstorm Seed Keywords - There are thousand of ways you can brain storm seed keywords. To name a few of them: Watch TV, Play a Game, Go out Shopping, Library, Wikipedia, Read Forums (in any niche or one you’d like to get into), Amazon (search by tags, categories, descriptions, bestsellers, comments, etc,.), Wikipedia, Google Instant, Google Trends, Ebay (same as with Amazon), Reddit (browser different subs), Talk to your friends, etc,. The list goes on and on. Think of seed keywords like this: Input and submit your seed keywords into your keyword research software and watch the results grow. Your list of potential keywords (and long tail keywords) will grow.
Seed Keyword Brain Storming Tools:
2.) Keyword Analysis - There are more than a thousand ways to analyze your keywords. You can do this manually or by using paid software. The cool thing about paid software is that they typically show you all the important metrics all on one screen in an easy to read and access format. While doing it by hand means you will probably need to use a different tool or service for each step of the process. I almost always do it manually. Below are some of the resources you can use (both paid and free) to perform keyword research. I won't list to many as that in it's self could be it's own guide. There are just so many tools.
Free/Paid Tools and Services:
Keyword Research - Keyword research is the single most important part of building a niche site or trying to rank in Google for a specific keyword or phrase. That and competition analysis for those keywords. For someone just starting out it can seem like a daunting task. When I first started out I found that having something to follow like a guide, reference or cheat sheet really helped me be more productive, organized and through. That’s essentially what this post is about. To give you something you can follow when doing this for yourself. Using these methods below I have built two niche sites (only 2; I am still a beginner = ) ) that are doing decently well I think. Once you have done keyword and competition research more and more you may not need to continuously reference each step of the process. I still like to keep my notes open though.
Note: This guide is based on the approach of going after low hanging fruit. Going after low search volume keywords that coincidentally have low competition.
1.) Brainstorm Seed Keywords - There are thousand of ways you can brain storm seed keywords. To name a few of them: Watch TV, Play a Game, Go out Shopping, Library, Wikipedia, Read Forums (in any niche or one you’d like to get into), Amazon (search by tags, categories, descriptions, bestsellers, comments, etc,.), Wikipedia, Google Instant, Google Trends, Ebay (same as with Amazon), Reddit (browser different subs), Talk to your friends, etc,. The list goes on and on. Think of seed keywords like this: Input and submit your seed keywords into your keyword research software and watch the results grow. Your list of potential keywords (and long tail keywords) will grow.
Seed Keyword Brain Storming Tools:
2.) Keyword Analysis - There are more than a thousand ways to analyze your keywords. You can do this manually or by using paid software. The cool thing about paid software is that they typically show you all the important metrics all on one screen in an easy to read and access format. While doing it by hand means you will probably need to use a different tool or service for each step of the process. I almost always do it manually. Below are some of the resources you can use (both paid and free) to perform keyword research. I won't list to many as that in it's self could be it's own guide. There are just so many tools.
Free/Paid Tools and Services:
- Google Adwords
- Übersuggest
- Keyword Tool
- Long Tail Pro
- Market Samurai
- Google PageRank Checker
- MOZ Open Site Explorer
- SEMrush
- SEOQuake Amazing browser addon. Displays metrics right in the SERPs.
- SEO Toolbar Another amazing browser addon. Displays metrics right in the SERPs as well.
- Ahrefs
- Local Monthly Searches >= 3,000
- Local Monthly Searches <= 100,000
- Approximate CPC > $1.00
- Show Exact Match searches
- High Competition is better than low competition.
- The resulting keywords meet my keyword research criteria. Once I have them I need to analyze the competition of these keywords to narrow down my search.
- Are the resulting pages eCommerce sites? - Avoid a keyword if too many results are eCommerce I tend to stay if the results have 4 or more eCommerce sites in top 10
- Are the resulting sites weak sites - Q&A sites, forums, social bookmarking sites, web 2.0 sites, article directories, weak niche sites with EMD’s (exact match domains), etc,.
- Are the resulting sites root domains? - If 3-5 of the resulting sites in the top 10 are root domains I would avoid this keyword.
- Are the resulting pages targeting the keyword or are they just mentioning the keyword in passing? - keyword relevancy. Is the page optimized for that keyword or just mention the keyword. i will target a keyword no even if other metrics are not favorable if the sites are NOT targeting the keyword.
- Are the resulting links in the top 10 authority sites? - .edu, .gov, DMOZ, yahoo directory, etc,. Take these into consideration if there are any. They are hard to out rank.
- Is the keyword in the resulting URLS? - keyword relevancy
- Is the keyword in the resulting Titles? - keyword relevancy - target keywords where not all of the pages are targeting the keyword in the title. title is one of the most important on page SEO factors.
- What is the PA (Page Authority) - Page Authority is a SEOMoz Metric. PAs of 25 or less is preferred. as high as 30 can be ok.
- What is the DA (Domain Authority) - Domain Authority is a SEOMoz Metric. The DA is not too important. If the PA is only 1 it has not been registered yet with MOZ so divide the DA in half to get your PA. Roughly.
- How many page links does each resulting page have? - This is how many pages/site are pointing/linking to that ranking page (not the site). I like to see less than 10 page links per ranking page but depending on where the links come from it’s ok if they have 100’s. You will need to use best judgement here. The amount of links is not that important if they are not juice page links.
- How many ‘juice page’ links does each resulting page have? - This is a SEOMoz metric. A juice page link is a link pointing to a page/site from a valuable or authoritative site passing link juice to the resulting page. I like to see results with 0 juice page links. No more than 10. Rule of thumb is that at least 2 of the top 10 results need to have 10 or less juice page links. Most of the time 0 Juice page links.
- mozRank - I like to go after keywords where the top 10 results have an average value of 2.5. total the mozRank of all the results to get this. Alternatively resulting pages with mozRank of 2.5 or less in general are what I want to see.
- PageRank (PR) - PR (a Google metric based on an algorithm named after larry page) is not as important as it once was but still alright to look at when averaging out all the metrics. I want to see at least 2 out of the top 10 results have 0 or 1 PR. Pr has not been updated in a while so keep that in mind. a PR of ‘N/A’ does not mean it is below 0.
- Anchor Text Distribution - Analyses the anchor text distribution of each page using a tool like SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc,. This is not mandatory but if you want an extra bit of thoroughness this is a good technique to implement.
- Content on competing page - Take a look at the content on each of the resulting 1- pages. Can you do better? Is it poorly written or executed? Is the page responsive?