We Bought 3 Affiliate Keyword Research Gigs on Fiverr

People often look to Fiverr for freelance SEO services. And that's probably why there are around 26,000 SEO-related gigs today. Now, because keyword research will usually be the first and perhaps most important part in setting yourself up for SEO success, we wanted to test just how good Fiverr keyword research gigs actually are. So we bought three gigs. One for $15, another for $80, and a pro gig for $150. Now, we didn't want to make the purchase under the name Ahrefs because a lot of these people will be using our tools. So we sent in this guy to do the bidding. Now, he doesn't know very much about SEO, so he asked each freelancer if they could provide some sort of action plan so he knows what to do with the keyword list. The sellers all agreed and so it began. They were each given a similar story. I plan to start an affiliate website on laser pointers and I want to rank in the US. Please tell me the keywords to go after and what to do with these keywords. Now, because three minds are better than one, I invited a couple of my friends at Ahrefs to help critique the deliverables. Patrick Stocks, technical SEO at Ahrefs, and Joshua Hardwick, our resident blogmaster. Now, in order to evaluate and critique these keyword research gigs, we needed to come up with some baseline expectations. And the things we expected really just came down to the basics of keyword research. Number one, we wanted a usable list of keyword ideas. Two, we wanted to know the search intent behind these keywords. Three, the keyword should be relevant to our affiliate business model. And for bonus points, we hoped to get some educational material to better understand the reports, metrics, and any SEO wisdom that would help. So as we dig through these reports, our team will share our thoughts on the deliverables and also go a bit deeper into some SEO myths that continue to spread in private conversations. Stay tuned. Alright, let's get started with the $15 gig. This gig was specifically on keyword research for affiliate websites. So despite the fact that it was $15, I thought we'd get something decent to work with. But in my opinion, that wasn't really the case. Now, I wasn't sure if my expectations were unreasonable, so I asked Josh and Patrick for their overall thoughts. Well, I think it looks kind of basic is the first kind of impression that I get. It's just a kind of list of what, 20 keywords, 30 keywords with the usual metrics. So it basically looks like an export from Ahrefs with a few other metrics pulled in, which is not really keyword research in my opinion. This one was bad. Yeah, the action plan was a big miss. It didn't explain metrics. And it really looked like this action plan is just reused for like all of the person's reports. I mean, it looked pretty generic. So I think they just send the same one to everyone with a couple little tweaks. Now, based on our baseline expectations, the person didn't give us a fully usable list. And by usable, I'm referring to keywords we have a chance at ranking for. And this came down to not being able to match searcher intent. The SERPs for many of these keywords like laser 303 and purple laser pointer had clear transactional intent, seeing as the top ranking pages were all ecommerce product or category pages. In fact, I was only confident in ranking for 8 of the 33 keywords. Meaning, 25 potential keywords we create pages around could be a total waste of time and money. Now, this brought up some interesting discussion because we weren't all in agreement. Both Josh and I hoped to see keywords where an affiliate blog could rank high with some degree of certainty. Meaning, we wanted to see SERPs that were predominantly blog posts rather than ecommerce category or product pages. And again, that's because we wouldn't be able to match intent with an affiliate blog. On the other hand, Patrick looked at these queries as opportunities. And that's because one or two listicles often squeeze their way into dominantly transactional queries. Take the keyword coffee maker as an example. You'll see that Amazon holds pole position and then there's results from other ecommerce stores like Bed Bath & Beyond, Walmart, and Target. But Consumer Reports' best coffee makers post is near the top of the search results too. In fact, they've held the top 10 position for this query for nearly one and a half years. So while we didn't disagree with Patrick, I had to ask him. Aside from getting a ton of backlinks, relatively speaking, how can a blog break that pattern and penetrate the SERP with a page that doesn't match the dominant search intent? To me, it's the product selection. So if you've got some popular products that all have search volume, those are the ones you want to be reviewing. Like those are the ones people are looking for. And like they're the right answer, the right product. Because you've got, maybe not for laser pointers, but in some cases, you've got like millions of things to choose from, from patio furniture. So what I always do is, which ones of those are people actually looking for? Which ones have the most volume? Those are the ones I want to include in my list. Now, finding products with search volume, as Patrick suggested, is pretty easy. For example, let's say you have a golf blog and you want to write a post on the best golf balls. Just go to a golf ecommerce store like Golf Galaxy and head on over to the golf balls category. And most ecommerce stores will have a brand facet. Just copy these down and then paste them into a keyword research tool like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. Next, go to the matching terms report. Now, all you have to do is hit the include box, choose the Any word tab, and filter for the category related to your post. So I'll add ball and balls. And now you'll see popular models like Halloway Supersoft, Titleist Pro V1, Titleist Velocity, and so on. Now, Josh being Josh, aka Ahrefs' most stubborn bloke, had some good points as to why he still wouldn't go after a transactional query like Purple Laser Pointer. Well, you know, I'm not one to disagree with Patrick. I just wouldn't do it because I think there's easier keywords to go for and more obvious keywords to go for. And just because you can do something just because someone else hasn't done something doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea. I mean, do people want a rounded post? The search intent seems to indicate no, but obviously these things aren't perfect. So I can see where Patrick's coming from, but personally, I probably wouldn't. Now, as you heard, all of us thought this keyword research gig was a big miss. Aside from not meeting the basic requirements we had hoped for, there was a lot of bad advice in the action plan. For a start, you know, this guy's talking about LSI keywords. This is in the first sentence of the action plan LSI keyword, which to me are just complete nonsense. Now, you might be shocked that we call this bad advice. And while it's largely about semantics, Patrick explained how people typically understand LSI keywords and what LSI actually is. The keywords that they're talking about are just related keywords. If I'm talking about baseball, I'm going to be talking about maybe different teams or like home plate, home run, pitchers, batters, catchers, etc. It's all the related terms that are relevant in the content. But LSI is an indexing method and without going too in-depth, it has absolutely nothing to do with your keywords. This person also gave a lot of on-page SEO advice with a heavy focus on word count and keyword density. They said, For 1500 word articles, you can use your focus keyword 5-7 times, and for 2500 word articles, use your focus keyword 8-10 times. Here's what we think about word count and keyword density as ranking factors. I don't get them at all. A lot of my blog posts end up long, but it's because there's a lot of information. But in general, I would say like just make your blog better, not longer, or your content in general, like how can you be more useful in the least amount of time is probably the best answer. I can see why you might want to give some kind of guideline to a writer just so that they don't write, you know, 50 words or 10,000 words. But yeah, so I wouldn't take that into account at all when writing content personally. The main takeaway here is that things like word count, related keywords, and keyword density are usually going to be a natural byproduct of content depth, which is why we don't pay writers by the word for Ahrefs' blog. I'll let Josh expand. We don't ever pay writers by word or give them any kind of this article needs to be X amount of words or whatever. We just pay per article and we a lot of the time we'll work with them to shorten articles rather than make them longer. I think a lot of people tend to overwrite and these first drafts tend to be much longer than they need to be. And a lot of this stuff you can actually cut out because it's not actually adding much value to the post. You can cut it out and the post becomes more valuable because we focus the key points by cutting out these kind of unrelated or semi-related points. Now, there was one piece of good advice for new websites. Aside from the fact that this has nothing to do with keyword research, the person recommended to build links to content on page two and three of Google. Why is that good advice? Chances are more good links to a page is going to push it onto page one. And this can be done pretty easily with a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account. Just enter your domain in Site Explorer and then head on over to the Organic Keywords report. Now, all you have to do is filter for keywords ranking in positions 11 to 20 or 11 to 30. Now, because we can't go through each report line by line, all of us rated this keyword research gig on a scale from 1 to 10. 10 being bang on and 1 being so far off. And here are the results for the $15 gig. I'm going to give this one a 2. It was pretty terrible. I'd probably say 2. I don't think that someone who doesn't know much about keyword research could really interpret this and actually put it into action and start ranking, start possibly making money and start actually getting somewhere. I don't think that's really possible from this gig. And I'll give this a 2 as well because of peer pressure. Plus, the keyword list wasn't great and the action plan was more misleading than helpful, just as Josh had said. Alright, let's move on to the $80 gig. This gig cost $30 for a list of 10 keywords and one competitor researched. But we paid an additional $50 to get the action plan, bringing our grand total to $80. Now, the one thing about this gig that I absolutely loved is that the freelancer was extremely transparent from the start. I asked him if he was using Ahrefs and he said, "...if you're already using that for your own keyword research, then I'm not sure how much extra help I can be." So not only is he using Ahrefs, but he thinks it's an insanely powerful tool. So much so that he thought he wouldn't be able to provide additional value. I liked him, so without a second thought, I purchased the gig. Now, he delivered way more than 10 keywords. And instead of a written action plan, he recorded a detailed video that was nearly an hour long. But are more keywords better? Well, in order to understand why we got hundreds of keywords, you need to know how he generated his keyword list. Well, I think this is the same kind of thing by the looks of it as the first gig, the $15 gig, where it's literally just an export once again. I thought it was interesting too because he promised you like a certain number of keywords, but then these are mostly like full exports. They had a few things deleted, which I thought was weird. The video was the really nice touch with this one. So at this point, we've paid $30 for a bunch of Ahrefs exports, which we could have done for $7 on a trial. But as Patrick mentioned, the video action plan was a nice touch to this gig. I'll let him expand on his Fiverr crush. He was very educational throughout, like he explained metrics, he told you things, he showed you his processes since you already had the tool, which I thought was brilliant. And even setting expectations, he's like, keyword research, that's just the start. Like you have a lot more you have to do around content and links and stuff to rank. He's like, here it is, you start with this, but this isn't going to magically make you rank for things. You still have to do the work. So I think it's good to see how he came to the conclusions that he did, how he found the keywords that he did, and why, you know, you might want to even target these keywords. From what I remember, he was talking about, you know, search volumes and categorizing keywords into possibly into groups, you know, red, green, white, blue, saying that, you know, you can basically just create a section all about the different colors of laser pointers, all about the different types of laser pointers, this kind of thing. As both Josh and Patrick mentioned, the educational aspect was a huge win in this action plan. He also indirectly talked a bit about content structure by using keyword grouping or clustering, which is helpful to both web visitors and search engine crawlers. Now, the action plan was far from perfect because there was still a lot of poor SEO advice in there, like meeting word count and keyword density quotas. But there was more. The fact that he didn't talk about search intent, which seems fundamental. And also, although the video format for the report is kind of good in the sense that it talks you through it, I think it was like an hour long. So, you know, it takes quite a while to watch and digest and you don't have to make your own note of what to do. It just takes your time up in a way. They didn't really get into the intent that well. Like you said, he focused on e-commerce a lot, not necessarily affiliated or informational. He talked about grouping, which was great, but he never grouped things for you. So I would have loved to see, you know, the pet things, the color things, all kind of grouped. He could have actually done this right inside Keywords Explorer because we have the keyword grouping on the left side and he is using Ahrefs. He could have literally just clicked on one of those, exported those results and given that to us. And how much longer would it have taken? Five minutes if he's not looking at intent. Not even five minutes, two minutes per keyword, basically. And so if he had just chosen five different groups of keywords, that could have provided a lot more value in terms of what he was trying to achieve. So missing search intent, which is fundamental to keyword research, as well as disorganization that led to wasted time, were two big factors that played into our ratings. So on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being bang on and 1 being so far off, here are the results for the $80 gig. Obviously, the keyword list, it was just an export from a keyword research tool again. He didn't talk about search intent. So I'd probably put it on the low end still at 3 or 4. I'd give it a 7. Interesting. I think I just really appreciate the fact that he's showing personal processes. He's explaining so much. And for someone that's a beginner and he knows you have access to the tool, I thought it was really perfect. He hit the market perfectly. Not everything was correct. Things could have been done better. But overall, the fact that he was really, really explaining things and trying to teach you to do it yourself, I think I gave him maybe a little extra for that. Yeah. So you were emotionally swayed. As for me, I gave this gig a 4.5. Because just as Josh had said, he basically just sent Ahrefs exports, which he knew I had access to, and he didn't touch on search intent at all. Now, just as Patrick was emotionally swayed by the $80 freelancer's charisma, I was emotionally swayed maybe too much by the next gig. So our final gig was the $150 one and the only Fiverr verified pro service of our three purchases. By profile alone, this person seemed to be extremely promising. They had testimonials on their website from known SEO influencers, claimed that a big publication had rated them as a top 20 SEO influencer, and had written for some well-known SEO blogs. To top it off, they had spoken at a good number of SEO conferences, making them stand out from the pack. But the moment I started communicating with this person, something just felt off. Their gig explicitly states that an action plan is included. But when I asked, they said it'll cost extra and that was followed by some vague information about their services. After numerous exchanges, I just straight up asked for some screenshots because I had no clue what their gig included. And they sent me this screenshot. Finally, someone who's ready to talk about search intent. We exchanged numerous more messages because when I asked if this is what I would get, they said, if that's what you need. So I just straight up asked, does your $150 gig include the title, intent, and write-up? And I was referring to their screenshots. They confirmed, so we reluctantly bought the gig. Now, after doing some due diligence, their claim of being called a so-called top-rated SEO influencer wasn't fully accurate. Their mention was actually from a press release, which just happened to get syndicated on the publication in question. Anyone who's willing to pay for a press release, write halfway decent content can also claim to be a top 20, 10, or even just the top SEO influencer in the world. All of this aside, let's take a look at the deliverable. At first glance, it looked a lot more professional than what the $15 and $80 gig had to offer. But as we continued to read through the report, the same interesting style of communication began to surface. Josh summarizes the keyword list nicely. A lot of these keywords, looking at the actual keywords themselves, don't seem to make a lot of sense. You've got things like laser pointer Amazon, why that would be included or potentially even a good keyword to go after, I don't fully understand because people are clearly searching for a specific website there. Things like laser pointer near me, I don't understand why that would be in this. Not only is this for an affiliate site, so it doesn't make sense anyway, this is a local keyword. So there's quite a few keywords in there that just don't seem to make any sense whatsoever. And there's quite a few keywords in there that, again, the same mistake or issue as the other reports, the other gigs, which is that I would guess most of these, many of these are commercial intent people looking for products. So there's no real thought being put into this keyword from what I can see. Now, not only was the keyword list more or less useless, the person made the report even more confusing by doing two things. Number one, they said they created a complex formula to prioritize the keywords. And this formula was search volume times CPC divided by difficulty. Now, I didn't really understand the purpose behind this, so I asked Patrick what this was all about. I have no idea. But it gives a score and honestly, that's what a lot of people want is they want just some way to prioritize. So it's hard to say whether a score is really like right or wrong. There's a bunch of different ways of doing it. He probably saw this on someone's blog and copied it. And the second thing. So I think he's just going backwards and forwards. Like you're saying, he's making one point, then contradicts himself, making another point, contradicts himself. So it becomes unclear what exactly you're supposed to do when looking at this document. But there was some good stuff in this report too that clearly proved his experience went beyond the other two freelancers. Patrick and Josh pointed out some of these things on our call. I would say where he got down to recommending specific articles and like what to include in those. Because that's really distilling it down. You know, keyword research, the purpose is sort of to create the content. So ideally, someone new doesn't even really want to see the keyword research. They just want someone to tell them what to do. I want you to make this page and talk about this, this, this and this. Done. He's talking about internal linking, adding links to the pages that you create, trying, you know, from other pages on your website to help them rank and that kind of thing. And he's talking about the basic, very basic on-page optimization stuff. So these are things that you would want to do. It's not bad advice. It's good advice. So I'd say that that's probably the best part of the content plan. Now, as much as I'd love to take you line by line through this report, I think it will be pretty fruitless because there wasn't anything too different from the other gigs. So instead, let's rate this gig on a scale from 1 to 10. 10 being bang on and 1 being so far off. I gave it a 4. I would have given it more if the recommendations and the data just wasn't so bad. He really, he gets so close and like some of the stuff is really good. Advice, but yeah, the data, no cleaning, no checking. And then some of the other advice is not great. I'd probably give it a 4. It's no better than the previous gigs, possibly no worse. But I think it doesn't really, although it looks complex, it probably leads the person purchasing it astray and leads them in the wrong direction. And I would probably give this one a 2. There were just way too many contradictory statements. Keywords that had absolutely nothing to do with our niche. And I agree with Josh. The report is more likely to lead someone astray than to set them off in the right direction. Now, while we weren't really fans of the keyword research gigs we got, there is an interesting takeaway here. None of the gigs had an overall passing score, meaning there could very well be an opportunity here for someone to learn keyword research and dominate the Fiverr keyword research market. And we have tons of videos and blog posts on how to do keyword research effectively, as well as a full SEO course for beginners, which covers the main facets of search engine optimization. All these resources are free, so go and check those out and if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials. I'll see you in the next one.