Using SEO Keyword Research To Dominate Page 1 Rankings
Look. SEO keyword research is where any successful online marketing strategy begins.
With the right keywords, you can create content around those subjects and begin ranking on page 1 of Google.
Without knowing what keywords to target, you’ll be writing content that drives zero traffic to your site.
You’ll waste an extraordinary amount of time, then believe SEO doesn’t work and throw in the towel.
Trust me, after driving millions of views, I know for a fact that content marketing works in driving traffic, leads, and sales. And I also know that SEO ROI is rather easy when you know what you’re doing.
Read this guide to clearly understand SEO keyword research, and then put what you know into practice.
The Right Keywords
Growing businesses get more organic traffic than stagnating or declining companies.
Makes sense, right? Thriving businesses get sales from free organic traffic, while their competitors get nothing out of online marketing or are forced to overspend in advertising.
What these growing businesses do differently is not only understand their customers better than their competition, they also have their finger on what keywords their customers search.
In other words, they know the “right keywords” to target for organic search.
A right keyword for your website is one that helps your customers, has a high search volume, and it’s not too difficult to rank on Google’s first page.
Let’s break down the three components you’ll want in every keyword.
1. Helps Your Customers
Remember in the intro when I said keyword research isn’t too complex? Here’s the basis of it: Find keywords that focus on giving value to your audience.
What’s helpful to your audience? Anything that addresses their pain points, needs, and desires.
To get you started, think about:
- What does your ideal customer search to find your company? (Exclude when they search for your company name.)
- What is your niche’s problem? What words do they use to describe their current situation?
- What is your customer’s desired transformation?
- What’s a goal your customer wants to achieve in the next 30 days? In the next 12 months?
- What are the other positive effects your niche receives from buying from you?
Write all of these answers down.
(Now if you don’t know what your potential buyers need, start talking to and researching your customers immediately. Odds are you’re going to be out of business soon, and SEO won’t matter, if you’re out of touch with what your market wants.)
Then, using the list you just created, make content around relieving their pain, assisting their needs, and helping them reach their desires.
For example, I’m in the marketing business. Our customers—business owners—always want more money and time savings. Knowing that, we’ve written blog posts on in-depth topics like 20 unique ways to get backlinks to drive more organic traffic and sales.
Deeply knowing your customer makes you more money, and it helps you create better content too.
Lead by helping prospects and customers, and your bank account will flourish. Call it goodwill, karma, or whatever you want, it makes dollars and cents.
Once you have a general idea of helpful topics for your customers, let’s move onto the second component of a great keyword.
2. High Traffic Volume
Content marketing is a strategic game of chess, not checkers.
The game goes like this: Target keywords with the highest traffic volume at the lowest possible competition, and ignore the other keywords.
How tactical you are in choosing these keywords will determine the amount of inbound traffic your website receives.
If you create content around keywords that have a minimum monthly search volume of 500 or more, you’ll be successful. If you’re doing regional keywords, like “Chicago dentist” or sell higher-ticket items, then you can lower the monthly search volume to 100. Robben Media is going after a few regional keywords at 80 searches per month, though that’s a special circumstance and not our standard.
Without these traffic volume standards, the alternative is this. You write the best guide of all time and get ranked first on Google. Great! But it doesn’t matter because no one searches for this keyword and you send zero traffic to your site.
I’m here to save you from that sad reality.
That’s where keyword research comes in so you can know the monthly search volume, before ever deciding to write and potentially throw your time away.
This training on how to find monthly search volume is coming soon down the page.
For now, there’s a final, third ingredient for picking the best keywords.
3. Realistic Keyword Difficulty
Who do you trust? People who have proven they’re reliable in the past.
I trust my mom because she’s been good to me my entire life. My dog has never bitten me, so I trust putting my face in his face.
Google operates a similar way by ranking websites on their online trustworthiness, which comes in the form of backlinks. A backlink is when one website ranks to another, which Google considers a vote in favor of the website receiving the link.
Here’s an example of how this plays out.
You’re a newer website with 11 backlinks to the page you want to rank, and you’re competing for a heavily competitive keyword with The New York Times, Harvard, and McKinsey.
Why’s it so tough for you to rank for that keyword? Because each of those sites have thousands of backlinks propelling them to the top.
Publish an article way better than these sites, and it won’t matter. Google will give their content all the traffic, since you haven’t established the backlinks required to rank.
To avoid this insurmountable situation, you want to find keywords that are less competitive. A lower keyword difficulty means the content ranking first has room for improvement and there aren’t many backlinks required to rank in the top 10.
Keyword difficulty is the term used to estimate what it takes to rank on Google’s first page— using a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being the most difficult.
The higher the keyword difficulty, the more quality backlinks the top-ranking pages possess.
When you’re doing research, give yourself the best chance to succeed by going after keywords with a realistic difficulty. A good rule of thumb is the following:
- Brand new sites should initially target a keyword difficulty of 20 or lower.
- Sites bringing in organic traffic and have published content for 6-12 months can target keyword difficulty of 40 or lower.
- As you build traffic and backlinks for years, go after keyword difficulty of 50, 75 and higher.
Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, you should prefer keywords that are neither too competitive nor not competitive enough, but have just the right competition.
(P.S. Two sections down, we’ll tell you about a tool that shows keyword difficulty.)
Umbrella Keywords And Long Tail Keywords
One last note.
There are two types of keywords: umbrella keywords and long tail keywords.
An umbrella keyword is a high-level, broad keyword (usually 1-2 words). These are your money-making keywords, but they often have a high keyword difficulty.
Umbrella keywords look like:
- Health insurance
- Rental car
- Catering services
- Mortgage company
Now long tail keywords are much longer in nature (3-4+ word phrases) and often include the umbrella keyword in the phrase.
A company that sells health insurance, for example, would define one of its umbrella keywords as health insurance. The long tail keywords that include the umbrella keyword would look like:
- Most affordable health insurance
- How to get health insurance
- When does health insurance open enrollment begin
- Health insurance for 30 year olds
- Penalty for not having health insurance
It’s a very smart strategy to publish new content for long tail keywords on your site, then link back to your main umbrella keyword page. This way you’re helping yourself rank for a less difficult keyword, while still helping your site rank for the main umbrella keyword.
To see what I mean, the long tail keyword “most affordable health insurance” includes the keyword “health insurance” in it.
You have to love a 2-for-1 special.
How To Perform SEO Keyword Research
Good work so far!
Now, to ensure you have a list of keywords with enough traffic volume that are also reasonable to rank for, follow these exact steps.
Step 1: Make A Keyword Spreadsheet
Benjamin Franklin may as well have been talking about keywords when he said this gem,
For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.
The path to SEO victory isn’t sexy… unless you find data sexy. But the rewards are 1,000,000% worth it. So let’s begin.
First, you need to create an organized spreadsheet to track your keywords.
We’ve done the hard work for you. Copy Robben Media’s keyword spreadsheet following these steps:
- Click here to open our keyword sheet.
- Click File → Make a copy
- Name the file and put it in a folder you’ll remember, then click OK.
This spreadsheet is now the home base of your entire keyword strategy. Keep this open throughout this lesson. We’re going to continue using it to map out a plan.
Step 2: Choose Umbrella Keywords
Remember, an umbrella keyword is your broad, high-level keyword that you supremely want to rank for on Google. These are the keywords that bring in the money.
To find your umbrella keyword, think about:
- What do you sell?
- How do customers describe what you sell? And what would they specifically search on Google to find you and buy?
- What do customers need to know about what you sell?
To pain the picture clearer, some umbrella keywords Robben Media wants to rank for include:
- SEO agency
- PPC agency
- Website design company
The idea behind this is, if a business wants to work with a SEO agency, and we rank for that keyword, then they’ll click to our site, see we’re credible, and schedule a sales call.
Write these 5 umbrella keywords in your spreadsheet on the first tab labeled 1. Umbrella Keywords. Here’s an example of how that would look.
Step 3: Use Ahrefs For Keyword Research
It’s time to call in the big guns.
Ahrefs is the best tool for keyword research. I discovered this software years ago and haven’t gone away from it ever since. (I even mentioned my love for it in this SaaS marketing guide.)
We’re going to use this to finish off our two remaining steps.
Once signed into Ahrefs, you’re going to click Keywords explorer in the menu, then enter your umbrella keywords you found in Step 2.
When I did this exercise, I entered the keywords “SEO agency”, “PPC agency”, and “website design company”. Then click to get results.
On this new page, Ahrefs shows you the Keyword Difficulty and Volume. (The volume is the keyword’s search volume per month in your country.)
Next, you’ll want to click on each keyword listed. Here’s what appears when I click on “website design company”.
With all this data loaded, scroll down to the section Keyword ideas by search volume > Having same terms, then click View all.
In my case, this will show me 2,119 different keywords related to our umbrella keyword. Insane, right!?
Once you’re at the screen below with the massive list of keywords, you’re ready to move onto Step 4.
(Now if you don’t have an account, here’s what I recommend. Sign up for Ahref’s 7-day trial for $7, and then compile 100 to 200 solid keywords until the trial ends in a week. Rack up enough keywords on in your spreadsheet before the trial expires and you won’t need to pay for the monthly subscription. If paying a little more than $100 a month isn’t a big deal, sign up for the basic monthly package.)
Step 4: Select Your Long Tail Keywords
With this massive keyword list in front of you, you may be overwhelmed. It’s time to filter out the keywords that don’t match our three requirements:
- Helpful to customers
- Volume over 500 (go down to a volume of 100 or lower if it’s a regional keyword like “Chicago dentist”)
- Reasonable keyword difficulty (lower the standard if it’s a regional keyword)
How you filter this giant list is by clicking the down arrow next to KD (signaling Keyword Difficulty) and the down arrow next to Volume.
In this case, let’s assume you have a new site. You’re going to follow our guidelines that new sites go after keywords with a difficulty of 20 or lower. Enter 20 in the max form and click Apply.
Then if you’re still overwhelmed by the keyword list, set a volume minimum of 500. If it’s a regional keyword or you sell high-ticket items or services, then you can set the minimum volume to 100 or lower.
Now, going back to the spreadsheet you created in Step 1, find the tab labeled 2. Long Tail Keywords. Then start filling in the three columns—keyword, monthly volume, keyword difficulty—using the information you’ve gathered from Ahrefs.
Your Google Sheet will start to look like this as you move the data manually from Ahrefs.
Conclusion
If there’s any secret sauce to driving major traffic to your website, SEO keyword research is it. And now you have that!
You understand keywords and how to find the ones that are going to drive the most traffic and sales to your site. Get pumped, you’re in the driver’s seat from this point forward.
So if you haven’t done this exercise already and you’ve only been reading, go through this guide again, make a spreadsheet, and discover the right keywords for your site.
In our next lesson, we’ll show you how to write content to rank at the top of Google for these keywords.
Execute this and your traffic, profits, and business will grow exponentially!