Would you like to have an endless stampede of customers to your business? Well then let’s talk traffic. One technique I’ve used to get 152,104 targeted visitors to this website in only 9 months is article marketing.
Basically, I create specially crafted articles that show up first in Google for specific keywords. But when I first started using this technique I was actually targeting the wrong words, so let’s take a look at the 3-step process you can use to literally uncover an avalanche of qualified leads.
Buyers Vs. Browsers, and which one you want
Let’s assume we’re running a website to generate income. Once we’ve got something to sell, we need potential customers to sell it to, right? Well what kind of customer do we want? We want people who are interested in buying what we are selling, not simply consuming what we have and moving on. In other words, we want people who are in the buyers mindset, not the browsers mindset.
For example, someone may type on Facebook “I need to exercise more”. This is a person in the passive “browsers” state.
But later on they may go onto Google and type “Home exercise routines”. At that point, they are in the more active “buyers” state, and this is when you want to pop up on their radar. It would be really useful to that person if we had some information outlining a good home exercise routine, EVEN if it suggested something for sale, right?
Well, to even get in front of that online prospect you first need to master how to research the keywords these “buyers” are typing, and once you have an idea of what people are looking for you can position your content to rank for those terms.
It’s worth noting I typically outsource this process but I’ll include each step in the process so you can get a good idea of how it works.
Step 1: How To research your keyword traffic
The goal when researching keyword traffic is to find words that will bring in enough traffic to make an SEO campaign worth your time, but not so much traffic that there is a lot of competition for it. I find words with between 2,000-5,000 monthly EXACT searches are a good rule of thumb.
To do keyword research itself, I use Google’s free keyword research tool, which you can get here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
It’s actually meant for paid search research (adwords) but it works just fine for researching for free (organic) search as well.
Also, make sure “exact” is checked under “match types” on the left.
Using this tool and performing multiple queries, I’ll record a list of 15-30 keywords that fit the above criteria, that I believe will result in “buyers” traffic. For example, the phrase “buy exercise course” is much more desirable than “free online exercise course”.
Step 2: Research The Keyword History
Search history for the keyword "Tour De France"
Consider variables around your keyword by looking at the performance history. For example, is your keyword phrase a seasonal one such as “Tour De France” or “Summer Dresses”, or is it one that can be used year round.
You can easily learn how your keyword has performed in search in the past by using another free tool provided by Google, Insights.
Access Insights at: www.google.com/insights/search/
Step 3: Research The SEO Competition
When I’m doing article marketing I only care about showing up in the first 3 places in Google, and with good reason; 42.13% of visitors click on the #1 result in search…
Isn’t that crazy? 11.90% click on #2 and 8.5% on #3. This reduces in increments all the way down to only 2.85% clicking on #9.
The difference can be as dramatic as having 1,000,000 clicks on #1 and only 28,000 on #9.
But even jumping from #9 to #3 can TRIPLE your traffic (a 298% increase).
So I want to make sure that whatever words I’m writing an article for, that I have a good chance of ranking that article in the top 3 places. To do this, I need to know the strengths and weaknesses of the pages currently in these spots. Fortunately, this is trivally simple using Market Samurai.
I simply enter my keywords and Market Samurai returns a report on the top 10 results, and analyzes on and off page ranking factors (the only important factors in ranking an article).
It even color codes the results, so you can tell at a glance whether your looking at a lot of competition (red highlights) or an easy keyword that you can take over (green highlights).
Check out a free trial of Market Samurai here.
And that’s all there is to it. Once keyword research is done, it’s time to write your articles and optimize the page for SEO. I’m in the process of creating a course that details this process step-by-step and will post more info on this shortly.
In the meantime, leave a comment below and let me know if this outline was helpful. Also, how could you use this process to identify profitable keywords in your target niche?
I’m always looking for more information on keyword research and seo. Thanks Shaun.
Glad it was useful to ya Michael, thanks for stopping by.
Great post Shaun, thanks for the detailed explanation on profitable keyword research.
I’m glad it was helpful Tyronne.