Around a staggering 1.5 billion websites (and that includes blogs) exist today. Do you really think it’s that easy to throw up a website and get first page rankings on that authority keyword on Google? Seriously? If you think so, let me break it to you that you are damn wrong.
Going after an authority keyword is maybe the most amateurish thing to do as an online marketer. Not only are you going up against big organizations with thousands, if not millions, of dollars for their marketing budget but also because the online market has become too sophisticated to chase broad keywords these days.
Rather you should go after long tail key phrases, that is, search phrases that are more specific in nature. When you target long tail key phrases, not only do you face far less competition but also you reach a more targeted audience more suited to your business. But is that all? Going after 3-4 worded key phrases instead of a 1-word keyword? Ah, I wish keyword research was that easy!
Frankly, if you really want to make the big bucks, not only will you need to find the more specific keywords suited to your target audience but also that are reasonably profitable — we are talking about keywords or phrases that have the potential to bring in money through advertising and sales.
In this article, we will go step by step on how to find the most money-making keywords in any niche (and yes, that also in less than 10 minutes! You might want to start your timer now).
Step 1. Brainstorm all topics related to your business.
Try to think of all topics that you want to rank for in generic categories. You will probably come up with 5-10 such categories most relevant to your business. These categories or topics are the broad keywords used to get at the more specific ones later in the process.
Finding these categories is not tricky either. All you need to do is put yourself in the shoes of your prospective customer and figure which categories you would want the customer to associate you with. Marketing 101, eh?
Step 2. Dig long tail keywords based on those generic keywords.
At this stage, we are going to find the long tail keywords to be derived from the generic categories we decided on in the earlier stage. You can brainstorm these specific keywords or you can use a paid premium tool like KeywordRevealer. All you have to open the dashboard and enter the generic keyword.
Let’s say, we search for the term ‘meditation’ and filter the search setting the minimum number of words in that phrase. (You can also include the maximum number of keywords, as well. But those are used to discover broader keywords.) The tool will pull up all the variations of your keyword like this.
Step 3. Choose the best keywords based on monthly volume, CPC and profit potential
Going long tail is not enough. You need to decide on the viability of the keywords.
How?
Well, check for their monthly search volume and their cost per click (CPC). Not only do you want to go for the relatively higher searched phrase but also the one with higher advertising value. It shows that a particular keyword is not only highly searched but is profitable. Come to think about it, unless business owners made money from their advertising campaigns, they would not put on such high bids, right?
At this stage, you would probably require a keyword tool to aid you in the process. You can source the CPC data from the free Google Keyword Tool (no worries!), but you would not get specific search volume there.
Your choice should be a paid tool like Keyword Revealer that can fetch the necessary data right on to the dashboard. All you have to do is sort the results — once by clicking on the CPC tab to check the highest CPC rate, and then by the Monthly Volume tab for the highest monthly search volume.
We can see below that the CPC rate in offer is $6.73.
This shows that the highest monthly search volume is 14,800.
Step 4. Filter out the most profitable keywords
Almost done. What we are going to do next is to filter out the results within the specific range we want. By that, what I mean is, though we know the highest CPC rate and highest search volume, it’s not much of use, because our whole selection of keywords includes the lowest CPC rate of $0 and monthly search volume of less than 10.
So, here’s what we are going to do. You probably have to use paid keyword tool for it is not possible in the Google Keyword Planner. (Don’t go for other free tools, please. They can show skewed data spoiling your research.)
In Keyword Revealer, we would set the least CPC rate as $3.50 (slightly less than half of the highest CPC) and the lowest monthly search volume as 200 (considered a significant traffic volume for specific long tail keywords).
Take a look:
Step 5. Select the least competitive keywords
We have reached the final step of our keyword research process. Now that we have a list of the most profitable long tail keywords, we have to analyze their competition score and choose the ones that fall within the range of ‘low competition’ and ‘moderate competition’.
Click on the Evaluate button for each of the keywords to check their competition score. For every keyword, you will reach a page like this (below is for “5 minute mindfulness meditation”).
Not only will you be able to see the keyword difficulty score, you will find out the recent trend, the SEO quality and social popularity of the domains ranking on the first page.
Just evaluate every other long tail key phrase in your list and find the one shows opportunity. Simple, isn’t it?
Let us know what you think by commenting below!