When people talking about keyword research, they will go directly to Google keyword tool and start picking the most traffic keyword with rather high SEO competition, that's the main reason for failure!
When picking the right keyword, we have to consider 3 factors:
1. Keyword search volume
2. SEO competition
3. Keyword type - There are 3 types of keywords:
a) Research keyword - Least valuable, they present an introduction of a topic, something we start to learn about a topic.
b) Problem / Solution keyword - When there are not many free solutions out there, the problem & solution keyword will become a valuable opt-in keyword. To convert these keywords, you still have to lead them into buying mode in your email series.
c) Buying keyword - This include the product name, solution or cure for a particular problem, people are ready to buy at this stage, this is the gold mine of all keywords!
When we build a website, we want to start with the Problem / Solution & Buying keywords, research keywords are a waste of time! What you first needed to make money from a niche is to find the problem & solution to it, and the proper products / services to promote to your visitors or list subscribers.
Ok, let's take a look at what I mean:
First, we expand the keyword from the topic - "Weight Loss".
Please note that "Weight Loss" itself is a research keyword, people who enter this keyword are looking for more information, they are not ready to buy yet! I will not target this keyword for 2 reasons:
- This is not a buying keyword
- This keyword has extremely high competition
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Why would you want to spend a fortune to rank a keyword that don't convert well?
Let's look at the other long tail keywords.
Research Keyword
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meal plans for weight loss
weight loss workouts
weight loss exercise
best weight loss program
Problem / Solution Keyword
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weight loss solutions
online weight loss programs
fast weight loss
effective weight loss
Buying Keywords
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The Actual Product / Service Name which is not shown in the initial research
BTW, before we proceed further, you want to change your search result to "Exact" and "Phrase" match, ignore the "Broad" result, they don't really tell you anything besides the actual market size of that keyword!
For example,
Weight Loss Programs has 368K broad searches, 90K phrase searches and 33K exact searches every month.
What does this means? In all the search query the user enter, something like
good weight loss programs
good programs for weight loss
bad programs to avoid for weight loss
programs to help me in weight loss
lose weight course
It doesn't matter how the keyword is arranged, or even some related search phrases. They are all count as a broad match. That's why the broad match search count is never accurate, if you use that to estimate traffic to your website, they will never work.
Next, the phrase match, keyword that are enter in the exact sequence are counted, for example:
Weight Loss Programs Before Wedding
Weight Loss Programs After Pregnancy
Good Weight Loss Programs
Best Weight Loss Programs
You'll notice that the exact keyword exists in all the above keyword list. That's the phrase search.
Lastly, the exact match. This is the simplest to understand:
Weight Loss ProgramsThis is the only keyword considered as an exact match. The actual search count will reflect the actual monthly search volume for this keyword, we build traffic to a website using this reference as the standard measure.
Not all search engine users for this keyword will visit your website, so we will take the ranked #1 website as a reference point. If you ranked #1 for this keyword, you can expect 40% of the traffic flows into the first position!
For example, "Weight Loss Programs" received 33K exact match visitors a month, that means you have 33K * 40% = 13K visitors to your website if you rank on first position for this keyword.
How To Uncover More Long Tail Keywords?Now, we have to look at only the "Phrase" VS "Exact" match result to find more long tail keywords for a particular Problem / Solution or Buying keyword.
Again, we look at "Weight Loss Programs", it has 90K VS 33K differences. That's a difference of 57K, this indicates there are a lot of long tail keywords waiting for discovery!
We can use special tools like Super Suggestor or Keyword Sniper Pro to expand more long tail keywords, or we can do this manually, it may take a lot of time. Let me show you one way to do this using Google Suggest. Just type the keyword in the Google search box, Google will show you the list of suggested long tail keywords, that's how we discover more long tail keywords.
We enter the keyword "Weight Loss Programs" + "a", after extract all the keywords, we continue with "Weight Loss Programs" + "b"... and so on, this way you'll discover almost all the keywords from a to z!
For some keywords, you might want to try "a", "ab", "ac" to uncover even more results, Super Suggestor and Keyword Sniper Pro will get them easily, you really don't want to do this by hand.
Here are some of the filtered exact match result:
"Weight Loss Programs for Women" - 2400
"best weight loss programs for women" - 120
"Weight Loss Programs for Men" - 1300
"Quick Weight Loss Programs" - 720
"Weight Loss Programs Online" - 480
"residential weight loss programs for adults" - 120
"Weight Loss Programs That Work" - 390
"Weight Loss Programs That Really Work" - 210
If we build a site around these keywords, expected traffic when all keywords ranked on #1 will be 5740 * 40% = 2296 ready to buy visitors / month!
That's not all, remember the main keyword - "Weight Loss Programs"? After you've ranked all the long tail keywords of the main keyword, the next step is to push the main keyword to the first page!
This main keyword alone has 33K searches every month, if you ranked all the sub keywords to top 3 position, you most probably already build enough link juice to at least boost the main keyword to top 50 positions, now all you need is some extra pushes and you'll hit page 1 for the main keyword.
You can expect a 5K to 10K range of traffic every month from just this one major keyword and its' long tails, that's how you build / increase web traffic!
One of the vital factors here - You must link back to the homepage with the main keyword, and your homepage should be targeting the main keyword!
We can expand the same procedure to finding more buying keywords to increase the website traffic anytime, and ranking these long tail keywords are relatively easy.