Keyword Research for SEO (2020 Tutorial)

Keyword research for SEO. Is it actually possible to get traffic to a brand new website by simply being smart about how you carry out your keyword research? In this video, I'm going to show you how I get anywhere from two and a half to 4,000 page views a day from free organic Google SEO traffic to my simple niche blog. Let's jump straight into my Google Analytics account. This is the website which I started in April 2019, and I've been able to grow this website since April 2019, over the past 12 months, to get thousands of page views per day. We're currently running anywhere from two and a half thousand to approximately 4,000 page views every single day. You see a couple of abnormalities. It was a very quiet period during Christmas, then very busy period just after New Year's Eve, when everyone wanted to get healthy and all the New Year's resolution, and then we had a bit of a dip because of the coronavirus. But in general, you can see that it's very consistent, and in total, I've had over 350,000 page views to this blog, all of these for free. I have not paid for any of this traffic, and it's only going to continue growing. I have not built any backlinks to this blog. This is all by being smart about how I carry out keyword research for my SEO tactics. So in this video, I'm going to show you this exact thing, how you can do the same thing for your website. If you are new to my channel, my name is Greg Kononenko. My channel name is Caffeinated Blogger, and on this channel, I publish regular videos about free traffic, affiliate marketing, and blogging. Make sure to tick the subscribe button just below this video, as well as tick that bell notification icon so I can notify you as soon as I upload my next video. Let's get into the details. Okay, so a couple of basics that I would like to get out of the way, just in case you're a little bit new to the online marketing world or to the SEO world. So the first thing is domain strength. Let's talk about that for a second. Each website, when it starts out on the internet, has got a certain strength associated with it. Generally, the websites that have been around for a long time, they get stronger domain authority, and new sites, when they first appear on the internet, they're generally considered to be weak sites. Now, the way that this is calculated is it's largely influenced by how many other websites are linking to this particular domain. So each link is kind of like a vote. So if you think of a website like Wikipedia, Wikipedia has got millions of links from all over the internet pointing to it, and that's why, in Google's eyes, Wikipedia is a very, very strong domain. So to give you an example, here are the stats for travelcroc.com, which is my travel blog, and as you can see, I've got 332 backlinks from 50 different websites that are linking to my travelcroc.com blog. This site has been around for a few years now, and I've acquired 50 links, and therefore my domain rank, so to speak, DR, is 2.7. Which is not very high. I have not focused on this website at all. This is just one of my secondary sites that I've currently got. Let's compare it to the link profile of tripadvisor.com. And TripAdvisor, I'm sure that you're probably familiar with this website, one of the biggest travel websites on the planet. It has got domain rank of 94. So travelcroc, 2.7, tripadvisor, 94, and it's got 162 million backlinks from 399,000 different websites. Okay, so there are two examples at different sort of sides of the equation, different extremes. However, as you will see during this video, having a weaker website does not mean that you can't get traffic. We all start somewhere, and you can actually totally get really good traffic, even if your website is brand new, and I'm gonna show you how in this exact video. In fact, travelcroc.com currently gets over 200 page views every single day, even though it's a very weak website that I have not focused on at all. So that's the first thing we'll talk about again and again during this video, the strength of the domain. The next thing, next basic idea that we need to get out of the way is content length. Very important to understand that content length is kind of almost as important as domain strength. Google actually loves long form content. So long content on a weak site can outrank a short article on a strong website, and I'm gonna show you a couple of examples in just a second. But basically, if you have a weak site, perhaps you've just started a brand new blog, if you write a long authoritative content, you can often outrank Wikipedia, Pinterest, Quora, YouTube, and many, many, many other very, very strong websites. Let me give you an example right now. Let's jump into Google and let's type in a keyword for which my travelcroc.com website is ranking so that we can check it out and sort of analyze it. So let's take a look at Bora Bora Facts. You can see that's one of the, it's a pretty common search term. So Google auto-suggest actually comes up and suggests that. So it's a real term that people type in. And if we look at these Bora Bora Facts, as you can see, my website here is ranking on the third position. So travelcroc.com, you can see it right here, one, two, three. And guess what? I'm outranking Wikipedia. So if we scroll a little bit below, and if we go to the second page, we've got Wikipedia all the way on the second page of Google search results. So Wikipedia is number 12, and my website here, travelcroc, presto, is number three. So it's totally possible to outrank Wikipedia, one of the most authoritative websites on the internet, if you do things correctly. And that's exactly what I'm going to show you in this video. So travelcroc authority, as you can see here, is just 2.7, domain rank of just 2.7. And I've only got 332 backlinks. However, I'm managing to outrank Wikipedia, which has got a domain rank of 88 with 74,000 domains linking to it, and 6.64 million backlinks. So you can see the difference here, 332 backlinks, 6.64 million, domain rank 88, my domain rank 2.7. So you know, sometimes people are saying, well, my blog is brand new, I can never rank, I can't do this, I can't do that. Well, you totally can, you just need to do things smartly. And that's what I'm going to show you in this video. Just take a look here below, as it says here, pretty much any big website out there that's just got short content posted on it. So today we're going to cover exactly how you can rank even brand new sites. It's not about building links, it's not about making your domain authority stronger, which can naturally happen over time. What I'm going to show you today is how you can take your brand new website that you've only just started, and how you can realistically start getting awesome traffic, hundreds of page views a day, thousands of page views a day, if you're patient to your blog. So let's get into the details of exactly how to do that. So for the purposes of this video today, let's just use the travel niche as an example. Let's say you decided to start a brand new blog and you've settled on the travel niche. And now you're thinking, okay, well, how do I get more traffic? What do I need to write about? What kind of topics do I need to write about? So that I can start getting traffic to my site, start making money, start getting some revenue coming in. So there's a two-step process that we're going to be going through. And that first step is you need to generate a list of keywords. And second step of the process is to then analyze that list of keywords and find the best keywords that have got the highest chance of success. So here is the number one method for generating keywords. And number one, I mean, just method one, it's not the best method. It's one of the two methods that I'm gonna show you for how to generate keywords. And that is going to be using seed lists. This works in any niche, not just with the travel niche, but let me show you an example with the travel niche. The tool that I'm going to be using here as an example is Ahrefs. It is a paid tool. However, the good news is that you can do this trial. See, it says start trial for $7, start trial for $7. So this gives you access for seven days. It gives you complete access to everything inside Ahrefs. So you just pay $7 and for seven days, you can use Ahrefs. Now those seven days is actually enough to, if you focus, it's enough to do keyword research for the next one or two or three months. And if you really have to, if your budget situation is tight, you can cancel your access on the sixth or on the seventh day before that rebuild from Ahrefs actually comes in. And then in the future, you can sort of, if you need access again to Ahrefs, you can consider possibly to getting access again to Ahrefs with maybe a different email or just by permanent access because it really is an awesome tool. I'm actually not an affiliate for Ahrefs. I don't get any benefit if you decide to use Ahrefs as a result of my advice. It's just the best tool. It's the professional standard for the marketers, for SEO people out there. Okay, so back to seed lists. What are these seed lists and how do you do them? Well, in the travel niche, the seed lists would be lists of places, perhaps lists of islands, lists of beaches, lists of national parks, and you can do this in different countries. As an example, let's type in list of beaches, list of islands in New Zealand. So if I type in list of islands in New Zealand, I'm gonna get a bunch of results. For example, here in Wikipedia, if I open this up, it will actually give me a list of all the islands in New Zealand. You can see that I've got them here listed by size. So here are 33 different islands in New Zealand, okay? And that's just islands in just in New Zealand. I can do beaches in New Zealand, national parks in New Zealand. Then I can do beaches in Bora Bora. I can do beaches in Mauritius, beaches in other places. You get the idea. You can basically type in, you can find kind of lists of all of these different places, and then you can analyze them, which I'm gonna show you in just a second. So generally, I like to work in the lots of 10. So I'm just gonna take these top 10 results, copy them, and clean them up. Like this, I've now got a clean list of these 10 names. So I'm going to copy them, and then we'll go into Keywords Explorer, and we're going to paste all of these keywords that we've copied in. And then let's run this search in Keywords Explorer for these keywords. We're going to get results that look like this. And then what I like to do on the left-hand side in Ahrefs is select the option of having same terms. That's actually going to give you keywords that are not just the exact match of this keyword, but they're going to give you all of the keywords that have got these keywords in them. So they are variations, so to speak. And instead of just 10 keywords, we've now got 130. So as long as something has got North Island in it, or South Georgia Island, or South Island in it, it's actually going to include things like North Fox Island. So we had North Island, but now we've got North Fox Island, all right? And we've got 130,000 different keywords. So now that you've got this massive list of keywords, 130,000, you can start applying different keyword, difficulty filters, and volume filters, and so on. So you can actually start analyzing these keyword results. But I'm going to come back to that because we still have, I'm going to show you a second way to generate these keywords. We're going to talk about analysis in just a second, in a few minutes. This was the first way for you to generate keywords using seed lists, okay? So now you've got like, I've shown you a way to come up with multiple, multiple hundreds of thousands of keywords in your niche. Now guys, this actually works not just in travel niche, but it works in, let's say if you've got a blog about baby products, you would go for names or baby product manufacturers, perhaps, you know, product names or brand names. It can work anywhere. You just need to think a little bit about what are the different lists of things that people might be looking for in my niche. So the second way of generating keywords in the niche is using reverse engineering. So here's how it works. To do reverse engineering on a competitor's website, you need to type in a keyword search that relates to your niche. So if you are in the travel niche, you might type in something like New Zealand, South Island, and that will bring up a bunch of results. And what you want to find is you want to find a blog, ideally a small kind of family or, you know, one person, two person blog that is ranking for this keyword search term. And then you're going to reverse analyze it. So here is a good example. It says, I am Aileen. So I am Aileen sounds like, you know, it's a person who started this blog. So here we go. That's probably Aileen there who, yeah, it's I'm Aileen Adelaide. I'm 21. I quit my corporate job in the Philippines. So we've now got a potential sort of competitor in the same niche, and we might be able to analyze what her website ranks for. And then we might be able to publish some similar content on the topics that she has published about. The reason why we want to choose IamAileen.com and we don't want to choose MustDoNewZealand or LonelyPlanet.com is you want to pick a website that is kind of realistic for you to compete with. You know, you can't compete with Lonely Planet. They're just way too powerful. They publish about millions of different topics. You want to reverse analyze a blog that is started by a normal person that you can realistically see yourself, you know, building a blog that is similar to this one. So that's why if you're not sure if it's a personal blog or not, the first thing probably to do is to open up the result and then just try to read the about page and try to find a blog that is sort of run just by one person. Okay, now we're gonna take this domain here, IamAileen.com, and we're gonna analyze it in Ahrefs. To do that, go into the Site Explorer option here and then type in IamAileen.com or whatever domain is going to be that you're going to be reverse engineering. And after you hit Enter on it, it will bring up all of the information about it. So you can see that Aileen started this website around probably 2014, 2015, and then she's had pretty big growth and she's built a pretty massive website in the past few years that has got quite a good authority and is getting quite good traffic. So 47.4, this is usually way too low. Usual figures are normally two to three to four to five times higher. So she probably gets something like 200,000 visitors a month, I would say. So probably about five to 10,000 page views per day, I would say to her site, which is really awesome. But the thing that we are interested here is these organic keywords. So 65.2,000 organic keywords is what she's currently ranking for. So if you click on that, on organic keywords, again, this has given you all of the keywords that IamAileen.com currently ranks for. And once again, here you can start applying different keyword difficulty filters and various other filters. So 11,000 very simple keywords in US Google. She also ranks on other international Google engines. And just like that, by simply using competitor website, we've come up with a list of awesome keywords. But now that brings us to the next step that we need to do, how to actually analyze these keywords and figure out are they good keywords or not. So we've now covered this method, reverse engineering, generating keywords using reverse engineering. Before that, we covered generating keywords using seed lists. So now you know how to actually generate these lists of keywords. Let's talk about this now. How do you go about analyzing the keywords and picking out the truly winning keywords that you can use, just write content, even on a brand new site, on a newbie site, and start getting organic traffic to your website using just pure SEO, nothing else, no link building. So essentially, these are the steps here on the screen. You need to apply a keyword difficulty filter. You need to also check search engine result pages, top 10, and just do a little bit of analysis on them. And I'm gonna take you through step by step exactly how to do this. This might look like a bunch of gibberish and it probably is, but these are just my notes. I try to summarize everything on one page for you. So let me show you in detail how I go about it. All right, so the first thing that we want to do is we want to apply a keyword difficulty filter. So let's say we're looking at all of the results for all the keywords that one of your competitor blogs is ranking, like here, we're looking at imalien.com, or perhaps you're looking even at the list of keywords that you generated using the seed keywords method, like we did with all of the islands. It doesn't matter, it's all the same. You would just go in and apply a keyword difficulty filter. I recommend to start with seven to see how many keywords you've got left. Seven is kind of like the cutoff where realistically, I find in my experience, my blogs, they don't have a lot of links, don't have a lot of authority. They have a pretty good chance of ranking. Obviously, anything that's lower than seven is also really good. It's even better if you can find keyword difficulty three or four, but seven is a good place to start. Now you can see we've got 11,000 different keywords that we still have with very low keyword difficulties of four, two, five, three, et cetera. So perhaps what we can do here is even cut it down to keyword difficulty of five, just to go for really, really super easy keywords. We still have 9.7,000. So maybe we can even go to keyword difficulty of four, which are super easy keywords. I would probably stop there. Keyword difficulty four is so low, pretty much a brand new blog can rank for, I'd say majority of the keywords that we can see here. So we've got 8,600 keywords, which is enough to build an amazing blog. And that's just from analyzing one domain, all right? You've also got obviously other people's domains that you can reverse engineer as well. So let's take a closer look at some of the statistics. Coming back to our list of steps, we've now done this applying keyword difficulty filter. We now need to check SERP top 10. By the way, you might be thinking, what does this keyword difficulty actually mean? Well, there is a proprietary algorithm. There's a formula that Ahrefs follow. I don't know the exact breakdown of what they take into account, but I would say for sure, they're looking at things like how authoritative are the results in top 10. So if we go, let's say we'll look a bit closer at this keyword here, Hurtigruten Antarctica. Okay, and if we open this SERP results, search engine result pages, these are the top 10 results in Google right now for US Google, we're looking at US Google results. All right, so these are the top sites in US Google that are ranking for Hurtigruten Antarctica. And they look at the strength of the domain. So how many backlinks are pointing at each of these websites? How many backlinks are pointing at individual pages that are ranking there on page one? They probably look at how relevant the titles of each of these posts, see this actual title here, how relevant that is to the search query. They look probably at the length of the articles, a bunch of different factors. And I find that generally it is extremely accurate. So we now need to check this SERP top 10, that thing that we've just dropped down and opened up. And my criteria is when I'm checking is I want to check two things. One is, are there at least two or more weak sites that are ranking on that page one? And by weak, I mean their AR score has to be higher than 1 million. So let's take a look at that. So the AR score that I'm talking about is this one here, AR. So if I mouse over for information on what it is, it says Ahrefs rank AR shows the strength of a website's backlink profile compared to the others in our database with rank number one being the strongest. So what this tells us is that a website that has got AR one is the best. So out of these top 10, this one here has got rank 102. All right, so that's the strongest. The next one after that is 23,000. So it's like if you put them all into a league ladder, the highest one up the league ladder is this one, tripadvisor.com, no surprises there. The next one down is 23,000. So it's a little bit lower, cruisecritic.com. Also sounds like a pretty authoritative website. And then after that, we've got 161,000 sort of way further below. And then we've got all of these really weak websites. Oh, there's 169,000, but we also have a bunch of really weak websites, 3 million, 6.1 million, 14 million. So these are all extremely good signs because any AR that's higher than 1 million, all right, so like worse than 1 million, lower below than 1 million, is actually quite a weak website that you can pretty easily compete with even if your site is brand new. Typically, like if your site is kind of just starting out right now, you're probably gonna have AR of about 150 million. But literally after you've got a couple of backlinks which acquire, you know, your website will grow some backlinks naturally over time, you will become AR 6 million, you know, then 3 million in virtually no time. Just as a point of comparison, my travelcroc.com website has got Ahrefs rank of 39 million. So it's way down below. And I'm still getting really good traffic to my blog. So, you know, they're just like a point of comparison for you to keep it in perspective that you don't really need a very high Ahrefs rank. And, you know, also just to prove to you that you're like 14 million and 6.1 million, you can definitely easily compete with these websites here. All right, so that's the first criteria where we said there needs to be at least two or more weak websites with AR over 1 million. So that's a check. We do have them here in this example. And the second thing that I like to look at is that we have two or more results on that front page on the top 10 results in Google that have short content. And short content is anything that has got less than 1,500 words. So here is how you can analyze this. I would just open up each of these results and count how many keywords they've got. So for example, I open this one in a new tab and then take a look at it and then highlight all of the content and count the words in this. So you can either copy and paste this into Microsoft Word, for example, if you want. So I've opened a brand new document here and what I can do is just go paste special text. So paste just text. And then it will tell me that this article is 1,942 words. I can see here in the bottom left. Okay, so that one was for Viva Expedition. I would do this for all of the top 10 results. Just open them up one by one and count the number of words in there. So I've just paused the video and what I've done while it was paused is I've analyzed them all. And what I found is that these two results here, travelweekly.com.au and mindtheadventures.com.au, they have got very, very short content. So here is Travel Weekly. So if I take this and copy and paste this, their content is just 200 words, 199 words. It's a very short post. And the second one, Mind the Adventures, if I copy and paste this content, just to count how long it is, it's only 671 words. So it's a little bit longer. So this is really good news and this makes logical sense. I like when things make logical sense. It doesn't always happen like that, but quite often it does. So travelweekly.com.au is a pretty strong website. C-A-R is 161,000. So it's quite up there. It's pretty strong. With a short article, just 200 words, this strong domain is managing to rank on page one. Okay, makes sense. Super short article, high domain authority, boom, they're there on page one. Now the next website, this mindtheadventures.com is a very weak website, 14 million. Their article is three times longer, three and a half times longer. It's 671 words and they're ranking, that's why they're ranking below. But because the competition is so low, they've written a fairly short article, 671 words, and they still managed to rank on page one. This is really, really important to understand. And these are the signs that you're looking for. This next result here, number 10, this chimuadventures.com also has got very short content. So basically these last three, even four if you count TripAdvisor, all of these websites have got extremely short content, which is great news for you. We have now ticked all of the boxes. We've applied our keyword difficulty filter. So we've applied Ahrefs logic. That takes out a lot of the keywords that you don't need to waste your time analyzing. Now you just need to confirm. And most of the time Ahrefs results are correct in my experience. All right, so we're sort of just recapping what we've done here. So you apply the keyword difficulty filter, and then you're checking that there are at least two or more weak sites, which we do have in this example with AR over 1 million, and that at least two or more results there on page one have got short content, less than 1,500 words. And yes, we do. We've got that here as well. We've got some websites that are ranking with 200 words, with 600 words, 700 words. So basically that now means that if you publish an article that is in depth on your reasonably new website, that's 1,500 to 2,000 words, your content is going to be much more in depth than these other results that were found. So you can realistically beat out any of these, number eight, number nine, and number 10, and take over these spots. I'm pretty sure that even with a brand new site, like if I, with my travelcrog.com, I just haven't gotten around to this keyword yet because I've got others that I'm publishing on. But if I publish an article, that's let's say 1,500 or even 2,000 words, I'm pretty sure that I can take over the number eight spot on page one. That's how I know. So personally, I hate theory, and I don't want to just leave you there with everything that I've shown. So this is what I would personally do in this example. If I wanted to rank my content there on page one, I would write an article that's longer than competition. So in this example, I would write a 2,000 word article. It's longer than anything else that's out there on page one right now. And our site, fair enough, might be weak. Most people who are watching this probably have got sort of fairly new websites, and your website might be weak, but your content is going to be much longer than anything else that's out there on page one. And we already know that Google is already ranking some fairly weak sites on page one. So you're just gonna smash it with content quality and publish a very nice, long, in-depth article that Google is going to love. This is exactly how I managed to rank number three for Bora Bora Facts. If we open this up, you'll see that my article here is fairly in-depth. You know, it's quite long, quite good, high quality article, about 2,000 words. And the reason why Wikipedia is all the way there on page two is because they've got a very short article. Okay, so their article is just something like 300 words. That's all it is. And Wikipedia, super strong domain, very short content. They are on page two, position number 12. With me, travelcroc.com, very, very weak domain and really long form content. And I managed to beat them by a lot, by nine positions, in fact. What to do next? Well, if you want to get going with this, check the links in the description. I've got links to more free videos from my channel. And the couple that I recommend for you to see next are the first one is how to start a blog step-by-step covering everything that you need to do to start a blog from scratch and make it successful. And the second free video that's there in the description is how to write a blog post step-by-step. Once again, it'll show you how to actually research your blog posts and make sure that you write amazing, high-quality blog posts that rank and get traffic. And if you want a bit more help from me, then once again, check the links in the description. I've got a special right now, 35% off my blogging and mentorship package. You can use coupon YouTube to get that 35% off in checkout. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this video. Leave me a comment below and tell me if you liked this video. Let me know what you thought. Once again, my name is Greg Kononenko. On this channel, on the Caffeinated Blogger channel, I put out regular videos about free traffic, affiliate marketing, and blogging. Make sure to subscribe just below this video if you're new to my channel so that we can stay connected and you can get notified about my next video as soon as I release it. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video.