Winnipeg Computer Repair Technician

SEO Keyword Guide

After teaching a buddy a bit about how I make my money online, I realized there aren’t very many tutorials for the fresh starters. So it’s time for me to write a tutorial. When I tell my buddy: “Make sure the term has over 5000 exact global monthly searches and over 3000 local USA. Allintitle and Allinurl should be under 50,000 and CPC should be over $1. If there is an authority site in the top 3 on Google, then don’t even try. Oh and it would be wise to choose a keyword with an EMD/TLD available.”

He quickly responded with:
-“Where do I find the amount of searches?”
-“What does exact global mean?”
-“Why USA? We are from Canada.”
-“What does allintitle and allinurl mean?”
-“What is CPC?”
-“What is an authority site?”

First, I want to clarify something: All the expert have their own way of analyzing a keyword. I will tell you one thing and another expert will tell you something similar. There are no “set” amounts of searches or competition that you need, it depends on a lot of factors. That is why you cannot rely on a single script or program to do the entire analyzation of your keyword and then expect to have a golden keyword. When I research my micro niches, I do use a lot of automation and I do it in big numbers. I’m willing to save that 60+ minutes of doing manual research in exchange for 10% of the domains/keywords failing. Don’t get me wrong, manual research is great for beginners. I started without a single tool, checking every keyword by hand. I ended up building turn key sites off of the extra keywords for an extra side profit. After all the orders, I decided I needed to scale up and make a tool that would save time and do what I want, so I had my own keyword research tool made (Keyword Scout) and ended up selling a few copies to save expenses. People loved it and so I expanded to larger markets and it ended up turning Keyword Scout into my main focus/project. Enough about me, but my point is: You can start with no investment, but it may take some time. My focus throughout this tutorial, will be to find a good Adsense keyword, and not for PPC or CPA purposes.

So the first thing you are going to want to do is register an Adwords account. Google has an ad network, if you didn’t know already. Google Adwords customers, often business owners or marketers, bid on ad placements for certain keywords. These Adwords customers use a tool called Google Keyword Tool to find which keywords to bid for. This tool provides us information on thosuands (if not millions) of keywords. The most important information this tool provides is the search counts and cost per click (CPC). 
Google Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Once registered and signed in, you need to start searching. If you don’t know what kind of keywords or even website you want, go to Amazon.com and find a niche you’d like to start with. I’m into golf so I’m going to type “golf” into the text box, and click search. Now you have a complete list of keywords, based off your seed keyword. The seed keyword is the keyword you typed in initially, mine is “golf”.

Next, we need to refine what we see. The search counts are inaccurate right now. There are 3 types of search counts: Broad, Exact and Phrase. By default, we are looking at broad. Broad match accounts for all the relevant variations of your keyword. Google explains: “Keyword variations can include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords.” This match type is useful if you want to know if your market is scaleable. You want to ensure yourself that after you occupy most of the traffic for the keyword, there are variations that you can rank for too.
The next match type is exact match. This is what I use and what I believe you should use too. It is the number of times your keyword is searched on Google. It tells me “king cobra golf” (without quotes) is searched 9,900 on Google per month.
Lastly, phrase match count is the number of times your keyword is contained in a search. If my keyword is “golf” then it would include “golf clubs”, “golf gloves”, etc.

There are more search engines, other than Google. For the sake of easy numbers, let’s say Google occupies 50% of the search engine traffic. If Google says your keyword gets 4,400 monthly exact searches, then there are roughly 8,800 searches per month for your keyword. You must also remember, all of these searches don’t mean visits to your site. Even the first place sites rarely get over 75% of the traffic, but there are occasional exclusions.

So please select the [Exact] button, and uncheck Broad. Now you have a bunch of keywords, ranging in all sizes. Click “Advanced Options and Filters”. Add the following filters:
-Local Monthly Searches >= 1000
-Global Monthly Searches >= 1500
-Global Monthly Searches <= 5000
-Approximate CPC > $0.50
Then, choose your country and USA, unless you are doing keyword research for keywords outside the English language. The USA has around 267,000,000 English speakers. That is the most English speakers any country has, and it’s followed by India with about half of that. USA is a profitable market, as it’s where most advertising English businesses are located. You might get $0.10 for a click from India and $1.00 for a click from the USA.

I put my CPC as over $0.50 as I like to keep my options open. You also must remember, you don’t get paid the listed CPC on Google Adsense, and the CPC isn’t the same every time. It changes from day to day inside Google. 

It may not show it on the keyword tool but every day, when most Adwords customers bid on a keyword, the price goes up, but when Adwords customers stop buying, it will go down. I should also inform you that the CPC is not what you get paid. Google takes their cut too, and unfortuneatly it’s around 50% or more. No one really knows what percent Google takes percisely. It changes a lot so it’s hard to put an accurate percentage on it.

So now we have a list of keywords. I have 141, and you will have a different amount. There is a competition column, but that does not mean search engine competition, it actually means Adwords competition. If the competition is high, then usually then it is more profitable and there will be lots of relevant ads showing on your site, as there are lots in line to be shown. Disregard the Ad Share, Search Share, and any other columns I don’t mention. If your CPC column doesn’t appear, there is a drop down menu called Columns on the page, and you can click that to enable different columns. 

Search trends are something we need to consider, we only want keywords that are reliable and long-term. Find a keyword with a fairly steady search trend.

Do not choose keywords that:
-Contain brand names. The owner of the brand will usually outrank you with their site and be very hard to compete with. You must also remember that the owner of the brand is a trademark and getting the domain in their hands won’t be very hard for them. Just too risky for me.
-Are holiday-themed. Holloween costume ideas and christmas trees will only be around for a couple months of the year and the rest of the year, they are almost useless.

Start scanning through the keywords. Find keywords that are at least 3 words in length, as they will be easier to rank for in the search engines. Just for the sake of giving you some examples to work with, some keywords that caught my eye were:
-discount golf shoes
-cheap golf shoes
-cheap golf bags
-golf course reviews
-best golf drivers

Now that I got 5 or so keywords to work with, the next thing I want to do is search for their exact match domains. Navigate to:http://www.godaddy.com/domains/searchbulk.aspx and put in as many keywords as you feel comfortable. I put 5 in, and checked the 3 TLDs. TLD stands for top level domain. The main TLDs are .com, .net and .org. Others argue .info is a TLD, but I wouldn’t build a website off a .info.

So I check .com, .net and .org, and search. All forms are taken. So it’s time to get some more keywords and check those. Without a tool, this does take a long term, but what the heck, it’s free and will get us by for the next few hours.

After searching for a good amount of time, you should find a keyword, if not, it’s not the end of the world. 

An exact match domain isn’t required, it just makes it easier in the long run. You can buy a domain in the following form(s) or anything you can think of:
{keyword}s.com
the{keyword}.com
best{keyword}.com
the{keyword}.com
{keyword}site.com

So now, take your keyword and search it on Google.

The first thing we check is the top 3 results. I notice they are linking directly to domains and not individual web pages inside of the website. These look like small “ma and pa” businesses so I think I can outrank them. If there were authority sites listed here, then I’d have to seriously consider what to do. By authority sites, I mean sites that the average person in that niche would be aware of. For example, Bass Pro Shops is an authority site for the fishing and hunting niche. I also do not want to compete with any .edu or .gov websites as they are all highly valued by Google. The next thing I notice is the ads shown all over the page, that is a good sign. It means the keyword is in demand by lots of businesses/marketers. From the SEL (Search Engine Listing), I can see the title of the webpage, the URL and the description. If the keyword is not in the title, that’s a plus. If the keyword is not in the url, that’s a plus. If the keyword is not in the description, that’s a plus. The keyword will be found in 1 of these 3 locations, minimal. Basically, every time part of the keyword appears in the SEL, it will be bolded. We want the least amount of bold. The furthur the bold is down in the SEL, the better. If the bold is up top (in the title or url) then it will be more competitive than a site with the keyword just in the text, unless the site was an authority site of course. Next, open up the top 3 web pages in different tabs. In Firefox, right click the web page and click View Page Source. Hit CTRL + F and a search textbox will appear, type “meta name” without quotations in it. A Go Daddy page has this as the meta tags: 

Ensure that your keyword isn’t too common in either of the 2.

Let’s do some off site competition analyzing and find out, exactly how many people are competiting for your desired keyword. 

Google offers a quick way to find all of this out. Search the following 3 phrases on Google. Replace golf with your keyword and ensure to enter the quotations.
“golf”
allintitle:”golf”
allinurl:”golf”

Look at the number of results for each search.
The first search is exact match. It tells you the number of times your keyword appears anywhere on almost every web page.
The second search is allintitle. It tells you the number of times your keyword appears in the title. The title is displayed in two places on your browser. It is what the tab is called on the top of the browser, and it’s beside the firefox icon in the task bar.
The third search is allinurl. It tells you the number of times your keyword appears in the url. Each word may be seperated by a hyphen.

It took 2 and a half hours to write, but this concludes my tutorial. If you have questions, I’d be more than happy to answer them in the comments. If you enjoyed the lesson, please share your thoughts in the comments. To make sure this thread stays alive, leave a comment so other new users can find the thread too. Please let me know if you see any errors or typos. Don’t forget to rate!

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