Keyword Research - How to Do it?

Keyword Research is an important and critical element for anyone looking to create content for monetization. A poorly carried out research can ruin your efforts since SEO for any content take minimum couple of months to rank in a search engine. Thus when starting a blog and creating content  on internet ensure that you are aware of your competition for that particular space. Spend more time on research to ensure that your SEO efforts are not wasted. I will be giving away 10 potential keywords at the end of this article which have low to medium competition based on the top 10 search results in Google first Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

I start Keyword Research by brainstorming myself with what I look for when I go to Google or what people type in the search box of Google. When looking to make money blogging this is a critical element as we want to ensure that people are searching for the keyword or topic we are blogging about.

We will be using Google Keyword Planner provided by Google under Google Adwords to carry out our Keyword Research. The requisite to use the above tool is a Google or Gmail Account and knowledge of How to use Google Keyword Planner Tool.

Before going to Google Keyword Planner available in Google Adwords under Tools option, we will shortlist some Basic keywords which people search for in Google. These basic keywords will form our strategy to target Long Tail Keywords around them. We will take a approach as suggested by Spencer Haws of Nichepursuits.com to finalize long tail keywords to make money online.

I will choose 10 random basic keywords to start my hunt for Long Tail Profitable Keywords. In order to find these basic keywords, I look at Product Categories at Amazon.com or the local version of Amazon in your country, Classified Sites and at my own searches for doing keyword research.

Basic Keywords : My Search Filter in Adwords is set to World

1.       Learn French Online (Selected from my own search)

2.       Office Exercises (My own search)

3.       Commercial lighting (Amazon Categories)

4.       Mountain Khakis (Amazon Categories)

5.       Yoga Clothing (Amazon Categories)

6.       Mechanical Pencils (Amazon Categories)

7.       Lab Safety Supply (Amazon Categories)

8.       Dinnerware Sets (Amazon Categories)

9.       Bluetooth Headphones (Classifieds)

10.       Recliner Chairs (Classifieds)

As you can see majority of the above keywords I have picked are from Amazon. While short listing them I kept on looking at the Keyword Research tool available at Google Adwords to ensure that we have good number of searches for all them.

Analyzing Keyword Competition:

Based on the number of keywords you start with I prefer to choose 30% of them after analyzing the competition. To analyze the competition I use the Free Moz Google Chrome tool bar provided by Moz.com. They have defined two metrics called Page Authority and Domain Authority to define ranking of a page in Google. Page Authority and Domain Authority are calculated on a logarithmic scale of 100 based on the quality, domain age and backlinks of a page. We look at these parameters to understand where our competition stands. While these basic keywords are at the rot, we use them to identify long tail keywords by looking at the suggestions by keyword research tool of Google adwords and also from Google Search results.

Top 10 Google Search Engine Results Page

Let’s start with the first keyword “Learn French Online” ,it has 22200 global monthly searches on Google and following is the search results page. Go through the top 10 search results.

Keyword Research

 This keyword is pretty competitive as the average page authority and domain authority of most of the pages on the first page is above 45. We are comfortable with a page authority of around 35 to 40. A Page Authority figure of 35 to 40 can be beaten with relevance, quality of the information and quality backlinks. Now look at the suggestions in the keyword research tool and Google Suggestions for search at the bottom of the search results page, as shown below.

Long Tail Keywords Research

Searches related to our keyword provide very good insights into what else people are searching for. After going through all the related keywords a keyword which we can shortlist is “learn french by podcast” with 2900 searches worldwide every month. The average page authority of search results pages for this keyword is around 40 (which is on the upper side). This can be called a medium competition keyword.

Following a similar approach on all the other keywords we have shortlisted the following long tail keywords. The idea is to have a minimum search criteria to put them down here with perception of low competition on Page Authority(PA) and Domain Authority(DA) on Moz Toolbar. I have taken 2500 minimum searches per month as the benchmark. On the PA front, I have shortlisted keywords which have a search result pages PA<35.

So in short follow these steps:

1.       Average Searches Per Month > 2500

2.       PA of pages on the first page of Google should be less than 35

3.       Avoid Keywords which have .gov or .edu sites on the first page

4.       Analyze the Title of the top 10 results to see if Keywords are present in same order

5.       Look at the age of your competition

(Note: Search count is global)

Root Keyword	Long Tail Keyword – Google Searches Per Month
Learn French Online	learn french by podcast - 2900
Office Exercises	used exercise equipment – 4400
Commercial lighting	bathroom ceiling lights-4400
Mountain Khakis	khaki skinny jeans-4400
Yoga Clothing	white yoga pants-4400
Mechanical Pencils	best mechanical pencil-4400
Lab Safety Supply	No Suitable Keyword Found
Dinnerware Sets	dining furniture-8100
Bluetooth Headphones	wireless tv headphones-8100
Recliner Chairs	zero gravity recliner-2900

All the above keywords offer great opportunity to make niche websites based on related products and earn a three figure affiliate income in US Dollars.

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What are Long Tail keywords?

As mentioned in my previous post on How to choose topics for blogging to Earn Money Online, I have explained the importance of Keyword Research and why you should focus on it if you are looking to make money through blogging.

Keyword Research starts as soon as you land on a Search Engine Box and start typing. Long Tail keywords, in simple terms are keywords which are longer in length. So let's say an internet user is looking for information about How to make money online, and then he will go to Google and type any one of the below

"Make Money Online"

or

"How to make money online"

or

"how to make money online with blogging"

Or you would choose one of the Google Instant Search suggestions and click on it. What we are seeing here is Google is learning to become more Human in it approach to provide best possible search results to any user. This is where our "Gold Mine" lies. In its effort to match and suggest user with best search results Google is working hard on its search algorithm to ensure that results which exactly match the search query entered by a user is shown among the search results.

Thus if we focus on answering queries and finding keywords which are exactly matching the user types search query then we are likely to rank better in Google Search Results Page.

Google Exact Matched Search Query Results is an Opportunity

Google in its effort to offer right solution in the form of right search results pages with the matching content is an opportunity in disguise to first time bloggers. The approach which I thus to do keyword research for finding profitable Long Tail Keywords is

1. Write down your Domain Experience

2. Analyse what you have searched for in the past

3. Introspect the sites which you visit

Keyword Research in Domain Experience:

If you have a field which you are domain expert of, then that is where you should start your keyword research. Identify questions related to your domain and head to adwords to identify the keywords which people are searching for. Look for long tail keywords which are combination of 3 words or more with minimum searches of 5000+ per month to add to your category for blogging. 

Analyse your Searches:

While it’s always easier to study your own searches to start the hunt for long tail keywords. What we should understand is that we as humans have tendency of searching for information online at a periodical interval of time. These triggers to search for information are sometimes due to an event like sports, political leader, an actor or an exam which takes place every year. As a result of these triggers and our quest to learn and gather information we get huge amount of searches every day, the figure of which stands at 3 billion per day only on Google, that's 3 with nine zeros behind it. 

Observe the Sites you visit:

There are always opportunities right in front of us whenever we are surfing the net. There are sites which help us find and get the desired information which we are looking for. On the other there are sites which give us incomplete/inaccurate/incorrect information and we are still not able to find answer to our query. Finding information about this query is necessary for us and we eventually tap offline/traditional channels to find the answer. This represents an opportunity to us when online information about a topic which we are looking for does not exist in the form which helps people to achieve their objective.

There are tools like the Organic Keywords Report tool provided by 99webtools.com for free which enables us to conduct our keyword research for a site which we are visiting.

In continuation of this post I will cover how I carry out Keyword Research for Long Tail Profitable Keywords in my next post.

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How to Choose topics for blogging to Earn Money Online?

How to Choose topics for blogging to Earn Money Online?

So, you have planned to take the plunge into the blogging field and you want to find out how you can make living out of blogging. While this topic has been covered a lot of times, the matter of fact is that we always have to figure out something new when start blogging for any topic to ensure that it actually makes good money to pay our bills.

So these are the steps I follow when looking out for blogging opportunities out there.

1. Keyword Research

2. More Keyword Research

3. Even More Keyword Research

What is Keyword Research? 

Whenever you want to start blogging you should know what people search for when they come online and this is very important because you do not want to writing about topics which cannot get you organic traffic because the fact on making earning money through blogging is that 90% of the traffic coming to your website will come through searches on Search Engines. Once you have got good traffic, you are all set to make money online.

Keyword Research is again of importance since you writing about topics where there is decent number of searches per month with low keyword competition is an ideal way to get your site good traffic online. I define 5000 monthly searches for one keyword as a good figure to write about a topic.

Keyword Research Tools:

There are multiple tools available online and also provided online by Google which enable you to launch your blog. The most reliable among them is the Google Keyword Research Tool available in the keyword Planner section of Google Adwords. Keyword Research can be done using the following tools:

Google Adwords : You can use your Gmail account login to start using the tools right away. Go to 

http://adwords.google.com and login with your Google Account login. Fill in the necessary details. Once the initial details are filled in, go to Tools -> Keyword Planner available in the top menu. Enter the keyword in the "Search for new keyword and ad group ideas" box and the click search. You can enter multiple keywords at a time by pressing enter. Once you have entered the desired keyword, go to the bottom and click "Get Ideas". After the results are displayed, click on Keyword Ideas to see the number of searches for keywords entered. Also have a look at the keyword relevance section to get more keyword ideas. You can arrange the results in the order of number of searches to get a better sense of which keywords to write for.

Which keywords to avoid?

As the search engine world has progressed and bloggers target traffic for keywords the searches are evolving and getting more specific. So for example you might find a keyword such as "Real Estate" with 2,000,000 monthly searches attractive. 

Also keywords such as 

"Car Insurance" - 800,000 monthly searches, "Stock Market" -600,000 monthly searches will give you dreams of big bucks you can make by targeting them and let me tell you if you get one the first page of Google for these keywords you will make 5 figure sum in Us Dollars pretty easily, but it’s not the right way to start your blogging career. These keywords have been identified as an opportunity when the world went online and there billions of web pages competing with each other for the first page spot on Google and other Search Engines. They have tons of backlinks which require that you setup a team of SEO Professionals to get your site somewhere near the first page. This would mean huge investments and it certainly isn't worth it until you are in the business of providing above services.

This is where the concept of Long tail keywords comes in, I will covering another article on What are Long Tail Keywords. 

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