Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
As you should already know, keyword research is a huge part of traffic generation. Apart from some paid traffic strategies, almost all traffic generation starts off with keyword research. So, keyword research is important and it’s a mandatory skill you must learn. Over the years I’ve become sort of a master, so I decided to put together a short list of around 7 major keyword research tips. Cutting the crap short, here’s the list:
In this guide
1. 500 Searches Minimum
This is a rule I came up with after literally spending thousands of dollars on content creation. Having content created solely for the purpose of ranking for a certain keyword. Back then, I was doing really well with my free marketing strategies. I was only using content marketing.
I was writing articles that targeted keywords in my niche, publishing them on my blog, and doing a load of link building. The blog posts then ranked on Google and brought in a little traffic. I experimented with different search volumes and found that any keyword with less than 500 monthly searches was a waste of time.
I’m talking about internal pages here. For either blog posts or pages. With 500 searches a month, I generally bring in 300 monthly visitors. Sixty percent of which come from the targeted keyword and then 40% from random long tail stuff. I’m talking generally here. Those averages are from hundreds of submitted articles that are all over the place.
If you’re doing keyword research for your blog or site’s home page, I’d go after keywords with no less than 2000 searches a month. It’s your home page; you can only fit x amount of keywords into your title and description. You need to be really picky. Really, I’d go no less than 2000 searches a month for your home page keywords. And… no less than 500 searches a month for your internal pages/posts.
2. Top 3 Or Nothing
You absolutely must be able to rank top 3 for a keyword. If you can’t rank top 3, then there’s no point in going after it. There just isn’t any point as all the traffic goes to the top 3 ranking sites. Here’s a chart of the average click distributions on Google. I know it’s outdated and all, but I’m sure the data is still relevant.
As you can see, the majority of all users click on the top 3 results. After seeing that data for the first time, I came to the conclusion that… if you can’t rank top 3 for a keyword, there’s no point in targeting it at all. The funny thing is that 95% of marketers go after the same keywords. They go after the keywords where there’s A LOT of traffic. I’d say around 90%+ of marketers go after the top 10% of keywords in any given niche.
Clearly, you’d be a lot better off going after the other 90% of keywords with less traffic. Seriously, you don’t actually have to compete with everyone. It’s much harder to rank top 3 for a keyword with 30,000 searches a month than it is to rank top 3 for 10 keywords with 3000 searches a month. Generally speaking of course, so the logical option is to go where there’s less competition. Think about it… It would probably take you twice as much effort to rank #10 for a keyword that gets 10,000 searches a month than it would to rank #1 for a keyword with 2000 searches a month.
So… at #10 you’d only receive around 3% of the traffic meaning 300 monthly visitors compared to 1000 being #1 for the smaller keyword.
3. Exact Match Domains
Exact match domains are great indicators of low competition keywords. They are sites with an exact keyword in the domain. So if you’re trying to rank for “bone density scanner” the exact match domain would be www.bonedensityscanner.com/.net/org or any other extension. For some unknown reason, exact match domains rank extremely well in the search engines. If you have an exact keyword in your domain, you will automatically rank for it.
Generally, if you buy an exact match domain, slap up 1 page of content and build a few backlinks… you’ll be on page 1 within a week. So, if any exact match domains are ranking page 1 with few inbound links, it’s a sign of low competition.
4. Look For Authority Sites
Crazy aren’t I? Well, I mean article directories and web2.0 sites. You know… sites like EzineArticles, ArticleBase, Hubpages, Squidoo, WordPress and all of those. They are all gigantic sites that hold insane authority in the eyes of Google. So… they rank really well and if you come across one… the chances are that it’s ranking where it is solely from on-page SEO and the site’s authority.
As those Page Rank 6-8 sites only have to add a keyword on-page to rank for it. They don’t even have to build any backlinks to the URL because the root domain is so damn powerful. So if you see a bunch of article directories or web2.0 sites ranking on page 1 of Google with little to no backlinks, it practically shouts out low competition.
5. Don’t Look For Authority Sites
Yep, I know I’m totally contradicting what I just said. The thing is, there are two types of authority sites. Maybe 3, but two in this scenario. There are niche-specific authority sites and generic authority sites. Generic authority sites are the ones I talked about in tip #4. Authority sites with mad ranking power, but they’re totally generic and cover every niche in the world. Those kinds of sites are quite easily outranked.
Then there are niche-specific authority sites which are authority sites that specialize in a particular niche. Like my site here, is an authority site in the Network Marketing niche. Niche-specific sites are sites that target hundreds of keywords in one niche, are very old, and have high Page Rank. You should avoid them like the plague!
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Start free →6. Look For New Sites
As I previously talked about, sites gain authority over time. Newly registered domains suck and are easily outranked. It’s not the case 100% of the time. As you can outrank ancient sites with a brand new domain and lots of backlinks. Link building wins the game every time, but this other stuff is crucial. New sites (1 year old or less) ranking on page 1 is a good sign.
It typically means you can rank very quickly with aggressive link building. I know this doesn’t apply to every keyword, more so to the highly competitive terms. Terms like weight loss, Internet Marketing, make money online and all of those gold mines. The front 2 pages are chocker block with aged and high Page Rank sites that have been actively building links for years.
7. Look For Stagnant Websites
By stagnant, I mean sites that have been sitting on the first page of Google for years without actively building links. A lot of the time, the majority of sites ranking on page 1 have been sitting there for months or years. Most marketers and webmasters will only build links until they reach page 1.
The ambitious guys will continue to build links till they hit #1 and maybe continue for a few months. They figure they just need to “lock in” their position. When really, as soon as they stop link building, they leave several doors open for other marketers to come and knock them off.
How do you find stagnant sites? It can be tough, but after a while, you’ll be able to easily identify stagnant sites. The easiest way to do it is by checking out a site’s backlinks. You can do this by going to Backlink Watch (Works, checked as of 2024). On Backlink Watch you can enter a URL and get a full list of its backlinks. Just check some of them out and look at the dates they were created on. The other option takes a little longer.
Just run a check on the number of links to the URL, note down how many and check a week later. If the number hasn’t gone up, then it’s probably stagnant.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. If you’d like to learn exactly how I do keyword research and completely dominate the search engines, put your name and email in the form below.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Eric Kalberer, September 14 2011, 00:02
Thanks for the pointers on keyword research. I know I have a problem with spending more time on researching a keyword than I do producing content. The guidelines you laid out will definitely help me speed up that process. Thanks.
PJ, September 14 2011, 12:28
Awesome post man! Great tips and insights on SEO. I’m still kind of new with that and your post really helped out. Thanks a lot for that!
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Tip 4 says chase authority sites, tip 5 says avoid them, and neither gets reconciled into an actual test you could run. Which is a bit like running a bike shop where I tell one customer disc brakes are essential and the next that rim brakes are underrated — both true in the right context, useless as advice unless I say which context. If anyone’s actually distinguished niche-authority from generic-authority in practice rather than just squinting at Page Rank, I’m curious how.
The ‘top 3 or nothing’ rule is dangerous for someone like me. Give me permission to discard a keyword and I’ll spend three weeks discarding keywords instead of writing anything, because there’s always one more search tool to check before I’ve truly ruled it out. I’ve got four unfinished projects that all died somewhere in the research phase, none of them because the keyword was actually wrong, all of them because I never let myself finish deciding.
Worth flagging: the exact-match-domain advantage in tip 3 was real before 2012, but Google’s own algorithm update that year specifically targeted low-quality exact-match domains, so treating an EMD as an automatic low-competition signal today would be out of date. Past that, Davey, the useful bit of tip 2 for you might be to set a numeric cutoff on the research time itself, not just on the keyword.
The 500-and-2000 thresholds are useful, but the real bottleneck for a lot of people isn’t the number, it’s how long they spend deciding whether a keyword clears it. Try timeboxing it — twenty minutes per keyword, decision made at the buzzer, no revisiting once you’ve started writing. If you’re still weighing it at minute twenty you don’t have a keyword problem, you have a decision problem dressed up as research. I’ve watched clients treat ‘is this the right keyword’ as a stand-in for ‘am I ready to be judged on this piece,’ which no amount of search volume data will resolve. What’s the longest you’ve actually spent deciding on one single keyword before writing a word of the post?
That’s exactly what Davey described further up — four projects dead in research. Worth trying before he starts a fifth.
What gets missed when people roll their eyes at ‘500 searches minimum’ is that it’s useful precisely because it’s a threshold, not a philosophy. Pick a number, stop relitigating every keyword individually, get on with writing the thing.
Fair point about a threshold beating a philosophy — we used to gate territory decisions on a minimum population number for the same reason, arguing vibes every time gets expensive fast. Where I’d push back a little: the 2000-searches-for-a-homepage number assumes you already know your niche’s total search volume, and a lot of people setting up their first site don’t have that context yet to judge whether 2000 is generous or scarce for them.
Probably a dumb question, but is that 500 searches total, or only the ones actually likely to buy something?
Bonnie’s question points at something bigger too — the whole tip assumes the goal is capturing buyer-intent traffic. If you’re building an audience through writing rather than funneling to an offer, a smaller, less commercial keyword with genuinely interested readers can be worth more than a bigger one full of people who bounce in ten seconds.