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A Simple Keyword Research Approach For Small Businesses

Posted in: Keyword Research by Kuzzuk on June 16, 2010

A very simple 3-step approach for keyword research for small businesses.

1. Find Relevant Keywords: Do not think like a business, instead, think like your prospects. What’s in their mind when they are searching? Make a list. Get Google’s help and widen the list.
2. Adequate Search Volume: It is great to compile a list of relevant keywords but are those keywords being searched? What is the ideal keyword volume? In my opinion, for a local business anything above 1,000 in monthly search volume is a good keyword to target.
3. Keyword Competition: Now that you have a list of relevant keywords with adequate search volume, it is time to assess how easy or difficult it will be to rank on the first page for these keywords. Do an exact phrase search for your keywords along with “allintitle” and “allinanchor” searches and analyze the results on the first page to ascertain the competition. It sounds difficult but it is actually pretty easy in reality.

That’s it, do click on the links above to see details on keyword relevance, search volume and keyword difficulty. If you have any feedback or questions then please do leave a comment below.

The Art Of Assessing Keyword Difficulty

Posted in: Keyword Research by Kuzzuk on May 26, 2010

After finding relevant keywords and deciding on an ideal monthly search volume now is the time to determine keyword difficulty. In other words, how competitive is the keyword. In this post, I’m going to share my formula of assessing keyword difficulty where I look at four factors.

1. Exact Phrase Search Results

Open up Google and type in exact search phrase by enclosing it within double quotes. Taking the Singapore plumbers example further, type in “Singapore plumbers” and take note of the number of results returned (highlighted in red).

Exact Phrase Search Results for Singapore plumbers

This gives a broad idea of the level of competition. In my experience, anything less than 5,000 competing websites is manageable competition. For our example, there are 601 competing websites which means there is a good chance of appearing on the first page of Google.

2. allintitle Phrase Search Results

Again, in Google type in allintitle:“Singapore plumbers” (highlighted in red). The number of results returned this time is the number of pages that have the keyword in their page title (highlighted in yellow). Then take note of the number of results returned.

AllInTitle Search Results

This gives a broad idea of the level of somewhat serious competition who know basic SEO. For our example, there are only 116 competing websites and pages so the level of competition is pretty low.

3. allinanchor Phrase Search Results

Open up Google and type in allinanchor:“Singapore plumbers” and take note of the number of results returned (highlighted in red).

AllInAnchor Search Results

The number of results returned this time is the one of all the pages which are linked to by backlinks with the keyword “Singapore plumbers” in their anchor text. This is serious competition but a number like 585 would not be too competitive.

4. Analyze The First Page Results

Apart from the numbers discussed above, we are most interested in getting our website or page on the first page of Google so examining the first page results for the keyword is important. Look for the following:

• Forums or Classifieds: If there are forum or classifieds pages high on the first page of the results then it is good news as it is relatively easy to outrank them.
• Authority Sites: Pages from authority sites like Wikipedia are hard to outrank.
• High Page Rank: Also sites or pages with page rank of 4 or more are difficult to outrank. Download the Google Toolbar to check page ranks.

There you have it, the four factors that determine keyword difficulty and competition. As always, leave a comment if you have questions or additional comments.

Finding The Ideal Monthly Search Volume That Fits Your Business

Posted in: Keyword Research by Kuzzuk on May 25, 2010

The topic of the previous blog post was how to find relevant keywords but relevant keywords without the ideal search volume is not of much use. If the search volume is too high then the competition is likely to be intense making it difficult to appear on the first page of search results. On the flipside, if the search volume is too low then you are unlikely to get enough visitors that turn into prospects and clients.

So what is the ideal monthly search volume?

Good question but there in no straightforward answer as it depends on the type of business among other factors. In my opinion, for a local business anything above 1,000 in monthly search volume is a good keyword to target. Let’s take the example of the Singapore plumber (from the previous article) further where the terms ‘plumber’ and ‘plumbers’ got approximately 6,600 and 1,300 monthly local searches in Singapore. This makes both the keywords ideal candidates to be short-listed provided the competition is not very high. I’ll cover competition in the next post.

Google Keyword Tool Settings

Breaking Down The Numbers

Let’s just consider the term ‘plumbers’ which had 1,300 local searches. Research from Enquiro shows that 75% of searchers click the organic listings (as opposed to paid links on Google) which means about 975 clicks for organic results.

A related research from iProspect shows that the number 1 listing for any search query gets roughly 42% of the traffic and the first page captures over 89% of traffic for any given search term. The numbers are quite straightforward:

Total Monthly Searches = 1,300 approximately
Organic Search Clicks = 975 approximately
First Page Results Clicks = 870 approximately
Number One Listing Clicks = 365 approximately

Note: The number of clicks between number 2 and number 10 of the search results page will not be evenly distributed. The higher ranked pages will obviously get more clicks.

You can work out roughly what kind of traffic you’ll be getting for a particular term based on the search volume as well as your ranking. Let’s say you rank number 1 for the term ‘plumbers’ in Singapore which translates into 365 visits to your website. If your average rate of visitor to lead conversion is 10% then you will be getting about 36 leads per month from this search term alone.

This is one way you can choose which keywords to target based on monthly search volume. Next up, I’ll write about keyword competition. As always, please leave a comment if you have questions or additional comments.

How To Find Relevant Keywords For Your Website

Posted in: Keyword Research by Kuzzuk on May 20, 2010

Importance of keyword research in web design

Most small business ignore keyword research as an integral part of web design and development when it should be the most important thing to do to ensure your website’s success. There are a number of reasons why keyword research is ignored. First, the small businesses owners are not even aware of keyword research. Second, the web designer is equally clueless. Third, there is a misconception that keyword research is hard. After all, its got the word research in it! Nothing could be further from the truth.

In this post, I will show you how to find relevant keywords in 3 easy steps.

1. Think Like Your Prospect

Pick the most relevant keywords so think from your clients’ perspective. What keywords are likely to be typed into Google by your prospect? Identify many different variations. Let’s pretend that you provide plumbing services in Singapore. So what would be relevant keywords for you? List them out.

Plumber
Singapore plumber
Plumber in Singapore
Handyman
Singapore handyman
Handyman in Singapore

2. Get Google’s Help

Next head over to the Google Adwords: Keyword Tool and change the language and country option (highlighted in green). In this example, I have changed it to English and Singapore. Then add one or more keywords and make sure the “Use synonyms” box is checked (highlighted in blue). I have just added “plumber” to discover more relevant keywords. Lastly, enter the CAPTCHA image and click the “Get keyword ideas” button.

Google Keyword Tool Settings

Now click on the “Local Search Volume” column header (highlighted in red) so that results are sorted based on keyword volume locally in Singapore. You can also see how competitive a particular keyword is (highlighted in blue) and an option to add the keywords to a list that you can export to CSV file (highlighted in green).

Google Keyword Tool Results

3. Collect Relevant Keywords

Click the “Add” link for all the relevant keywords and a list of relevant keywords will be added to the “Selected Keywords” panel on the right (see image below). After adding all the relevant keywords, you can export the keyword list in “text”, “.csv (for excel)” or “.csv” formats (highlighted in red).

Google Selected Keywords For Export

There you have it. An easy way to find relevant keywords for your website. Please leave a comment if you have questions or additional tips.

Mark Ling Of Affilorama Webinar Lessons

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on May 5, 2009

Who Is Mark Ling and What Is Affilorama?

Mark Ling from Affilorama is a well-respected affiliate marketer from New Zealand who recently opened up doors for his AffiloBlueprint Training. In conjunction to the launch, he taught a webinar hosted wonderfully by Reena Shohet at Associate Programs (who are giving away 7 valuable bonuses) which had great takeaways for affiliate marketers.

Mark’s affiliate marketing adventures started in 1999 when his friend Charlie put up a website on GeoCities. This lead to Charlie putting up an affiliate link for a dating site and earning commissions for about US$50 per month. This prompted Mark to ask the question, “How do I link up people with products and earn commissions?” and like they say the rest is history.

Mark is based in New Zealand which shows time and time again that you can be successful on the Internet even from outside of the US as location generally has no impact on online business. What’s inspirational about Mark is that he started out small (like the most of us) and had a student loan to pay. He juggled his Internet business with a part-time job at Pizza Hut. His early success came from free search engines and for the first 4 years online, he did not but any products by gurus for making money online. He had a simple formula that worked and he simply rinsed and repeated it.

Affilorama is a training and community site for affiliate marketers founded in 2006 by Mark Ling. It has two tier membership (basic and premium – I’m a basic member) with lots of video lessons, interviews, tools, blog and a forum.

Starting Out With Affiliate Marketing

A question was asked about what is the bare minimum required when starting out on a shoestring budget? Mark’s recommendation was:

1. Website hosting account: I’m glad Mark is not like one of those gurus who state that you can make bucketloads of money without a website. He prefers Hostgator but for me personally, I prefer BlueHost.
2. Domain name registrations: Mark prefers GoDaddy (all my domains are registered via GoDaddy) but lately I have found NameCheap to be quite good as well.
3. Optional: Mark said that other than your own domain and a web host, all other things are optional. However, outsourcing work like article writing and link building can definitely accelerate the process. A view I concur with.

Newbie Mistakes In Affiliate Marketing?

Another great question that was posed was what mistakes newbies make in affiliate marketing. Mark’s views were as follows:

1. Monetization: Newbies often do not monetize their pages, they don’t put in their affiliate links. Giving an example of his website, www.wowblackbook.com, Mark encouraged newbies to put in their affiliate links above the fold, have an call to action in the graphic instead of just a plain graphic and put in affiliate links at the bottom of the page.
2. Keyword Research: Mark said newbies do not tend to think closely about the search terms. for instance, a lot of people just go wholesale with their PLR articles instead of tweaking it and using the proper keywords.

The second point of Mark’s response brought in another relevant question “How does Mark research his markets?”. This was the part I was waiting for eagerly.

Mark Ling’s Market Research Methodology For A Profitable Niche

I found this part the most valuable where Mark candidly shared how he does market research to find profitable niches.

1. Mark goes to the ClickBank Marketplace and searches for a particular keyword or clicks on any category to see what is hot within that category.
2. He then looks at the ‘gravity’ which is a measure of how many separate affiliates made a sale of that product in the last week. He believes there is more to the formula for gravity than that and thinks that it also takes into account sales from other weeks but on a weighted scale. Mark says that a gravity over 30 can be a profitable niche.
3. He then tries to find at least 5 products within or outside of ClickBank for that niche as he believes in promoting more than one product.
4. Mark usually stays away from promoting dodgy products and services like ‘paid surveys’, ‘downloading DVDs from the Internet’ which are not only unethical but do not provide a base for a sustainable business.

This brought in a question of how someone can have their own product listed on ClickBank. Mark’s advice was to meet all of ClickBank’s requirements and submit it for approval. This was kind of obvious but he followed it up with a great tip that you have to actively promote your own product to push up the gravity and ensure that it becomes successful.

Affilorama And Mark Ling’s Approach To Keyword Research

1. Forum Research: Mark suggested that forums are a very valuable tool to find out what kind of keywords your potential buyers are using.
2. Create article topics based on the keywords found on the forum.
3. Use Traffic Travis (a free tool from Affilorama) to build a giant list of keywords, sort the keywords by search volume, remove duplicates, filter and categorize the search terms and save it as a set.
4. Pay attention to needs based keywords rather than want based keywords. Mark refers needs based keywords as crisis keywords.
5. Additionally, Mark also uses the Google keyword tool.
6. Product name review type search is an absolute needs based keyword. It is vital to focus on these type of keywords even if the keyword research tool shows low volume because the leads convert well.

How To Achieve High Search Engine Rankings?

To achieve high search engine rankings, Mark’s lesson was to focus on the following:

1. Onpage search optimization which he reckons weighs in about 20% for search engine rankings. He suggests paying attention to the following:
   • Title optimization
   • H1 tag
   • the keywords at least once in the first 50 words
   • Go for about 1% keyword density which can be checked from within Traffic Travis
2. Off page factors account for the remaining 80% for search engine rankings especially the links and anchor tags.
3. Get links but do not make it look unnatural. For instance, do not have the same anchor tags for all incoming links.
4. Submit to article websites like ezinearticles
5. Use the affordable services of www.submitedge.com
6. Use www.amautomation.com (which is a network of blogs). This allows you to reword articles and have up to 3 links. However, this method of link building seems potentially gray hat

PPC Versus Search Engines

Mark recommends using PPC or Pay Per Click advertising once the money starts rolling in because it is virtually impossible to rank for all different variations of search. Additionally, it is another way to generate traffic into the website. However, with PPC Mark recommends keeping the following pointers in mind.

• For PPC landing pages do not use menu bars as it distracts the user into clicking other parts of the site.
• Use a noindex nofollow tag for PPC landing pages so that Google doesn’t penalize you for duplicate content.
• Add links at the bottom of the page to other parts of your website so Google does not think that this is a one page website. This generally improves the Google quality score which means paying less for the clicks.
• For starters have 3 product name adgroups + 3 buyer adgroups (crisis or needs based keyword adgroups)
• Start with product name per click bid at $1 or needs based keyword bid at $0.60 to improve click through
• Reduce the bids about 20% for every 30 clicks until positions 4 or 5 is reached. Assess profitability only after 300 clicks

Email Marketing Tips

Last but not least, do not ignore capturing email addresses of prospects. Mark uses AWeber for email autoresponders and has about 2 million subscribers in his various lists. He usually gives a free 6 part mini course in exchange of an email address and uses what he calls a day 7 trick to give a free report if the user purchases the product.

In my opinion, AffiloBlueprint is really great for beginners and do checkout the bonuses they are giving. Also worth checking out is the Affilorama training portal and their keyword research tool, Traffic Travis.