5.6.1 Long Tail Pro Deep Dive — Hunting Down Low Competition Keywords (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • How to find keywords in even the most competitive niches using Long Tail Pro

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5.6 Finding Keywords Quicker and More Easily Using Premium Keyword Tools (AF)

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Important links from this video:

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In this video I discuss:

  • The advantages of paid keyword tools over free keyword tools
  • The best keyword tool for finding high-quality keywords quickly and easily
  • A step-by-step, live demonstration of finding keywords using premium keyword tools

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

5.6 Transcript Below

Okay!

If you’re an observant person, you may notice: “Hey! Ian looks a little bit different than all of the other videos. Hair’s a little bit longer, he looks a little bit more homeless, etc.”

That is because originally, when I recorded all this training, I had a different Premium Keyword Tool recommendation. I recommended them largely because they were cheaper than everyone else. And then they went and doubled their prices within a month of me recording that video and that completely changes the recommendation. There are better tools out there for the price point they’re now asking.

So if you hear me reference Jaaxy in any of the training just know that that is an obsolete recommendation. The up-to-date recommendation is what I will discuss here in Lesson 5.6. So just know that that explains the difference in appearance – why I look a little bit more hippy-like. And also If you hear that reference anywhere else in the training, just know that that’s an artifact. But this is the most up-to-date recommendation.

Today I’m going to talk a little bit about finding keywords quicker using premium tools. You know, I’ll get into this. Before we really dig in here, I want to make really clear, it’s not at all required. You do not need a premium keyword tool to succeed in this industry, okay? So many people out there that create training say “Hey! You need X, Y or Z to succeed” – that’s not the case, you can get this done with the free tools that I taught in the previous lessons. So, don’t stress out about it if you can’t afford it. Don’t think that you’re going to fail just because you can’t afford a premium keyword tool.

But a premium keyword tool will make your writing and your search engine optimization efforts much more potent and make them a lot more powerful and save you a hell of a lot of time – no exaggeration, I’m not overselling this. If there’s one place that I recommend someone invest besides hosting, it’s a keyword tool. Hands down, day in and day out. If you’ve got the extra money to invest, you’re going to save yourself so much time and set yourself up for success so much better if you invest in a premium keyword tool. It’s bringing a better gun to the gun fight, period. You know, it’s a given and a very American analogy.

So, you know, I mention the pros and cons in the previous video about free keyword tools. You know, of course, no added expenses and things like that. They turn on their head for premium keyword tools, it’s basically flipped.

Pros are you’re going to get a really good competition data at-a-glance. It’s going to be much less laborious than using the Moz bar, we’ll see that. I’ll demonstrate this later in the video when I show the actual tool. You know, it shows Majestic trust flow and citation flow as opposed to Moz page authority and domain authority, and it shows that both for the page and the domain.

For years, Moz’s DA and PA were the go to metrics for SEO because of course google doesn’t publish that data for us to see, and the closest thing we can get is a really good third party tool. Moz over the past – somewhere between the past one to two years, has been kind of overtaken by company called Majestic.

And Majestic is an expensive tool, of course Moz is too but their metrics are much more reliable these days, as far as we can tell, as far as website authority goes, as far as SEO authority goes. So, that is the go to tool for SEO authority these days for people in the industry. The fact that the keyword tool shows Majestic trust flow and citation flow as opposed to Moz’s DA and PA, it’s going to be much more reliable. It’s just going to be a much better, a much more accurate representation of the competition you face.

And overall the data is just going to be a whole lot more holistic. It’s going to be in one place, rather than having to pull from several different tools. And it’s going to be a lot more reliable on the whole than piecing it together with free tools.

Most importantly, in my opinion is it saves a ton of time, I mean a ton of time. You’ll see it when we hop in and how quickly we can knock out some keyword research as opposed to what we had to do manually and laboriously using the free keyword planner and things like Ubersuggest and comparing that with Moz bar metrics where we had to search individually, search individually, search individually.

You know, the only con here is that it’s an added expense. At the time of recording this, annual plans range anywhere from 300 to 500-ish dollars. So there, it’s not a cheap investment. But, it’s definitely investment that is very much worth making. And you’ll see that, again, if you just hang in here for a few minutes and watch this in the video. You’ll see how much more powerful and quick this is.

So the best keyword tool that I recommend is Long Tail Pro. It’s recommended by a lot of pros that have been in this industry a really long time. It simplifies a lot of really complex data into at-a-glance Key Performance Indicators, abbreviated KPIs, obviously.

And also it’s going to allow you to spend a lot more time creating and promoting your content rather than all of this time manually researching the keywords. Basically, you can take that time and invest it into the more important aspects of your business, which in the long run is going to get you to success faster and it’s also going to make you much more successful in the long run. And it’s also going to cut keyword research by 90% or more, no exaggeration. I mean, it’s just going to save you so much time.

Long Tail Pro also has some other helpful tools like Rank Tracking. They also have something called Long Tail University, that’s included with all memberships that teaches you really advance in depth keyword research. What I’m going to give you here is kind of at-a-glance tour of the tool… well, not at-a-glance, we’ll get in depth too. But every membership comes with Long Tail University, which is some really, really, really high quality keyword research training as well that you should check out.

So, this is actually outdated. I should remove that. Sorry that’s from when… I thought I had removed this. This is from when I was recommending Jaaxy. One of the unfortunate things about Jaaxy is that it required double-checking against using the Moz bar and Google’s Keyword Planner because the data wasn’t quite as Long Tail Pro’s is. Just ignore that last bullet that I just deleted off.

If you’d like to help support FIMP and you do invest in Long Tail Pro, this is my link for 30% off. If you went directly to their homepage, you’d be paying about 30% more than this. It’s just stoppingscams.com/longtailpro is my affiliate link. Of course you’re appreciate… your support is always greatly appreciated. “You’re appreciated is always greatly support!” – makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, I don’t want you to feel pressured. It’s an incredible investment in your business, I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m hyping this thing too much because that’s not my intention. It’s just that I can’t imagine my business day to day without a tool like this.

Let’s hop in and take a look at Long Tail Pro so that you can see what I’ve been talking about here. Alright. So, this is the Long Tail Pro homepage. When you log in this what you’ll see. Right now I just have a blank project but I’m going to show you how some of this works too.

This is just your kind of at-a-glance dashboard. You have individual projects in here. I’m actually going to click to Add a New Project and I’m going to title it RueTattoo.com, just so you can see how some of these features work.

You can enter your domain name, as well, so I’m going to enter RueTattoo.com (of course my auto-correct is going to try and fix it for me, which is not helpful at all). Okay and I’m going to add this. What’s really cool about this is that it’s going to tell you right off the bat: okay, this is what your link profile looks like, this is what your majestic trust flow and citation flow look like for this website.

You can kind of get an at-a-glance look at all the stuff. And it’s going to tell you that “Hey! For this particular domain name, this is the range we recommend you stick in for keyword competitiveness.” We’ll see that play in when we start searching keywords, but I just want to kind of give you a heads-up.

It’s pretty unique that you can add your domain name into your project then it’s going to give you a suggested range and say “Hey! Don’t go outside of this competition level because you’re probably not going to have much of a shot at getting ranked but you can probably get ranked within this range as long as you do everything correctly”.

In the next section down here, you can enter keywords one at a time. Or you can, in the default, is enter keyword and then it’s going to go over to Google’s Keyword Planner in the back in and bring in their suggested searches.

The thing to keep in mind here is depending on your subscription level, you’ll probably have somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 keyword searches per month. Every single one of these counts as one of your keyword searches, so keep that in mind. You can go up to 400 but you’re going to burn through 10,000 keyword searches per month pretty quickly doing 400 at a time.

I typically bump mine up to 25, I think that’s enough. And then just enter multiple keywords then we’ll see how this works too. If we just type in Laser Tattoo Removal and we hit retrieve, it’s going to retrieve some keywords. It’s gives a notification here and says it’s retrieving keywords. You’ll see them all start populating down here and you can see this little icons saying the gears are turning, we’ll just let those load up.

But while that’s happening, I’ll also mention any other keyword you put in here, they’re smart about it and they’re friendly about it in the sense that they know you have limited searches so if you want to see this keyword data again, it stays saved until you delete it out of the project. So you don’t have to use your searches all over again to pull that data back in. Any keywords you put in here are going to add to you projects keyword list rather than replacing this keyword list. So just keep that in mind.

Right now, we have 25 keywords. If I put in “does tattoo removal hurt” and I hit retrieve. You can see that the number’s going up, now we have 50 keywords in here. Okay, so I added them and they’re all displayed together. You can set filters and I could type in here or I could go into these filters and say “hey! I only want to see keywords that have to do with hurt”. Just type in “hurt” and get that information in there as well. But for the sake of this video I just want to show you kind of what this all looks like.

You can get global search data here, you can see the location has defaulted to the United States, I can update that if I want, and change to another country. U.S. is typically a pretty accurate representation of what the global search volume is going to look like in the landscape and competitiveness, etc. Yeah, so that’s basically Long Tail Pro at-a-glance.

So now what we can do is we can come down here and… the key performance indicators I talked about, the main one you want to look at is your average keyword competitiveness. Usually what I do whenever I get however many keywords I want in here is I’m going to sort by average KC (Keyword Competitiveness).

Now I can see my lowest hanging fruit right up here at the top. If your website’s brand new, I really wouldn’t go for anything outside of the 15-20 range. I know it’s suggesting “Hey! This is a new website. You can go for anything from the 25-30 range”. But the lower the better and I really wouldn’t go outside of that too much.

We’ll take a look at how these numbers are calculated here in a second. But at-a-glance you can see that Saline Tattoo Removal work which frankly I don’t even know what saline tattoo removal is. Non-laser Tattoo Removal, EliminInk Tattoo Removal (sounds like a product), Tattoo Removal Virginia, How Long Does Tattoo Removal Take – that would be a decent one. It’s a 23, but given my options here, hey maybe that’s something I actually consider. I would definitely… even if you get outside of the 15-20 range and you’re going to go to the 20-25 range, I wouldn’t step outside of the green, right? And this will change in time, you’ll notice that this correlates directly to the target keyword competitiveness it created for my domain name.

You can see that anything that’s under 25 is green. Anything that’s under 30 but more than 25 is yellow. So that’s telling me “Hey! This is the keyword competitiveness. This is the suggested range based specifically on your website’s existing authority”. That’s pretty unique to Long Tail Pro, I don’t see that done anywhere else.

Let’s see if we can punch in some more keywords here. Let’s go… “Does Tattoo Removal Cream Work” see what it pulls there. And you can see over here on the left hand side, my monthly keywords remaining or going down on every search I make, which again is why it’s important to kind of limit this to something other than 400. But you can see now there are 75 keywords in here, it’s pulling a lot of these new ones. While it’s pulling these, I’ll pull you into one of these and show you what it looks like when you click on a keyword.

Now we’re going to see for the Top 10 in Google, all of the competition details, I guess kind of at-a-glance but they’re also really in-depth. You can see for this particular keyword, we get 390 searches a month. This is pulled directly from Google, so this is very reliable keyword search volume.

And you can see the results, it’s 80% Organic, 21% Local, which is nice because I know, if you watched the free training for free keyword tools, you saw a lot of stuff for…I was like “Oh! Some of these are local so they’re ranking better” And so, you can kind of see at-a-glance “Okay I’m going to be competing against some local businesses which are going to have an advantage over me”. I wouldn’t worry about it too, too much unless the number’s pretty high. But just keep it in mind, it’s good to know.

This is probably around a fifth of the first page because they probably have a maps listing. So if I come in here and say “Non-laser Tattoo Removal”… well, I don’t have a maps listing (which is interesting), but I probably have… I mean we’ve got some ads in there for some local people. TattooVanishMethod.com that’s interesting. Let’s just take a quick look here, I’m kind of running off on a tangent. But looks like, Find a Location. All natural, huh. As far as I can see, there isn’t one location… okay, there we go.

It looks like they may be getting a boost because they’ve got so many locations, but I doubt it somehow. At least in my local area, doesn’t look like there are any local listings. But anyways, definitely if Long Tail Pro is pulling in this data, it means that a lot of people that searched are going to get local search results which we’re going to be competing against at a little bit of a disadvantage. So just keep that in mind whenever you see that metric.

All through here, we can see overall keyword competitiveness for the Top 10 Results. And we can also see the domain keyword competitiveness. But the things I really want you to pay attention to are the trust flow and citation flow for this particular page, which are these two numbers right here. This is the trust flow and citation flow for the whole domain, but this is what’s really important. Okay.

So we see this top result as 15, this one’s 6, 4, 0, 24 – this is the only really high one besides all the way down here. For me this is a very rankable keyword. If I look at the first page of Google and I see anything, the average trust flow being less than 10 or 15, that is a really ripe opportunity keyword.

Once your looking at a lot of these and you see a lot of 20-25 for brand new websites, I would be a little bit concerned and I would say “Hey look for some better keywords unless you’re at a really high competition niche and everything else is in like the 50s, 60s, 70s”. Then that’s a decent keyword.

But for most niches, you’re going to want for brand new website to find a lot of first pages, as far as when you search your keyword, you want the first page to be mostly something between the 10-15 range and below if you’re going to go for it. So for me, this looks like a pretty rankable keyword, which is really, really nice.

You have some other metrics in here which are really helpful. Like how many External Backlinks this particular page has. Again this is not the domain, this is to the page. This page right here has 1,682 backlinks, which is pretty high. It’s interesting that this one’s only showing 1 backlink because it’s so authoritative. But you can see the number of unique domains referring to the root domain, so that’s to tattooaway.com. You know, just interesting stuff like that.

So, Index URLs. How many URLs this website has in Google. How many index pages this website has in Google. Man! This one’s way up there… ah, it’s ‘cause it’s YouTube, that makes sense! So, some just really, really interesting stuff. You can go pretty dependably off of just the keyword competitiveness but off of just the trust flow and citation flow for the actual page. Right. Again, domain is helpful overall but mainly what you want to look at is page.

You don’t need to worry about citation flow too much. You may be sitting there asking yourself: “What is citation flow?” Citation flow is typically just an indicator of how spammy someone’s backlink profile is. Which isn’t something you need to concern yourself with too, too much. Especially if you’re looking at the first page of Google, they probably don’t have too spammy of a backlink profile. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be getting the rankings that they’re getting.

Trust flow is just calculated on the relevance of the links coming to that page, on the authority of the page, pages linking to this page and this page. Okay. So that’s why I say that’s the most important thing to look at because those are the most important metrics that determine rankings these days.

If we go back here to the project, we probably have more keywords in here now. Let’s see. There’s still “how long does tattoo removal take” in there. There we go. Resort. “Rejuvi tattoo removal cream” (it could be a review), 30 search volume. When you’re young, 30 search volume when your site is still young is not that bad. “How long does tattoo removal take” is still up there. “Laser tattoo removal before and after” – an interesting choice.

Same thing here, we can see all of the same data. But it’s showing the keyword competitiveness, which is also factoring in things like – you can see everything here. Calculated using page title and URLs. So if they’re using their keywords that you searched for in the page title and URL, it’s going to boost the keyword competitiveness, majestic trust flow, citation flow and backlink data. So how many banklinks this page and this domain have.

It’s just crunching all of those numbers at-a-glance. But again, you can see most of these, as far as trust flow, it’s a little bit more competitive than the other keywords. But most of these, again, looks pretty rankable overall. Even though it shows it’s a 26 within Long Tail Pro.

You have a couple of ways you can use this tool. You can spend more time digging much more in-depth and looking at each one of these individually. I’d say in the early stage is it’s definitely good for your learning, for you to get a sense of these things. But other than that, it just comes down to punching in keywords.

And let’s bump this up to 50. And let’s say… (what’s something else that has to do with tattoo?) Let’s go “tattoo removal after care”. Let’s go retrieve, and I’m going to retrieve 50 for this particular keyword. So that’ll take some time. Again…

Data wasn’t available. Interesting. Yeah, maybe it was too long of a term. So, let’s go “how long…” that’s a keyword in here, right? So I’ll just click this one and take a look at the keyword competitiveness really quickly. We can see trust flow. Yeah, so again overall looking like a pretty rankable keyword.

We’ve got, again about 20%. Ow, featured snippets, interesting. We don’t have local search appearing in this one. So again, just a lot of really helpful, useful data in here. But if we go back here, what we can do is we can really quickly, say… plus 20. You know, add 20 results based on that keyword. Add 20 suggestions to this list.

And of course, you can also… favorite (I need to find that keyword again. They’re jumping around ‘cause I just put more keywords in there.) But now we can say “hey add this to my favorites”. So, and it says “hey this has been added to your favorites”. But everything’s resorting and reshuffling in here.

“How to become a laser tattoo removal technician” that could be an interesting post for my site. “Tattoo removal prices” could be a good article, again, especially with 1,900 search results. So if we take a look at this one, trust flow: 17, 3, 12, 0, 9, 0. So it’s a little bit more competitive. But it’s probably a pretty decent keyword, especially given the search volume.

I wouldn’t expect to rank for this anytime soon. But in the coming months as my website authority builds, I could definitely see myself ranking for that. So that’s a really decent keyword overall. I’m going to favorite that one too. Return to projects. “Tattoo removal before and after”.

Let me get into some of the yellow. Ah! This is a good article because there are all kinds of different lasers that people use and some shops don’t have the most up-to-date laser technology. So this could be a really decent article.

I know it’s labeled yellow as far as competition goes but if we come in here and we look at the trust flow, the first couple of pages are kind of authoritative. The last page is kind of authoritative. But trust flow of 2, 0, 5, 0, 0, 0, 0.

I assume these have some authoritative domains which is why they’re ranking. But especially if I created a page and did some (we’ll talk about it later in the training) some promotional things like “Securing Some White Hat Backlinks” to that page if I wrote a really, really good article. You could definitely outrank some of these guys within a few months. Pretty easily, I’d say. So, this is a really good article, a really good keyword. So this is something that I would definitely consider writing for for RueTattoo.com.

So, you see how much quicker that is than going and pulling data from Google’s Keyword Planner and then checking each one of these keywords individually. You just get so much data at-a-glance. And especially with kinds of these color coded keyword competitiveness, you get to see really quickly how something is… how good or bad the competition is for a keyword that you’re searching for. Really unique, really cool, just huge time savings.

I remember back in the day, and the reason I always make it clear to people: “hey you don’t have to invest in this, it’s going to save you a lot of time” is because when I first got started in internet marketing, I didn’t have the money to invest in tools like this. I totally empathize with anyone that doesn’t have the money to invest in some of these tools. But if you do have the money and you value your time, it is hands down one of the best investments that you can make.

So again, if you do decide to invest in Long Tail Pro, please use my affiliate link, help support FIMP: stoppingscams.com/longtailpro,

If you have any questions about Long Tail Pro, don’t hesitate to post them to the members-only Facebook group for FIMP. Of course, it’s free for all members, so hop on there, ask any questions you have and I will be happy to help you with them.

Other than that, they do also have a free trial (probably something I should’ve mentioned 20 minutes ago). So if you want to hop in and check it out for yourself, you can. I think it’s a 7-day trial, So you can check it out and poke around. And if you really want to, what you could do in there is you could sign up for the free trial, do a bunch of keyword research and then cancel before it bills. If that’s something you really wanted to do.

But I highly recommend investing in Long Tail Pro. Actually, keyword tools are going to save you a lot of time. It’s going to set you up for success a lot better. You’re just going to have a lot higher likelihood for the content you write to actually be rankable than when you are passing all this data around between these multiple tools.

And you’re not getting the industry’s best data because it’s not Majestic, it’s Moz when you’re using the free tools. Majestic unfortunately doesn’t have a free tool like Moz does. You just get a lot of advantages that are going to really set you up for success in the long run.

If I keep talking, I’m just going to keep rambling. So I’m going to shut up, I’m going to finish this video. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to post them into the Facebook group.

If you can’t afford it right now, don’t stress about it. Just use the free tools. But again, if you can afford it right now and you value your time and you see how much quicker this works, I strongly recommend investing in it. You can see that I have the plan below and they’re priced personally because I really believe in investing and using this tool.

If you have any questions I’ll keep an eye up from the Facebook group. Otherwise, I will see you in the next video. Or I’ll see you in the Facebook group.

Talk to you then.

5.5 Finding Keywords Using Free Keyword Tools (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • How to find high quality keywords using free keyword tools
  • The best free keyword tools currently available online
  • How to combine these free keyword tools to get useful data
  • Which keywords to target and which keywords to avoid based on search volume and competition
  • A step-by-step live demonstration of all of this in action

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

5.5 Transcript Below

Okay, let’s finally get into actually digging in and finding some keywords.

I want to start with free keyword tools because I’m well aware that a lot of the people (probably the majority of people watching this training series) don’t have the upfront investment capital to pay for premium keyword tools – especially since all of the really good ones now are monthly fee based instead of one-time fee based. I don’t why that happened. That was a trend over many years. You used to be able to get some really good ones (mainly one really good one) for a flat time fee and even they went monthly based now.

And there are some reasons for that that makes sense as far as their expenses go up – especially with a lot of the data APIs they have to pay for – but at the same time, honestly, I think most of it’s a money grab and it sucks. They did it because they can and because it’s much better for their revenue. Unfortunately. I wish that weren’t the case but that is the way it is.

But you shouldn’t feel at all like you can’t do this just because you can’t pay for the premium keyword tools. I got started with free keyword tools, and admittedly, that was a much different internet marketing climate than now. But it’s still absolutely possible if you know what you’re doing and you’re using the right tools.

It can be a little bit overwhelming so just know that finding keywords using free tools is going to be much more overwhelming because the data isn’t as interpreted and crunched for you. You kind of have to do a lot of that yourself using free keyword tools versus paid keyword tools.

But by no means should you feel like you can’t do this. And anybody that has made you feel like you can’t do this just because you can’t afford premium keyword tools is just out to get another affiliate commission out of you. People do that to make people like you feel like, “Oh I can’t succeed unless I spend more money.” And they just do that so that you’ll buy more things that are affiliate links. And unfortunately, that’s all too common in this industry and it’s just a really scummy thing that I don’t want you to feel like you have to do.

So free keyword tools are absolutely sufficient. You’re going to have to put in a little bit more legwork, but I’m going to show you exactly how to do it in this video.

So I want to talk really quickly about the pros and cons of using free keyword tools. Unfortunately, the cons do fairly heavily outweigh the pros for free keyword tools. But the pro is… and this is going to be enough for the vast majority of people watching this video I think… is that there are no added expenses. After you’ve paid for your hosting and your domain name, you’re good for a year. Those are all of your expenses feasibly if you’re using free keyword tools.

And so, I know that’s a lot of people out there just saying, “This is all I have. I only have, you know, $150 to get started my first year.” And a lot of people in this industry I feel like make you think that’s not enough because most of them charge more than that just for training in the first place. But it is more than enough.

I think the biggest expense in this industry is training – and you’re getting all of that here for free which opens up a world of possibilities – after that, it’s only hosting and a domain name. And if you’re willing to put in the legwork with free keyword tools, you’ve got everything you need to make a profitable internet business happen. So now that, you know, kind of all of this is in place… (not too toot my own horn) but thanks to this really high-quality step-by-step free training being published, this industry should be a lot more approachable than it ever was before.

So the pro (the only real pro) to free keyword tools is there’s no added expenses. And like I said, for a lot of people watching this video, that’s going to be more than enough. And I don’t judge you for that. That’s where I was when I started. So good on you for trying to improve your life! Just be prepared to put in a little bit extra work.

The bad news on free keyword tools is that they don’t give us as much at a glance data on competition. You can get data for competition (and we’re going to look at it live later in this video after we finish talking about some of the stuff in the slideshow), but it’s not as good as premium keyword tools just flat out. Some of the best premium keyword tools will make it kind of at a glance easy to see whether or not you should try and pursue that keyword – nothing like that exists in free keyword tools; only in premium keyword tools. So that can make it a little bit tricky and it makes it a little bit more overwhelming when you’re looking at the data because you kind of have to manually interpret a lot of it; but you’ll get better at it with time. That’s just the nature of the beast. If you’re looking to save money, you’re going to have to spend more time to work around some of these things.

So you’ll see exactly what I mean when we look at the free keyword tool and how we interpret competition. There are some really good ways to do it that are very dependable. Frankly, they’re more dependable than a lot of the premium keyword tools out there; but it’s going to take literally like ten times as much time. And you’ll see why if you watch the free keyword tool training and the premium keyword tool training. You’ll see side-by-side why it takes so much longer.

Another con is that the data for some of these free keyword tools is often not as accurate or reliable. That is not true for the main free keyword tool we’re going to be using – which is put out by Google themselves – so that’s the one we’re going to be using mainly and looking at the most. So this doesn’t really apply to them, but unfortunately, they don’t give any competition data. So we’ll talk about that as we go through, too.

And as I mentioned, it typically is going to take a lot more time for you to find keywords using free keyword tools versus premium keyword tools. And it’s no exaggeration to say that it will (pretty easily) probably take five to ten times as much time using free keyword tools than premium keyword tools. And again, if you don’t have the money to spend on premium keyword tools from the beginning – it doesn’t matter. You’re going to have to spend the time anywhere around it. I just want you to be prepared and know that that’s the case going forward.

So there are a number of really good free keyword tools out there honestly. If you just Google ‘free keyword tools’, ‘best free keyword tools’, you’ll find some really good ones. The ones that I found really helpful – and the most reliable, of course – is going directly to the source and that’s Google AdWords Keyword Planner (also just called the Google Keyword Planner).

You will need an AdWords account to use this. That doesn’t mean you need to spend any money with AdWords. You just need to go through the process of setting up an AdWords account. And even if your AdWords account has been suspended… which has happened to a lot of us as we started in internet marketing, trying to run some pay-per-click ads, and we got kind of slapped on the wrists (myself included)… so don’t worry even if your AdWords account is suspended… you can still use Google’s Keyword Planner.

So when you go to use Google’s Keyword Planner through AdWords… and you can find the Google Keyword Planner, just search the internet for ‘Google keyword planner’. It’ll pop up.

And the first time, if you don’t have an account, it will kind of prompt you through like a campaign creation wizard. And it’ll be like, “What do you want to buy keywords for? How much is your daily budget?” And just either: never launch that campaign or be very careful after you go through that wizard to turn off the campaign if you launched it; because otherwise, you’re going to actually be buying ads on Google which is not what you want to do if you’re trying to not spend money.

So anyways, that’s just a little bit of information about the Google Keyword Planner. But you can find it easily online: just search ‘Google keyword planner’ or ‘Google free keyword planner’ and then it’ll pop up – and you’ll recognize it because we’re going to look at it later in this video.

There are also some other somewhat helpful tools. Keyword.io used to be better than it is now. They’ve kind of locked down so much of their data and filled their site up with so many ads that it’s really annoying to use, but there’s still some useful help there. And Ubersuggest.io is another really good one that we’ll look at really briefly. It gives no search volume, unfortunately, so you have to kind of depend on Google for the search volume which is a smart thing to do – even a lot of the times when using premium keyword tools – because nobody’s data is going to be more accurate than Google’s.

So after finding our keywords, we need to… this is a workaround for free keyword tools… we need to check the competition using the free MozBar and you will need also to create a free account with Moz in order to do that. Both things that you can do very easily. Again, just using Google, just search the internet for ‘install MozBar’. Just like that. M-O-Z-B-A-R. And you’ll get the bar that we’re going to be using in this video.

The only unfortunate thing is Moz metrics used to be… we’ll talk about them here in a second… but they used to be the industry standard and kind of what everyone depended on; and they were the strongest indicators for whether a site was going to rank and how much ranking authority a website had – and that’s not really the case anymore. Majestic is another company in the industry; and instead of Moz has Domain Authority and Page Authority (which will make more sense in a second), Majestic has Trust Flow and Citation Flow. And over the years in the SEO industry – at least in the internet marketing world – Majestic has kind of taken the cake away from Moz and Trust Flow is one of the best components to look at when evaluating a website’s link portfolio and competition and how high authority that page and that domain are. But the good news is – at least for now – Domain Authority and Page Authority are still pretty good indicators. They’re just not the industry leaders anymore.

So when we use MozBar, we’re going to be using Moz’s metrics to analyze competition. And I just wanted you to know going in, I know they’re not the industry leader anymore; but unfortunately, Majestic doesn’t put out any free tools like this (at least as of recording this video) so that we can interpret competition. So we have to use the next best thing which is the second best metrics in the industry for analyzing competition and website authority.

So when we get in here… this is going to make a lot more sense in a second and we’ll reference back to this as we’re going through and kind of doing over-the-shoulder training where you’re looking at my screen and seeing what I’m looking for… but the important metrics that we’re going to be looking at when using the MozBar and trying to interpret competition – one of the absolute (actually, I would say the most important) metric when you’re looking for page authority or when you’re looking for competition – is Page Authority.

The closer you can get to less than 10 (it’s on a scale from 1 to 100), the better. Unfortunately, it’s gotten harder and harder and harder to find anything that doesn’t have at least PA 15, 20, 25 on the first page on Google. The good news is we can find weaknesses and other things which we’ll talk about here in a second… but long story short, you want to get as close to less than 10 as possible and you want to see some big holes in the other things that we’re going to talk about as far as competition goes if you want to target that keyword and have any chance at getting ranked even when your website is kind of building that authority.

So we’ll look at all that in a second but Page Authority is that specific page on their website that is ranked in Google right there in top 5, top 10 – whatever you’re looking at. It’s a proprietary metric based on a lot of different things; but a really, really heavy component of that is their link profile and how powerful the link profile is to their website. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, it doesn’t need to at this stage; but a link profile is everyone else on the internet that is linking to their site. They have created a link from a page on their site to that page that you’re now looking at in Google’s listings. That’s a link profile: what a bunch of different people are linking to and also the links from your own website going to that page. But that’s pretty advanced. We’ll get there when we’re talking about on-page SEO. So for now, I just want you to know that Page Authority is a Moz metric for the exact page you’re looking at on that site – that individual page.

Domain Authority (abbreviated DA) is what the entire domain authority is. It’s exactly what it sounds like. So whereas Page Authority is the individual page that you’re looking at (every page on a website has different authority), the Domain Authority for all of Stopping Scams – for example – stays the same. That does not fluctuate. Domain Authority stays the same across the entire domain.

The exception to that would be subdomains. Subdomains are treated as their own website. So for example… I don’t know… if I had Training.StoppingScams.com, the authority that I have for StoppingScams.com would not apply to the subdomain. So an even better example would be this is why I installed StoppingScams.com/FIMP for Free Internet Marketing Project instead of FIMP.StoppingScams.com because by installing FIMP in a subdirectory (StoppingScams.com/FIMP – so that’s installing it in a subdirectory) I leveraged the Domain Authority for all of Stopping Scams that I’ve built over the past… I guess three years is about how old the site is… so I get to leverage all of that in my ranking authority for my new content that I’m creating for Free Internet Marketing Project. If I had created FIMP.StoppingScams.com, that would not be true. It would be treated like a brand new website. It would have no Domain Authority.

And that’s not just by… Domain Authority doesn’t just exist in the world of Moz. They are the ones that kind of coined that metric but Domain Authority is a thing, regardless of whether or not you’re talking about Moz. So it’s not just like Moz created this thing that didn’t exist. It’s kind of like… I guess it’s kind of like Math. It’s probably a horrible and totally inaccurate analogy; but Math was always there. There were all kinds of laws that kind of controlled Physics and the way objects interacted with one another, et cetera; and so the underlying Math was always there but it took a while for us to discover it and we’re still discovering a lot of it.

The same thing is true for Domain Authority and Page Authority. These things exist even outside of the world of Moz or outside of the world of Majestic, but this helps us give them a name. And also, they have proprietary algorithms that crunch them and kind of represent them in a number form. That may not be totally accurate because they’re not Google and Google doesn’t release that information publicly, but Majestic and Moz are about as close as you can get to having a really good idea of how powerful that site is or that page is in Google’s eyes.

So, talked enough about that. But hopefully, that gives you a pretty thorough understanding of the concepts of Domain Authority and Page Authority – generally speaking – but as well as DA and PA when we’re talking about Moz’s proprietary metrics.

Another thing to look for is the exact keyword you are researching and considering trying to rank for is that in their meta title and description – which if you don’t know what those are, it’s okay. I’ll point it out as we’re going through live here in a couple of minutes. But that’s another very important thing, because fact of the matter is, you’re probably pretty much across the board going to see Domain Authority and Page Authority that are going to scare the hell out of you. The Page Authority is not going to be remotely close to less than 10 for most keywords you look at. So you have to start looking for the gaps in things like the exact keyword being in the meta title and the description, how well their content is ranked for regarding on-page SEO, stuff like that. So we’ll dig in and take a look at that when we’re looking through some of these keywords.

And another good thing to look for is answer-oriented sites Yahoo! Answers, old article directories like Ezine, and of course, answer sites like eHow and other things like that in the top 10 rankings are pretty good sign that probably means that there aren’t a whole lot of authoritative results there. This is not universally true, but it’s going to be true a lot because a lot of those sites rank based on their Domain Authority overall rather than their Page Authority for that individual page. And that’s actually really good for you because although they have really high Domain Authority, if you can come along and optimize them and have a more authoritative individual page, you could bump up above them. That’ll make more sense when we’re looking through the metrics live.

Another good sign is any kind of free blog site like WordPress.com… and I don’t mean a website that’s hosted on WordPress and they have their own domain name… like Stopping Scams, for example, is its own website hosted on WordPress. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about if you saw a website that was StoppingScams.WordPress.com, okay? Those are the kinds of ones that are a good sign. Same thing with Blogspot, Blogger – anything like that in the top 10, generally speaking.

Again, these last two are not universal; but more often than not, they’re going to be good signs that you could get rankings for those terms if you see those kind of really good signs; because again, they’re ranking more on their Domain Authority than their Page Authority. The competitors that are really hard to outrank are the ones that are ranking based on Page Authority. You can outrank someone that has high Domain Authority, but the really difficult thing to outrank is Page Authority.

So we’ll talk a look at all of this now – live – okay?

So the first thing I want to do is I want to pop in and show you a quick overview of a couple of the keyword tools and then we’ll take a look at a handful of keywords – hopefully without dragging things out too much. But I also want to make sure we go through enough that you actually get these concepts, because again, they’re essential for your success in the coming weeks and months and you really, really need to know how to pick keywords.

So let’s go ahead and hop in to Google.

So I’ve already popped in here ‘tattoo removal’. One of the nice things about most of these keyword tools is that you can pop in at what’s referred to as a ‘seed keyword’ and it’s going to give you all kinds of suggestions based on that seed keyword.

I do want to point out that you can change locations. Like I could narrow this down to my home city of Austin, Texas and get data just for Austin. I could do this for Texas, generally speaking; or I could do that for all of the United States; or just for Germany – or stuff like that. Typically speaking, that comes in really handy for when you’re doing research for local SEO… if you’re planning on getting local SEO clients – which, again, I hope to teach somewhere down the road. But that’s putting the cart before the horse for sure.

So when we’re talking about affiliate websites and just information-based websites, we’re going to probably end up getting traffic from all over the world. So we’re not going to concern ourselves with refining this too much. All locations is fine but I would make sure that I narrowed it down to English.

Something that people ask a lot is, “Can I run a website in French or German?” or whatever your native language is. And the answer is yes. Just make sure that you update the correct setting on Google’s Keyword Planner in order to do that.

So I guess that is one pro to Google’s Keyword Planner… that is not true for a lot of premium tools… is that you can change your language and get search volume for different languages. That is not true for a lot of premium tools. So that is also worth mentioning. I wish I thought about that for the slides. But just know that going forward.

So I’m just going to put in a broad kind of seed keyword. And as time goes on, you could take this broad seed keyword and find a handful of different ones and punch those into and come through and do this in several different cycles. I’m just going to – for right now – just show ‘tattoo removal’ generally speaking and we’ll see what this looks like in Google.

So when you’re brought into Google’s Keyword Planner after searching, you’ll get a lot of data here and you can adjust your keyword up here that we just put in on the last page. But you have Ad group ideas… and personally, I don’t spend really any time in here… I look at the individual Keyword ideas – because again, I’m not using this for Google pay-per-click. I’m using this for search engine optimization inspiration. And so, I’m using this tool very differently than it was originally created for – all SEOs do. But just know that. You’ll probably be operating in the Keyword ideas tab close to 100%, if not 100% of the time.

So we can just kind of scroll down here. I have these sorted by the Average monthly searches. And really quick note: Competition here is not SEO competition. The Competition you see here is for pay-per-click advertising which is a very different thing. There may be some overlap, but it is not dependable enough to say, “Oh, it’s low competition. I can go ahead and try for that with search engine optimization because it says it’s low competition.” That’s not the case at all. (Forgive me, I need to remember to breathe here. I’m just talking so much that I’m like running out of breath. Excuse me. Okay, that’s a lot better.)

So I mean, like Suggested bid… again, these are our pay-per-click metrics. We’re not going to concern ourselves with them too much. The main thing we want to look at is the keyword itself and the monthly searches. We can research competition individually.

So before we dig too deep, I’ve also punched ‘tattoo removal’ over here into Ubersuggest.io to give you an idea of what’s going on over here. So you can see all kinds of options here as well and they kind of break it down alphabetically (this is a really great way to get keyword ideas and long tail keyword ideas); and you know, just kind of click through and say like expand this keyword. So now, it’s going to search ‘tattoo removal equipment’; and obviously, this is going to be a much shorter list (because this was a much more specific seed keyword) but still worth showing.

So Ubersuggest is really cool in that sense and very helpful. Just know that it’s there at your disposal. Especially when you get to the point that you’re having a lot of trouble finding new keywords, Ubersuggest is really good. Even though it doesn’t give you the search volume, it’ll give you some ideas that you can then bring over to Google’s Keyword Planner and put them in and check their search volume and also get even more ideas from Google. So these things kind of stack on one another.

Again, I wish I could make it less overwhelming and less confusing; but this is just the nature of using free keyword tools. So you’re going to have to kind of find a groove of how to use these and it won’t be hard once you use them enough that you get a good feel for them.

So I’m going to re-sort by relevance (which is the default sort) and now you can see like this. As much as I would love to get ranked for this keyword, it is not going to happen remotely quickly. This is the kind of keyword that I could probably spend a year or two years trying to rank for and still probably only be creeping up page one. So I’m not even really going to pay a whole lot of attention to keywords that have really high search volume. I’m going to kind of skip down to the ones that have somewhere between 100 and 1,000 searches a month and even the ones that have between 10 and 100 searches a month.

Let’s take this one for example. I think this is a decent one because it’s fairly long tail. But you see there are a fair amount of these here saying ‘tattoo removals’, ‘removing a tattoo’, ‘cheap tattoo removal’, ‘best laser for tattoo removal’… and I haven’t looked at this really extensively before this video because I think (again) in this industry, you get coaches that hop in and they kind of stage a play-by-play and then they get in and then all the dots connect really quickly and you’re like, “Oh wow. That happened really quickly!” And you start doing it yourself and you’re like, “Why the hell is it taking me six hours when it took him 15 minutes on camera?” So, I try to keep it fairly unplanned so that it’s pretty representative of what it will look like when you’re doing it yourself.

So I’m actually going to take this one: ‘can tattoos be removed’. I might look at some others as well (I’m going to close out this tab from Ubersuggest) and we’re just going to punch this into Google. Again, assuming you have already installed the Moz free toolbar… and you can turn it off and on by clicking this little icon up here. Just a heads up: that’s how you turn it off and on because it can get kind of annoying if you’re not using it and it’s constantly popping up. So when I’m not using it, I have it turned off.

So the keyword ‘can tattoos be removed’… I’m not going to search it with quotes or anything like that… we want to see what this looks like. And the other nice thing for Moz is that you see this drop down here. It’s automatically removing the personalization from Google.

What will happen a lot of the time when people get into this industry is say, for example, I wrote an article about ‘can tattoos be removed’. And I wrote that article, I published it, checked it out at my website, I was so happy with it because I felt like it came out really, really well. And a week later, I searched ‘can tattoos be removed’ and of my God, there I am! I’m in the third position on Google! And then, people get super excited – rightfully so – but what they don’t know is Google has started personalizing search.

So you actually need to either de-personalize your search by using something like the Moz keyword tool or you just have to open a new private browsing window when you’re searching for your rankings, because otherwise, you’re going to get your hopes up and it’s going to be really disappointing when you find out that you’re not actually ranked anywhere near page one. That’s just Google personalizing search and they’re showing you that page that high because you went to the site previously.

Okay. So just disclaimer there. I’ve broken a lot of hearts with that information and it breaks my heart to tell people every single time because people are so excited; but it also explains why you rank for a keyword that gets a thousand searches a month and you’re not getting any traffic. It’s because you’re not actually ranked.

So that’s another nice thing about Moz’s keyword tool or the free MozBar is that it makes for non-personalized search results automatically.

So as we scroll down, you can see for the search term ‘can tattoos be removed’ which Google showed had somewhere between 100 and 1,000 searches a month – which sucks that it’s that big of a swing… that it is that broad like they couldn’t be more specific than that. But I know at the end of the day, that’s a keyword that I’m interested in it as long as the competition is low enough.

So we scroll down here for ‘can tattoos be removed’ and the first thing we see is a very, very authoritative site… WebMD.com and sites like Mayo Clinic and stuff like that. For anything health-oriented, they’re going to be very, very difficult to outrank. So I look at this and I think, “Could I get number one?” Very unlikely. But it makes sense that WebMD is ranked there, because at the end of the day, ‘tattoo removal’ is health-related.

So here’s another article ’10 Things I Wish I Knew Before Laser Tattoo Removal’ for RealSelf.com. I’m going to open that up and just see what kind of site that is. Okay, so RealSelf seems to be some sort of cosmetic-themed website where people talk to you, where people can review and write information about different cosmetic treatments… it looks like from dental to plastic surgery to cosmetic… or dermatological treatments which is technically what laser tattoo removal is. And you can see they’re ranked here, too. You can see they have pretty high Domain Authority overall. Here. Here.

Anything ranked on YouTube is going to have a Domain Authority of 100. But again, we’re not looking at Domain Authority too much. We’re looking at Page Authority. And another thing: whenever you see a PA 1 with a blip of all these other PA 50 or PA 47, either there’s been a reporting error from Moz or what’s also potentially happening here is that Google is giving this as kind of a localized result. (Man, I’m getting so tongue-tied today. I apologize.)

So I actually know that Eraser Clinic is a local business. They’re actually my tattoo removal clinic but they have a lot of locations around Texas. And so, that’s probably why they’re getting ranked here. This is not an advantage you’re going to have. So if you see something like a PA 1 or a PA 4 or 6 among all of these other PA 50, PA 40, PA 70 type websites, don’t think that just because they got there, you can too. It’s either a reporting error or there’s a special exception that applies to them that will probably not apply to you as a blogger. In this particular case, it’s because this website has a lot of really, really good unique content and they’re a local business – and again, that is not going to apply to you. You are not going to get that same advantage.

So this is a pretty scary keyword competition-wise. The lowest one is PA 29. And like I told you… I mean, again, without the exception of Eraser Clinic… I told you it’s going to be really hard to find PA 10 or less just in today’s search climate. It doesn’t really happen that much anymore. But I don’t really want to end up in 30, 40, 50, 70 in competing with these guys.

So the next thing you can look at too is how well are they optimized for this exact keyword. The exact keyword ‘can tattoos be removed’… you don’t see in the… remember, I mentioned meta title and meta description… you don’t see that. This is the meta title and this is the meta description right here. You do not see a single instance of that exact keyword ‘can tattoos be removed’ in this meta description or meta title. Same thing here. There is no exact match keyword for ‘can tattoos be removed’. (Good. I remembered the keyword correctly.)

So as we keep going down, ‘it can remove’… again, we see the keyword broken up throughout the content but we do not see anything with a meta title or meta description and also in the URL slug. We do not see anything that is fully optimized for ‘can tattoos be removed’. So that is the only good sign from this page. That’s a tough call.

And again, this is the thing when you’re using free keyword tools: it’s always going to be a difficult thing to call. I would be much more comfortable seeing like a bunch of PA 20-ish, maybe going up to 30; and nobody having optimized for ‘can tattoos be removed’ in their meta title and meta description. If I saw those two things combined, I would think, “Yeah. This is a keyword I’m going to write on.” If your site’s brand new, I would not expect to rank for it for several months; but again, you may have a shot at it as your website authority builds in the coming months. So I might add it to my list as somewhat moderate competition but I wouldn’t really get my hopes up for this one. I would aim for lower hanging fruit.

So it took us all that time. Granted, it will take you less time because you’re not sitting there talking about it over and over and teaching a video on this particular topic. And as time goes on (just like everything else) this gets easier and easier. But it took us all that time to rule out one keyword. And you’ll see how that is night and day compared to the premium keyword tool we’re going to be looking at in the next video. So just keep that in mind. Expect to spend some time here.

And so, let’s look at ‘best laser tattoo removal’ and see if we have any better results there. So I’ll just scroll back up. Moz’s pop-ups get pretty infuriating sometimes so you just have to deal with them unless you want to pay like $130 or $100 a month for their premium subscription. That’s the only way you’re going to get rid of these little pop-ups that keep coming up.

So again, you could see they’ve kind of localized this result by the fact that we’re seeing a map. This is the exact tattoo removal clinic that I go to. This is an ad. In fairness, they’re not up there at the top through SEO; but they are at the top through SEO up here. And again… man, we’re seeing a couple of things… I think Moz may have given me a notification about this as I hit Enter… could be wrong. Okay. They’re loading better now.

So again, when you see this PA 1, don’t think, “Oh, it’s PA 1! I’m going to be able to rank for this now.” It’s actually kind of a bad sign because Google very clearly thinks that this is a local-oriented search phrase. So someone searching ‘best laser tattoo removal’, they (Google) feel clearly like that is someone looking for the best laser tattoo removal locally. They don’t think this is someone that’s looking for the best type of laser tattoo removal. They think this is someone looking locally for the best tattoo removal business. And so, I wouldn’t even look at this one extensively because although it’s possible that we may get ranked somewhere down here at the bottom half of page one, the top half of page one for this term (pretty much across the board) is going to be dominated by local results. And so, that’s not going to be worth my time to get really deep into.

So, let’s see. Let’s look for another 100 to 1K. ‘Laser for tattoo removal’… let’s see what that one pops up. See what Google thinks is relevant there. Again, local listings. Anytime you see this map pop up, that’s an indicator that Google thinks that this is a more localized search term.

‘Tattoo removal clinic’ is definitely going to be a localized search term. (Excuse me while I get some water.) Let’s see because this is different than ‘best laser tattoo removal’. Let’s see if they think this one’s local, too. Yeah. It’s clear that Google thinks that that’s a local result as well because they’re putting the maps up top. You can see that there’s kind of a general discussion just below that. But again, like Eraser Clinic, Eraser Clinic, Westlake Dermatology – those are local businesses. Google thinks that this is a more local-related term.

So let’s kind of flip the script a little bit here. I’m going to sort by Average monthly searches. I’m going to sort ascending so that they go from the lowest to the highest. And another thing that’s worth mentioning is whenever you see a keyword like this that doesn’t make sense syntactically… like someone has just totally cut out a word here and kind of searched the way you search on the internet… and that makes it very hard to optimize an article for that keyword. And I personally just totally skip over these unless there’s a clever way to go about it – and hopefully, I come across an example – but writing an article that the title is ‘Getting a Tattoo Removed Cost’… the best way you could do that is something like that. So technically, that’s fully optimized for that keyword; but it’s just not the greatest user experience overall. And I think it’s also up for debate as to whether or not that actually has any payoff because Google’s algorithms (their bots, their spiders) now are smart enough to know when someone is just writing important English to try and appease an exact match for a keyword. So unless I could do it in a way that really made a lot of sense, I would just skip over those.

So let’s check ‘permanent tattoo removal price’. Ah, good! No local results. We’re seeing some fairly high Page Authority… not as high as before… so I would actually say that this is one that I would write for. Again, we’re seeing RealSelf. That’s apparently going to be a common theme for this particular niche. But these are all ads. This is what’s commonly referred to as ‘result zero’ or ‘position zero’ because it’s above all of the other ones. This only came about within the last couple of years. But you can see I’m not dealing with as high a Page Authority overall. Maybe the top two or three. But again, they’re RealSelf and they are not ranked for the exact match keyword ‘permanent tattoo removal price’.

So I could write an article that was like ‘Permanent Tattoo Removal Price: How Much Does Laser Tattoo Removal Cost?’ and that way, I’m going to rank for a lot of keywords. And this could just be a general topic. It would take a fair amount of research on my end because I know that my particular tattoo cost about $300 a session because it’s a really big one. But that’s not necessarily true for every tattoo. A lot of people have tattoos that are that big that they want to have removed or they have someone’s name that’s this big. Not everyone’s trying to get some almost two-foot tattoo removed from the front of their torso because they were a really, really stupid 20-year old. So yeah, that’s worth mentioning. But I would probably write an article somewhere around those lines.

So if I were doing keyword research manually, what I would do is I would have a little notepad open on my computer somewhere and I would take note of this one. I would take note of the search term; I would take note of the search volume (which of course, again, we’re only getting a range from Google); and I would probably take note of the average Page Authority throughout. You know, just kind of eyeball it. I wouldn’t actually crunch the numbers. So we see 43, 52, 36, 17, 48, 25, 30, 35, 19, 29… so I’d probably say PA 30. And I would also take note along the lines of (I’m just going to have to open up and do this. I’m going to create a new document. Show you how I would do this)… I would also take note of whether or not they were optimized for the exact keyword.

So I would come over here and I would take ‘permanent tattoo removal price’, drop it in here. Okay. And then, I would… an Excel spreadsheet would probably be better, actually. Let’s do that. I’m starting to run around so much. Again, I use premium keyword tools. I haven’t done manual keyword research extensively in quite a while. Fortunately, it hasn’t change that much. The main tools when I was doing it were Moz and Google Keyword Planner and that hasn’t changed. But yeah, so I don’t really keep spreadsheets and stuff like this anymore. My premium keyword tool that you’ll see in the next video keep track of all my list and stuff like that. But I would have a Keyword column, I would have Search Volume, and I would have Average PA, and I would have Optimized for KW?. And this is, again, going to be the meta title and the meta description. Are they optimized for the keyword?

So, ‘permanent tattoo removal price’ (sorry about that, I opened up all kinds of crap here)… okay, ‘permanent tattoo removal price’ number of searches is 10 to 100; average Page Authority was I said 30; optimized for keyword, No. Or I could just put ‘N’ there. So now we’ve got our first keyword. This keyword… we would write an article specifically for this keyword. I mentioned what I would call that article, ‘Permanent Tattoo Removal Price: How Much Does Laser Tattoo Removal Cost?’ That’s going to kind of double optimize for those two keywords and probably optimize for a ton of other keywords. But, as I went through and I wrote the article, I really only focused on doing this. I’d just throw this in there for extra (hopefully) bonus SEO points.

So, that’s one and then we would just keep going through. And I would say in one session, I would aim to get at least ten keywords like this that meet kind of the same criteria. Hopefully, we can get even lower average Page Authority if you kept looking… even lower than kind of an average of 30… and hopefully somewhere, find some keywords around average Page Authority of 20 or maybe even as well as 15. But like I said, that’s going to be really hard in today’s search climate and it’s only going to get harder and harder as time goes on.

So I think this has been really helpful overall. You know, we saw examples of like… what was it? Health MD? I don’t know what it’s called… anyways, the really authoritative website that we saw… and kind of an example of yeah, we’re never going to outrank those guys. But then also, we saw a lot of different examples for local keywords. Remember, if you see the map pop up, it’s probably not worth going for unless you’re a local business because Google clearly is going to give preference to local businesses for those terms. And at the very best, you are not going to rise above the map… you know… you’re going to be bumped halfway down the page just because the map is there.

And you know, there’s going to be all kinds of keywords as we dug deeper and deeper into this that we could have pulled from Google or from Ubersuggest. For example, like I could put in here ‘does tattoo removal hurt’. Get ideas. Sometimes you get a little error like that. Typically, clicking back and forth helps. But I guess not. There we go. This time. Cool. So you saw that I got an error and I just clicked back and forth in these tabs until it worked. Again, just tricks of the trades you learn over time. So this is probably too high a search volume for me to optimize for. But let’s see. Like this keyword doesn’t make any sense: ‘how much is to remove a tattoo’. I wouldn’t ever, ever go for that just because it just doesn’t make sense.

Keyword Planner’s having issues for some reason. Okay, I re-sorted by relevance here. So ‘does tattoo removal hurt’ is still up there at the top. I’m still getting a lot of unrelated keywords frankly. There you go: ‘is tattoo removal painful’. Let’s check that one out really quick. Come over to Google, ‘is tattoo removal painful’, and you can see at least we’re not seeing local listings. But we can see PA 72. WebMD – that’s what I was thinking about, not Health MD. WebMD is all the way down here at the bottom; but again, it’s not directly related so I wouldn’t worry about it too, too much. ’10 Things You Need to Know About Laser Tattoo Removal’… this one’s kind of a coin toss. I would probably lean towards avoiding it because we see some fairly… I don’t know… that’s tough. It’s tough because we’ve got RealSelf again and none of these guys are directly optimized for ‘is tattoo removal painful’.

There’s a lot of ‘does laser tattoo removal hurt’ and there’s a mention of it being painful here. This is actually a really good representation of what we’re talking about, how we skirt around these things. Because you can see here that this site… if they have low Domain Authority… and it’s distinctly possible that this is an accurate readout of PA 1… we can always open up the… you only get a limited number of these every day if you have their free membership, but I just click this little Link Analysis… I think you get three free per day and we can kind of look at the detail metrics. And it does look like they in fact have a Page Authority of 1 and they don’t have any links that Moz is aware of.

Majestic or Ahrefs is another premium tool, but again, they’re very expensive. Each one of those is like $100 a month. But you can get really, really in the weeds with these stuff. And at the end of the day, if you just focus on doing your best as far as these metrics go; and writing really, really high-quality content; and putting out a lot of that really high-quality content – you’re going to see results.

So at the end of the day, if you feel really overwhelmed by all of this… again as always, take a deep breath and remind yourself: big picture. I don’t need to do this absolutely perfectly, I’m doing the best I can, and I’m doing it a hell of a lot better than most people trying to get started this industry. If you can’t afford premium keyword tools, this is what you’ve got. Right? Work with what you’ve got and just stick with it. Work the course. Work the program.

This is a perfect example of what I’m saying that we’ve got some really high Page Authority sites here but nobody is directly optimized for ‘is tattoo removal painful’. The one site… the article is about a little over a year old so that’s about all that has going for it and a little bit of Domain Authority… but the one site that directly optimized… and their meta description isn’t even optimized, it’s only their meta title.

So actually once I saw that, I was about to say I’m not sure I’d write for this one. But now, I absolutely would because you can see what a page with almost no authority, a very unestablished website… just because they optimized for this keyword and there are some other things at play… remember, they do have Domain Authority… they have little bit older website than you would have at this point… so there are other things at play. You shouldn’t expect to publish an article (even a really high-quality article for this) and get ranked immediately. But this is absolutely one of those articles that you could publish – you could write about and publish.

And as you begin to build authority as you’re writing about all of these other topics and people start talking about your website and linking to your website and finding your website and staying for a while and reading, you’re going to see articles like this go up and up and up over time – which is exactly what this person is experiencing right now. They wrote a good really high-quality article, they optimized it as far as even the URL slug has a partial match for the keyword, and let’s… ‘is tattoo removal’ and so if we search ‘painful’, they… wow. They only have one mention of ‘painful’ the entire article so we could very easily optimize for this.

(And my God, this is horrible tattoo removal. Okay, right after the first treatment. Never mind. I thought they were showing these as they’re finalized. I just got lost in the industry. I apologize. I thought they were showing these as finalized results. These are just directly after treatment and they always look a little bit funky immediately after treatment.)

So anyways, this is a perfect example of what we’re aiming to do. That site is writing some really high-quality content and it does look like they’re at least doing lead generation. Ah, no. They’re a local business. Okay. So that’s another reason why they’re ranking – which goes back to what I said of them being a local business. So remember that they’re going to get some advantages that you’re not going to have.

So, would I write about this with that in mind? ’10 Things You Need To Know…’ Everyone else is just so under-optimized for the exact match keyword that I’d probably still do it. I’d probably still do it even knowing that that’s a local business. But so anyways, we’re getting really into the weeds here. I want you to see this firsthand and hear everything about how I interpret things and why I’m thinking about it this way, and why I’m saying it’s good and why I’m saying it’s bad. I would still write an article on this one. I think I could get ranked for this one. Again, it’s not giving total preference to local because we don’t have that map up top.

So I don’t know. Maybe I don’t write about it immediately, but at the very least, I add it to my spreadsheet. So I would come over here, I would say ‘is tattoo removal painful’ (delete that extra line there), and it has 10 to 100 searches a month. Oh, no. That one has 100 to 1,000. So that’s one of the reasons it’s a higher competition keyword, too.

So keeping that in mind… yeah, I probably don’t write for it; because again, higher search volumes is almost always going to mean higher competition – at least at this stage in my business. A year from now… if I wrote constantly for a year and I started building that authority, I would not be so afraid of a higher competition + higher search volume keyword. But immediately right off the bat, just the odds of getting ranked for it are not super high.

So we can see there’s an average. If I had to ballpark this Page Authority, I’d say probably around 35. Optimized for keyword? No. The only one that’s optimized for keyword was that local one and it was ranking okay.

So I would just keep going until I found at least 10 of these. Also keeping in mind, maybe you have another kind of section. You have maybe a column here and a column down here that’s like Maybes? because you’re going to find some that… you know… you’re kind of up in the air about and maybe one day you get to a point and you’re like, “What should I write about today? Hmm. I don’t know. I’m going to do this because I just don’t feel like doing keyword research” And yeah, there’s a chance that we’ll get ranked for it at some point. And you’ll be surprised how many of those over time could pay off.

And the other thing to keep in mind is if you write about this keyword, you will also potentially get rankings for a lot of longtail keywords that you weren’t directly optimizing for that are related to that topic, too. So a good piece of content’s a good piece of content. It’s going to be an asset to your business any way around it.

But just keep these things in mind, okay? Some of these competition authority notes that we’ve talked about. And just, again, work the program. Stick with it. Practice, practice, practice. This is going to be super overwhelming and possibly very confusing even if you’ve watched this video once, twice, three times and you start doing a lot of it yourself. But the more you stick with it, the better you’re going to get.

Now, this in contrast to premium keyword research tools is night and day. And this is where you’re going to see like, “Oh. That’s why people pay for premium keyword research tools even though they’re really expensive.” Because everything we just did… I don’t know how long this video has run… there it is. It’s run like an hour now. We’ve run from slideshow to going through and probably at least 40 minutes of that was actual keyword research. That’s just the process of free keyword research tools. Period. It gets a lot faster when we get into premium keyword research which is the next video.

So if you don’t have the budget for it, don’t feel bad. Don’t feel crappy. Don’t feel like you’re doomed. You’re just going to have to get really good at everything you just saw in this video. Make sure to search the Facebook group to see if anybody else has been talking about this and ask questions there if you have them.

But at the end of the day, whatever you write for as long as you’re optimizing on page, in time (if you stick with it) we’ll start ranking for long tail keywords or the exact keyword you were targeting. Just keep that in mind. Even if it feels like a waste of time today, if you do it correctly and it’s really high-quality, it may start paying a year from now, eight months from now, six months from now, two years from now as you continue building your site. Just know that, okay?

Very important note: you want to keep the big picture in mind, because otherwise, you’re going to get really overwhelmed and feel really defeated throughout a lot of this process.

But that’s free keyword research tool or free keyword research – and I guess, keyword research using free tools would be the correct way to say it. That’s as good as it gets. And you would probably need to carve every couple of weeks eight or ten hours out of your work to just research keywords and find high-quality keywords. The good news is… you know, we went through this; and of course, I walked you through every step… you could probably check out individual keywords within two or three or four minutes of one another and knock it all out much quicker than this. But just remember: it takes time, it takes practice, and there’s nothing wrong with these free keyword research tools. You’re just going to have to work at it a little bit harder.

So I’m done rambling. I hope I did this topic justice. Very, very complex topic… as we’ve discussed also very, very important.

So as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the Facebook group. And I will see you over there or I will just see you in the next video where we’re going to take a look at how different and how much quicker and more efficient this is if you do have the budget for premium keyword research. See you there!

5.4 Qualified Traffic vs. Unqualified Traffic (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • Why all traffic is NOT created equal
  • Why you shouldn’t rank for a keyword in your industry simply because you can
  • An example of how this has bitten me in the butt in my own business

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

5.4 Transcript Below

Alright! Let’s make this pit stop as quick as possible while also making sure it’s effective and teaches you what you need to know while we linger here.

So like I mentioned (tying up the last lesson), this is all about Qualified Traffic versus Unqualified Traffic. And we’re going to talk very extensively here – but briefly – so we’ll be efficient about what exactly that means.

And at the end of the day, the moral of the story is that all traffic is not created equal. That is a very important concept to learn early on. And I wish it’s something someone had explained to me. And it’s something that I see a lot of really advanced internet marketers that are very successful… even they aren’t paying attention to this… they’re just going after all the traffic they can without even thinking about whether or not it’s going to result in anything that’s beneficial to them.

So you see it more commonly made with new internet marketers, but I’ve seen it (again) with people that are making $10000, $15000, $20000+ a month. They continue to make these mistakes. And it’s a really simple concept if you know to look out for it.

Just because a keyword in your niche has high search volume and low competition (at least relatively speaking) does not necessarily mean that it’s an opportunity for you. Even if they’re technically kind of borderline in your target audience, if that’s not the kind of person based on their search intent that is going to take action in your conversion funnels in the things that you offer on your website and the affiliate offers you promote or the products that you’re selling – they don’t mean anything on your site. I don’t care if there are 10,000 of them a month that you can rank for. It’s just going to flood your site with a bunch of worthless traffic.

So you have to realize that your posts which is fueled… it’s very directly determined and influenced by which keyword you pick. It has to relate very closely (at least closely enough) to other content and offers you promote on your website to result in conversions. So that’s a statement we could probably spend 15 minutes breaking down. But I think the easiest way to discuss it would be to look at my review of an MLM product.

So I did this (I’m going to… you know… you’re going to see the rest of my slides but whatever) on Stopping Scams, specifically, where I review a lot of products and I typically stick to internet marketing and affiliate marketing products specifically. But I decided this time, okay, I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to write an article about this MLM. I had a friend that was trying to recruit me into this multi-level marketing or network marketing (however you want to say it) opportunity called Nerium. And it’s a skin cream, basically.

And he was getting in really early stage, he had been really successful previously in another network marketing company, and he was recruiting me. So I wrote this post. It was actually when Stopping Scams was really young. Stopping Scams was a pretty new website… I had run NoMoreBSReviews.com at that point for a few years but decided to transition into something that was more holistic – that I could do training and not be so confined to just doing reviews because that was what people expected to see based on my domain name.

So when Stopping Scams was fairly new and I was trying to build the authority, I wrote this article. It just so happened to be something that was timely for me because my friend was trying to recruit me. And it just destroyed our friendship. And that is what this article is about. The title is “How MLMs Ruin Friendships – My 100% Honest Nerium Review”. I have gotten since then thousands upon thousands upon thousands of visitors for this article because it ranks fairly well for things like ‘Nerium scam’ and some kind of long tail Nerium traffic that a lot of people end up searching for.

And I have tried everything. Again, coming from someone that has a lot of conversion optimization experience: short of finding an MLM product in the beauty industry and promoting it or promoting Nerium and completely compromising my morals – because when I researched Nerium, it did not have a good reputation at all. That may have changed since then. But outside of promoting Nerium or promoting something that was closely related to Nerium, these people – no matter how many of them I get – are not converting for internet marketing training, how to build an online business.

And you would think they would, right? You would think someone interested in an MLM opportunity is interested in building a business. Why not try to foot that traffic into building an online business? Building an internet business based on affiliate marketing or blogging – whatever the case may be. And they just don’t. I have tried so many things for this particular article and they just do not flip well. They don’t convert. They are interested in MLM opportunities. They are interested in Nerium. They are not interested in making money online or building a business around content marketing.

So at the end of the day, I still get over a hundred (sometimes a couple hundred of visitors a day) from this one article. And they just don’t convert into my particular funnel. And like I said, if I wanted to… I probably should because I’m probably leaving a decent chunk of money on the table… I could find something in that industry that was more network marketing, MLM oriented, and promote it, and make some decent money. But, I’m just not… no offense to anybody that is… I’m just not that into MLM businesses myself. I find (on the whole) the products to be really overpriced for a comparable quality in the industry that’s not based on an MLM model. You have to be able to pay people enough commissions, and as a result, they end up being really expensive. So that’s the reason I haven’t pursued this. But it is the perfect example of unqualified traffic.

A lot of people that compete in the same space as Stopping Scams that run review websites write a lot about MLMs and they see a ton of traffic but they don’t see a whole lot of conversion into promoting internet marketing training, internet marketing business because those things… even though they’re both interested in business… even though they’re both interested in extra income and potentially even passive income, they’re… if you think about a Venn diagram where the circles are overlapping… they’re just like not. They’re just two separate circles.

And so, that is my example (my very painful example) of traffic that just does not convert – even though I’m getting a lot of it. And technically, they are in the same space as Stopping Scams’ average visitor; but they are not converting because they’re just not closely related enough to the offers and the training and the benefits that I am offering them.

So long story short, just because you can rank for something… just because there’s something out there with search volume that you could potentially get rankings for, does not mean it’s always worth your time or it’s going to make you money.

It wasn’t just Nerium that I did this for. There were a number of other articles when I was getting Stopping Scams established, coming over from No More BS Reviews. And whereas No More BS Reviews had something like overall 20% of people that visited that website opted in to my email list, it fluctuated somewhere between like 18% and 23% of all visitors overall – which was insane. You know, sometimes I’m lucky to get like 5% on Stopping Scams and a big reason for that is because I wrote about a lot of things that frankly just were not related to the offers that I was promoting, to the free training that I was giving away, and to my email list, et cetera.

And as a result, now I have a lot more traffic (don’t get me wrong) which is kind of cool; but at the end of the day, that traffic doesn’t mean anything to me because I can’t get it to convert. And if you can’t get it to convert and equal something in your business – whether it be furthering your reputation, building your following, making extra money – it’s just not worth taking the time to write a piece of content about and target.

So you can find other keywords that may have 10% or even 5% as much search volume as that keyword and make more money because the other keyword with lower search volume is much higher quality and much more directly related to what you’re promoting and much more clearly in your target audience. And as a result, you’re going to make more money going for those keywords rather than going for the keywords that have higher search volume but are more of a stretch as far as whether they’re interested in what you’re pitching and what you’re talking about and what you’re teaching – the value you’re trying to put into their lives.

So anyways, that’s that lesson.

Long story short, just because you can rank for something, doesn’t mean it’s worth your time or it’s going to make you money. It’s distinctly possible that going for a keyword that had much lower search volume could make you a lot more money in the short term and the long term. So just keep that in mind. It’s a very, very important lesson.

And as you’re looking at keywords and you’re kind of building this list of keywords, think about it. Think about “Is this person in my target audience?” because a lot of the time, you can tell just by the keyword they’re searching and staying tuned to it as you are building your website.

Because even if you may not be able to call it right off of the bat – because you’re just fairly new to this or you’re getting to know your niche or your industry, pay attention to it and the trends of how well traffic on your site is converting for given keywords over time (we’ll talk about analyzing that data way down the road) – but it’s possible.

And just stay tuned into it, because if you don’t, you may just keep writing about a bunch of keywords that aren’t ever going to convert. When if you just paid attention, you could kind of learn which keywords are converting better than others, what traffic is converting better than others and make more money with dramatically less traffic.

So as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group. That’s free for registered members. And I will see you over there.

And finally, we’re going to get into actual keyword tools. We’re going to start off with a bunch of ways to analyze keywords using free keyword tools and then we’ll talk really briefly about some totally optional ways to find keywords using premium keyword tools.

So in the next lesson, we’ll dig in. You’ve got all of the foundation going forward for how to do keyword research and now it’s time to jump in and actually find some keywords. So I’ll see you there!

5.3 How We Use Keywords to Ignite Our Content (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • How many keywords to use per article/blog post on your website
  • An overview of how we use keywords to grow our internet business
  • The exact criteria we’re looking for in every keyword we write content for

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

5.3 Transcript Below

Okay. So now that we know what keywords are and we know kind of what our overall keyword strategy is going to be, we need to talk about exactly how we use keywords to ignite our content.

And for those of you that this is kind of a recap, I hope you’ll hang in there with me. It’s distinctly possible that you’ll learn a couple of new things just watching this lesson if you are more familiar with some of these ideas, but I want to make sure that I’m not leaving anyone behind. So I want to say very explicitly how we are going to use keywords in our business to kind of ignite our content and get a lot of traction in the coming months.

So keywords – as I’ve mentioned several times by this point – are the fuel for successful content. So first, what we want to do before we write anything is when we’re preparing for an article, we want to find one or two keywords that we want to target in that article. Some people say, you know, target three keywords, optimize an article for five keywords; I find when you do that, you’re almost spreading yourself so thin that it’s really hard to pay attention and do the work at high enough quality that it actually means anything. Sure, you can go out there and try to optimize every article you write for five different keywords; but you’re going to be spreading yourself so thin that you might as well have not tried to optimize for any keywords.

So personally, I only focus on one keyword for every single article I write and I train my writers to do the exact same thing: pick one keyword and write for that one keyword, optimize for that one keyword. Because at the end of the day, if you do that and you write really high-quality content, you’re going to accidentally rank for a lot of other keywords in time around that topic – just based on the context of your article, and what people are saying when they link to you, what other kind of articles and websites are linking to you because you have such high-quality content.

So I only focus on one keyword because (again) for me, it’s quality over quantity. I want to really make sure we knock that one keyword out of the park. We want to pick one really good keyword, we want to optimize for one really good keyword; and then from there, we’re just not going to worry about it too much. We’re just going to focus on that one, we’re going to publish, and we’re going to move on to the next piece of content, alright? And of course, we’ll talk about all of that in great detail in the coming lessons and sections.

So after we find that one keyword, we write a really, really high-quality post about that keyword – ideally, better than anything else on the internet. That should be your goal when you’re writing content is if you know the topic so well because you’ve had a job or you have some sort of certification; or if you don’t know it well enough and you have to go out there and research your butt off so that you come up with a piece of content that is more helpful for that keyword than what anybody else has written about or at least holds a candle to the top competitors. That’s what we’re aiming to do with our content. As far as you’re concerned, you should set a standard for yourself that aiming for anything shy of that is not acceptable because it’s going to hurt your business in the long run.

Does every piece of content you put out need to be 5,000 words? Absolutely not. You can have really high-quality content that’s 1,200 to 1,500 words. And we’re going to talk very explicitly about how to write high-quality content. But just know, you’re not going to be able to pump out 300- and 500-word articles and they’re going to be the best on the web. You really need to kind of get down into the details to truly help people; and the better you do that, the higher quality content you have; and the more you do that, the more you aim for that, the closer you’re going to align with the goal of having the best piece of content on the internet for that particular keyword.

And then there are other things we can do like we can make sure that we optimize that piece of content for that keyword better than anyone else has and we’ll start talking about that as we get into actual keyword tools and we start trying to find high-quality keywords that we want to target with our content.

So I’ll just mention this briefly: that after we write the really high-quality content (hopefully the best piece of content on the internet for that particular keyword and topic), we optimize our post for those keywords. And that is what we’ve referred to many times throughout the training up to this point as SEO (search engine optimization). And there’s on-page SEO; there’s off-page SEO. We’re going to talk about both in different sections as we work on the upcoming lessons.

So just know… we’re in Section 5 now… in Section 6 we’ll talk about really high-quality content and we’ll talk about on-page SEO very, very explicitly there. And then I believe it’s Section 7 when we start talking about how to get traffic to your site. I’ll do a very thorough training on off-page SEO as well. So anyways, just know that’s coming. That’s what we talk about when we talk about optimizing our posts for the keywords we’re targeting. We’ll get there. But just know that’s what it means for now.

And in time, as time goes on, our website begins to build authority and starts ranking for the terms we’re targeting. And I mentioned this is the last lesson, it’s often retroactive. So just because you spend eight months writing content without seeing any real results; you’re just writing really, really high-quality content; sometimes you’re wondering if you’re doing everything correctly… I talked in Section 2 about mindset… that’s normal. You’re going to encounter those phases when you’re trying to build an internet marketing business with little to no investment capital. So you’re going to in those eight months wonder, “Am I doing this right? Why am I not seeing any results? And is this whole industry a scam?” et cetera.

But the good news is once you start to see that tipping point I’ve talked about say at Month 9 or Month 10… Month 10 or Month 11, for example… you’ll start to see that content from those first eight months will start to rank as well. So it kind of ranks retroactively a lot of the time. And as your entire site’s authority builds, a lot of the content that did not previously have enough authority to rank will start to get that authority and start to rank; and you’ll start seeing traffic come in for keywords that you didn’t even optimize for. It just happens when you put out really high-quality content and you focus on your on-page SEO.

So all of this adds up to: we find a really good keyword; we write a really high-quality piece of content; we optimize that piece of content for rankings; and then over time, we start to get traffic to our website – because we do this over and over and over again, people start talking about us, people start finding the site, people start engaging with our site in a way that indicates to Google, “Hey, there’s some really high-quality stuff here!” And all of those things begin to stack on top of each other (again, it’s cumulative) and then we start to see results, we start to get traffic and more traffic and more traffic. And if we’re doing the right things with that traffic, we’ll start making more money and more money and more money. And again, we’ll talk about that later in the training in a different section; but just to give you kind of a big-picture view.

So what specifically should you be looking for in a keyword?

Ideally, a keyword will have at least 30 to 100 searches a month. Sometimes, you can build a business on writing for a bunch of keywords that have 10 searches a month. You’re just going to have to write for more keywords and rank for more keywords. But that’s okay sometimes. But ideally, we’d like to find keywords that we can realistically rank for – that have at least 30 to 100 searches per month.

The lower the competition, the better. I forgot my close parenthesis over there at the end of ‘tools’. We’re going to talk more about that when we begin looking at keyword tools. Exactly how to determine what your competition is for that keyword, how to find low competition keywords, what indicates that something’s a low competition keyword – it’s a combination of many different things. But we’ll take a look at those when we begin looking at keyword tools in Lesson 5.5 and Lesson 5.6.

I typically do keyword research in chunks so I’m not going to sit down and do keyword research for every single article. I may carve out half a day or a day, do a lot of keyword research, take note of all of it, and then use it to fuel my content for the next six to ten articles – if not more. And then when I run out of keywords that I wanted to write content for, I go back and I do another chunk of keyword research.

So just know that it comes down to efficiency. If every single article you write, you have to come back; and you spend several hours focusing on keyword research; then you go and you write the article; and then you come back – it’s just going to interrupt your flow. It’s better to do it all or a big chunk of it and then focus on writing for the next several articles (next several posts) on your website, and then come back to keyword research. And also, it’s nice. It gives you a little bit more variety without sacrificing efficiency.

So before we do all of this (again, we’re getting really close to digging into keyword research tools), we need to talk about why some keywords in your niche are valuable and some are totally worthless. And if you don’t (at least) vaguely know about this going in, it can really bite you in the butt and you could end up with a website that has a thousand visitors a day and you can’t… no matter how much you optimize for conversions, no matter what offers you promote… you can’t get more than $500 a month out of that website even though you’re getting 30,000 visitors a month. That just doesn’t make sense. That happens to a lot of people because they don’t know to look for qualified traffic versus unqualified traffic when they’re doing keyword research. So I want to make one very specific stop there and talk about that and then we will go on and start looking at keywords in keyword research tools.

So as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group – it’s free for registered members. And I will see you there and I’ll see you in the next video.

5.2 The Anatomy of a “Perfect” Keyword (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • What USED to make for a perfect keyword
  • Why that isn’t the case anymore
  • How to turn this tradition and outdated teaching to our advantage
  • A strategy for building a successful website in even the most competitive niches or industries

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

5.2 Transcript Below

Okay, let’s do this. Let’s talk about what we are looking for in a keyword.

So the anatomy of a perfect keyword and what makes a keyword more desirable than another is… traditional teaching (that goes back years and years in this industry) is you want something that has as high search volume as possible – something that is searched every month as much as possible and we can pull that data very dependably from several different tools. We’ll get into that later as we start looking at specific keyword tools later in this section.

But you want something that a lot of people are searching every month and that doesn’t have a whole lot of competition – and that can mean a lot of different things. There are a lot of metrics that determine competition, and again, we’ll cover those very extensively later in this section. But the traditional thinking in this industry that’s been taught for years (going back almost to the birth of affiliate marketing) is you want high search volume + low competition and that is a unicorn. That is the perfect compensation. That is what you want to find.

My experience is… especially as the internet has become more and more saturated and more and more competitive… you know, of course, there are probably billions… well, without out doubt there are billions of webpages… at least hundreds of millions of websites… well yeah, at least tens of millions of websites I’d say… but probably more in the hundreds of millions. So as time has gone on and the internet has been packed with more and more content, it’s become more and more difficult to find those really high search volume keywords that would be really easy to rank for without some pretty complex knowledge for search engine optimization. So in my experience and in my opinion, this mindset is very much an artifact of the old days where you would build like a three- or five-page website and you would try to optimize it for one very specific keyword, two very specific keywords, three very specific keywords that were really high in search volume.

Modern-day websites typically have a lot more content. We’re posting content much more regularly; we’re blogging two or three times a week, if not more (a lot of us at least once a week); and even that within a month, you’re going to outgrow kind of the average size of an affiliate marketing or internet marketing website ten years ago.

So everyone knows that internet marketing changes very rapidly. From one year to the next even, there can be a lot of changes. But certainly, every two or three years (and really every five years beyond a shadow of a doubt), things almost get turned upside down and revolutionized – and are completely different than they were five years ago.

So the reason I refer to this as kind of an artifact of the old days is because everything else has changed. Search engine optimization has changed dramatically, of course. All different kinds of marketing, pay-per-click advertising… everything’s been revolutionized. But we still have a bunch of people teaching, and as a result, a bunch of students looking for these really high search volume keywords with as low a competition as possible. And back in the day, I mean even pre-2012, you could probably get away with that because search engine optimization was more of a question of quantity than quality – which can technically be argued there are ways to do that today that are still possible. But again, that’s getting really, really advanced. Just know – for the advanced people that are watching – I know that there things like PBNs and all these other things that can be used to kind of circumvent the changes that were put in place since 2012 but without getting super, super overwhelming and getting just way down a rabbit hole.

2012 is when Google released Penguin 2.0. So Penguin 2.0 was technically their second release (big release) of Penguin which is an algorithm that they used to punish websites based on over-optimized anchor text, way too many links, et cetera. So again, probably even getting too thick into the weeds here… but the long story short is once Google did that, it became much more difficult and much more complex (to the point that you almost need a really sophisticated understanding of search engine optimization) to beat Google at their own game. So you can either play by Google’s rules which is focused on high-quality content and our algorithms will take care of the rest; or you can get really, really, really deep into how to game Google. But again, that takes a ton of technical understanding and it’s a very, very difficult thing to learn. So you have those kind of two options and it’s also much higher cost – much, much higher cost.

So you have those two things and… I’ve ended up down a rabbit hole even though I didn’t want to. But it’s good to know, because essentially – pre-2012 – you could just build a bunch of links that said ‘laser tattoo removal’, right? The link was laser tattoo removal so that was it’s anchor text. So if you wanted to click on that link, you would be clicking on the words ‘laser tattoo removal’. And I could just go get a ton of those. I could just go get hundreds or thousands of those linking to RueTattoo.com, and in time, I would rank for that term. So even though it was a really competitive term, I’d be able to get ranked for it. No problem. I would just have to spend a lot of time and invest in teams (which typically could be hired very easily out of India) to get a really high quantity of links.

And quality didn’t really factor in. Well now, Google looks very extensively and very thoroughly at the quality and the context of those links as well. So you get punished when you try to abuse it that way – which, back in the day, that’s just how you got ranked. Now, it’s how you get a website buried and never found again. Unfortunately.

So I say it’s an artifact of the old days because you could get ranked for those high search volume + low competition (as low competition as you could find terms) fairly easily. It was just a matter of who could get the highest quantity of links really quickly. And as long as you could keep adding that quantity of links, you were probably going to get ranked in the top three. It doesn’t really work that way anymore. And as a result, ranking for a high competition or high search volume keywords because they’re so desirable has become more and more difficult.

So I’ve probably spent way too much time on this, and hopefully, none of you were just like your heads are just like spinning. If they are, take a deep breath… don’t worry about it… because a lot of that’s going to make so much more sense as we continue through the other sections. But just kind of to really explain why I say this is kind of an artifact of the old days, we don’t have to do it this way anymore. We really don’t. It’s really kind of swimming against the current compared to what today’s search engine climate looks like compared to what it looked like five years ago.

So, moving on. People are probably just like fast-forwarding like, “Oh God, finally!”

So higher search volume keywords (like I’ve mentioned briefly) are usually dominated by high authority established websites. So websites that have been around a long time have dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of pages of content that’s really, really high-quality. And so, as a result of these higher search terms being more desirable… obviously, they’re more desirable because if you get ranked for them, you’re going to get more traffic; if you get more traffic, you have more opportunities to make more money… so the more desirable they are (it goes hand in hand), the higher competition they are these days. You can still find some gems that may have a few thousand searches a month that are technically still somewhat low or moderate competition, but that is super hard and you just can’t depend on building a business on that anymore these days.

So after just kind of vomiting all of this all over you (which I apologize for, for the record), what is the solution? How do we get around all of this?

So the solution to this is to kind of flip the script. Instead of going for low competition + high search volume (which doesn’t really exist anymore in today’s search climate), you can build your site’s weight by kind of picking up the scraps that all of the big boys are leaving behind. A lot of these super authoritative sites want nothing to do with a keyword that has 30 searches or 100 searches or 500 searches a month. They just don’t target those because they have the authority.

Think of it as kind of like a championship boxer. Like they’ve already trained, they’ve already built up all of their weight, they’ve eaten healthy, they’ve exercised – now there’s this champion with this giant belt on. And when they write a piece of content, a lot of the time Google goes, “Hey! Yeah, you. I trust you. You’re going up towards the top.” And they can do that for keywords that get thousands of searches a month.

When you’re getting established, you don’t have that advantage. But what you can do is you can kind of build… that’s why I said build your weight… you want to kind of eat up all of the scraps that these guys are leaving behind that may have 15, 30, 45, 100 searches a month. And then as time goes on, your website’s authority will build on those kind of little scraps and then you will be able to compete more and more as time goes on. And you put out more and more quality with those heavy weights and contend for some of those really desirable spots. But that takes a lot of time to build up to. The good news is you can start seeing traction before then just with lower search volume keywords.

So I kind of refer to this as “Scraps today, feasts tomorrow.” And of course, that’s a simplification because when I say ‘feast tomorrow’, we’re talking about at least six to twelve months of really hard work here before you start seeing some noticeable results – if you’re doing everything according to the training here.

So the idea is if you turn out a higher volume of really high-quality content directly targeting lower search volume keywords that other guys are overlooking, this really adds up over time. So instead of spending the next eight months trying to get ranked for a single keyword that gets 5,000 searches a month, you can spin those next eight to twelve months focusing on dozens of keywords that have 100 searches a month, 200 searches a month, 30 searches a month. And you’re going to end up with a much better shot in today’s search climate of getting ranked for a lot of those tiny keywords, rather than ending up eight months down the road and still not even being on page five for that main keyword you were going for because it’s just so hard to go at internet marketing from that approach these days.

So over time – as you start getting a lot of these lower search volume articles ranked – your authority’s going to build, people are going to link to you, people are going to talk about you in forums because you have really high-quality content. And as time goes on from you kind of (like I said) picking up these scraps and eating them, you’re going to build your weight because people are going to start noticing you, people are going to start talking about you; and as that happens (you get more engagement on your site, et cetera), you really kind of start to gain that credibility and build that authority. And then, as time goes on, you can use this authority to rank for moderate competition; and ultimately, even high competition keywords.

So we kind of focus on these phases like a brand new site – you’re a newborn. And it’s going to be impossible to go beat Mike Tyson in a boxing match; but you can (like I said) eat up those little scraps, get the nutrition you need, start building a little weight. And as time goes on, it almost becomes… I’ve mentioned kind of exponential… but there’s a tipping point where you kind of start to see a little success. And once you start to see that little success, typically it’s followed with a really tremendous growth curve because those are little kind of early signs of gaining authority. I mean, you’re almost kind of there to breaking through a wall. And typically, those happen within… I don’t know… three to six months of one another.

So it takes a while to get to that tipping point, but once you get to that tipping point, it becomes much easier from there to begin ranking for a lot more keywords. And the really nice thing is that this… I’ll mention later in the training… this kind of happens retroactively. So what you’ve written in the past also begins to rank because your authority begins to build.

So this is why frequent publishing of high-quality content has become so pivotal for early stage blogs especially when they don’t have a large marketing budget. (Excuse me, I’m getting a burning in my nose like I need to sneeze. Very distracting.) So this is why this path you hear talked about a lot and some people go, “Ah, that path’s a load of crap. Just do what I say,” and then they charge you several hundred dollars for this path that is totally outdated and requires thousands of dollars in advertising and marketing is a coin toss at best. If you do this correctly, if you stay this course, and you pay attention to the training, and you’re willing to work hard; this is as surefire as a business (a low cost business) gets in this industry. You just have to be willing to stick with it.

So I mentioned this isn’t what everyone else is saying. Internet marketing has evolved so dramatically since the golden years and only aiming for desirable search terms that have a few hundred or a few thousand searches plus every month with no marketing budget is going to result in disappointment in today’s search climate. That’s all there is to it. There are no ifs, ands, or buts. It just doesn’t work that way anymore. It’s impossible in today’s search climate (again) without some really advanced knowledge and knowing how to game Google – which is incredibly complex because they’ve gotten so good at optimizing their algorithms to punish people that try to gain their search engine rankings. Outside of that… getting really, really good at that… there’s no way to go about content marketing and search engine optimization and get ranked for really high search volume keywords like you could five years ago. It just doesn’t work anymore. It’s totally obsolete.

So like I mentioned earlier, this is… as far as low cost businesses… this is as fail-proof as it gets in internet marketing if you don’t have a marketing budget and advertising budget where you can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars and maybe lose it all without really feeling the pain. That’s not true of most people that are trying to start internet businesses. So as far as low-cost internet businesses go, it’s a lot of work in the beginning; it takes a lot of studying – which is all here in the Free Internet Marketing Project for you for free. So if you do everything correctly, this is a surefire of a shot as you’re going to get in this industry with a low budget.

So this is what we’re going to focus on. These efforts are what we’re going to focus on for the next few months. But first, we have to find some keywords.

So now that we’ve talked probably a little bit too extensively about the backgrounds of keywords and what we’re going to aim to do, we’re kind of flipping the script on traditional keyword teaching that is totally outdated and from 2005 to 2010 up to 2012 when it really got kind of cut off at the head by Google but for some reason people just kept teaching it. I think it’s largely due to the fact that a lot of people in this industry – a lot of coaches in this industry – are just frankly out of touch and they don’t realize how hard that is because they have existing authority websites and they’re not trying to build out new websites. I’ve probably tried to build out a dozen new websites in the past three years – most of which have failed. And so, I’ve learned this the hard way that this is absolutely the best way to approach a low-budget internet business that’s built around content and content creation and content marketing.

So, now that we’ve talked about all that (probably, like I said, way too in-depth)… but now you’re a pro, we need to talk about exactly how to find keywords. So I’m going to talk a little bit about exactly how we use keywords… I mentioned in the last lesson how do we use them… we’ll talk about that later. Well, that’s next lesson.

And then, we’re going to start looking firsthand at how to find these using free keyword tools. There are some really good free keyword tools out there as well as some premium keyword tools that are totally optional – and I’ll make that very clear once we get there.

So if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group. As always, that is free for registered members. And I will see you over there and I’ll see you in the next lesson.

5.1 How Keyword Research Will Make or Break Your Entire Business (AF)

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Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

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Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • What a “keyword” or “key phrase” are
  • Why keywords are so pivotal to an internet business
  • A demonstration of why keyword research is so important
  • The idea of internet businesses being cumulative, and why that makes keyword research even MORE important

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

5.1 Transcript Below

Hey again, everyone! Another day, another opportunity to change the world!

Today we’re going to be talking about keyword research and that’s what this entire section is going to be about and really digging into it super, super deeply.

Keyword research is fundamental to success in internet marketing and affiliate marketing, even more so in the blogging and content creation, content marketing, anything that’s dependent on search engine optimization (SEO) – and that’s going to be most people that are trying to get started with as little of a budget as possible, trying to keep expenses as low as possible.

So if you were trying to keep expenses low and you don’t know a lot about keyword research, you are dramatically decreasing your chances at success – I can say with a really high degree of confidence. So we’re going to linger here for a bit and I’ll explain why in this slideshow and I’ll emphasize why all of these things are true and kind of back them up with some more concrete arguments rather than just saying this is the way it is and you have to take it or leave it.

So that’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s lesson and every lesson in this section, we’ll really build on what we learn here in this first lesson as with every other section in the Free Internet Marketing Project training. So without further ado, let’s jump in.

So of course, we’ve covered how to build a website and a website is definitely the foundation of your internet business. Especially in today’s internet climate, I would say that a website is essential to becoming successful. Even a lot of people that have really huge YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers, even they have websites because it helps them sell their e-Commerce and stuff.

So I would say if a website is the foundation of an internet marketing business, the keywords that you build – that you choose to write content about – kind of equal the frame. You need them both, without a doubt, before you start tacking on sheetrock (or you know depending on what part of the world you’re in, cinder blocks or whatever). You need both. You need the foundation: website – we’ve already got that knocked out, right? By this point in the training, you should have that knocked out. If you don’t, it’s time to go back and watch those lessons before you get to this point. And once you’ve got all that set up, it’s all about building the frame. And keywords absolutely are the frame.

So really briefly, what is a keyword? I want to (just in case)… I know this may be way under some of your knowledge depending on where you’re at in your journey; but I don’t want to overlook the people that don’t know what a keyword is.

So really quickly: a keyword is what someone searches in Google or another search engine when they’re looking for a piece of information. Since I chose the niche tattoo removal (laser tattoo removal), if someone asked, “What is laser tattoo removal?”… technically that’s a keyphrase, but we refer to them interchangeably these days. So if you hear me say ‘what is laser tattoo removal’ as a keyword, that’s what I’m talking about. It means that if someone were putting into putting into Google, “What is laser tattoo removal?” or “How much does tattoo removal hurt?” or “How much does tattoo removal cost?” Those are keywords. Whatever someone’s putting into Google or any other search engine to get listings, rankings to decide which one they’re going to click – whatever they put in, that is what we refer to as a keyword or a key phrase. Sometimes you’ll still hear them referred to as a keyphrase, but more often than not, we just call them keywords on the whole these days.

So we’re going to get incredibly in-depth as to how they’re used later in this section. But right now, I just kind of build the foundational knowledge that we’re going to add on to when we talk about how to use keywords, how to find keywords, et cetera.

So what I found in the years I’ve been in the industry is that this is really commonly overlooked – as in people just kind of don’t know to pay so much attention to it because they don’t realize it’s a really vital thing or they just zoom right past it. They’re just like, “I don’t need to learn much about that. I’m going to go forward and I’m just going to start cranking out content,” and then they work for ten months and can’t figure out why they’re not getting results. It’s because they missed an essential step in the process which we’ll talk about later, too.

So if you aren’t paying attention to keywords, long story short (I think I probably overemphasized this by this point in the lesson)… but if you are not paying attention to keywords and if you don’t become somewhat of an expert in finding keywords, you will severely undercut your efforts in this industry.

Poorly chosen or completely ignored keyword research is going to equal inefficient SEO. You’re going to get much worse results with your search engine optimization efforts if you aren’t paying attention to your keywords. If you are getting worse results with your search engine optimization, then you are going to get less or possibly zero traffic. And of course, as we’ve talked about: traffic equals money. So if you’re getting less traffic or no traffic, you’re going to get less money or no money. Period. So those are kind of the sequential steps as to how keyword research ties directly to your bottom line and how much revenue your website is going to generate.

So really quickly, I want to illustrate something here. I’ll go through this as quickly as possible. I don’t want to waste any of your time. But I do really want to give kind of an analogy to drive this home because people don’t realize that it’s this big of a deal – even if you tell them keyword research is the big deal. Keyword research is a big deal. Unless you really paint a very clear picture, people are still going to run past and just like, “Alright, I’m going to learn this as quickly… I’m going to shut off this video – he’s wasting my time. I’m going to keep going.” And you’re going to see much worse results if that’s what you do. Kind of a tale of two brothers.

So what we’re assuming here is that two brothers built niche sites. And the first brother kind of picked an okay niche (we’ve talked all about niche research by this point in the training); and he didn’t follow all of the things that I suggested; found a far from perfect niche, but it was okay, it’s sufficient. He bought the first domain name that came to mind, didn’t try to be witty, didn’t try to insert keywords or anything, just kind of registered a keyword. He does right above average content. Not like stellar – not the best of the best – but above average. He doesn’t have any social media presence. He selects his keywords very diligently. So of course, what we’re talking about in this lesson… he really takes his time, he researches his keywords before he writes his slightly above average content for his okay niche, and then he executes all SEO (all search engine optimization which we haven’t talked about, yet we’ll talk about in-depth… I think it’s the next section… we’ll be talking about that), and he executes all on-page search engine optimization perfectly. So that’s the first brother. Just kind of a quick overview of his business.

The next brother takes an incredible niche; just follows all of the training, all of the steps, kind of all the checkboxes that I outlined – he nails them all. Comes up with a clever brand name, really cool little domain, easy to remember, nice and short. He writes incredibly high-quality content. So whereas the other brother wrote okay content (above average content), this one writes just like some of the best content on the web. He leverages his social media and promotes heavily. The one drawback of this brother’s kind of story and his business is that he doesn’t really choose keywords very specifically. He kind of goes, “Okay, I’m going to pick this one.” He doesn’t even do any keyword research on this. Just, “I want to write about this. And I think people will be searching this term.” And so, he kind of writes content for that keyword. And he too executes all SEO on page perfectly. All the search engine optimization on page is perfect, on point – so there’s no differentiator there.

So on the left, at the end of the day, you’ve got a brother that kind of missed a fair amount of the stuff; leading up, did it good enough; but didn’t really knock it out of the park. And then on the right, you have a brother that knocked everything out of the park; got the keyword research; and kind of said, “Ah you know, I just really wanted to focus on writing content, really wanted to put value into the world, and just didn’t want to get tied up in all the details of keyword research.”

And out of these two (given the context of where you’re seeing this particular lesson), you probably know which one wins out. But I think a lot of people – if we weren’t in the context of talking about keyword research – would go, “Ah. The guy on the right.” `The brother on the right is the one that’s going to be more successful because he picked a better niche, his brand is more clever, he spends a lot more time on promotion, he writes even higher quality content. And the fact of the matter is the brother on the left probably has a much better shot than the brother on the right at success – even though his content is not as good, even though his niche isn’t quite as good. It’s all good enough in that he really spends time on keyword research and that makes a tremendous difference in this industry.

So do not overlook this. You have to give every step in internet marketing your best effort. And an important thing to learn early on is that internet businesses are cumulative – meaning that each step of the process stacks on top of the next. So the more solid the first step you lay is, the more solid the second step is going to be, more so the third step is going to be. The earlier steps can have the most positive or the most negative impact on your business.

We’ve already talked extensively about niche selection – and that’s absolutely one of the very first things, if not the very first thing outside of mindset which isn’t even kind of a tangible component of your business. So the first kind of tangible component is niche selection; and then after that, there’s basically keyword research. Picking the right theme and stuff for your website and the things we talked about in the last section are also important; but they aren’t pivotal kind of steps in the process that can make or break your business quite like niche selection and keyword research.

So keyword research is very early stage. Like I said, pretty much the only thing before this is going to be niche selection (we’ve already talked extensively about that so you should be set there). But as we go into keyword research, just remember that it’s just as pivotal, if not more pivotal than niche selection. (I’m getting wrapped up in my words here, I apologize.)

So to restate that, it’s distinctly possible that keyword research is going to have a bigger impact on your business than niche selection even. And we’ve already talked extensively about how crucial that is and it’s very make or break for your business. Keyword research is just as much, if not more so. And because it’s so early stage… and we’ve talked about how everything is cumulative… your efforts are going to be cumulative as an internet marketer that’s trying to build a profitable business. You want to get those early, early stages really, really solid and set perfectly; because if they’re even a little bit mismatched, it’s going to make your tower kind of teeter earlier on as you stack more and more on top of it – if that visualization makes any sense.

The good thing about keyword research is whereas when we talked about niche selection, I talked about how it was more of an art than a science. The good thing about keyword research is it’s much more data-driven and analytical so it’s more of a science than an art. And it’s much more black and white and not so much room for interpretation or getting overwhelmed because there are all these kind of blank areas that you just don’t even know how to think about yet.

We can put all of the pieces in place when it comes to keyword research and talk very specifically about data and numbers and what you’re looking for. And that’s what we’re going to do as we go through this section.

So in the next lesson, we’re going to talk… kind of the same way we talked about the anatomy of a perfect domain name several lessons ago… now we’re going to talk about the anatomy of a perfect keyword and kind of what you should be looking for when you’re doing your keyword research. And as we get deeper into this section, we’re going to talk very extensively about exactly how you should be doing keyword research.

So as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group – that’s free for registered members. And other than that, I will see you either in the Facebook group or I’ll see you in the next lesson. Talk to you then.

5.6.1 Long Tail Pro Deep Dive — Hunting Down Low Competition Keywords

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • How to find keywords in even the most competitive niches using Long Tail Pro

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

5.6 Finding Keywords Quicker and More Easily Using Premium Keyword Tools

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

Important links from this video:

(affiliate link; no coupon code required)

(affiliate link; requires coupon code STOPSCAMS30)

In this video I discuss:

  • The advantages of paid keyword tools over free keyword tools
  • The best keyword tool for finding high-quality keywords quickly and easily
  • A step-by-step, live demonstration of finding keywords using premium keyword tools

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

5.6 Transcript Below

Okay!

If you’re an observant person, you may notice: “Hey! Ian looks a little bit different than all of the other videos. Hair’s a little bit longer, he looks a little bit more homeless, etc.”

That is because originally, when I recorded all this training, I had a different Premium Keyword Tool recommendation. I recommended them largely because they were cheaper than everyone else. And then they went and doubled their prices within a month of me recording that video and that completely changes the recommendation. There are better tools out there for the price point they’re now asking.

So if you hear me reference Jaaxy in any of the training just know that that is an obsolete recommendation. The up-to-date recommendation is what I will discuss here in Lesson 5.6. So just know that that explains the difference in appearance – why I look a little bit more hippy-like. And also If you hear that reference anywhere else in the training, just know that that’s an artifact. But this is the most up-to-date recommendation.

Today I’m going to talk a little bit about finding keywords quicker using premium tools. You know, I’ll get into this. Before we really dig in here, I want to make really clear, it’s not at all required. You do not need a premium keyword tool to succeed in this industry, okay? So many people out there that create training say “Hey! You need X, Y or Z to succeed” – that’s not the case, you can get this done with the free tools that I taught in the previous lessons. So, don’t stress out about it if you can’t afford it. Don’t think that you’re going to fail just because you can’t afford a premium keyword tool.

But a premium keyword tool will make your writing and your search engine optimization efforts much more potent and make them a lot more powerful and save you a hell of a lot of time – no exaggeration, I’m not overselling this. If there’s one place that I recommend someone invest besides hosting, it’s a keyword tool. Hands down, day in and day out. If you’ve got the extra money to invest, you’re going to save yourself so much time and set yourself up for success so much better if you invest in a premium keyword tool. It’s bringing a better gun to the gun fight, period. You know, it’s a given and a very American analogy.

So, you know, I mention the pros and cons in the previous video about free keyword tools. You know, of course, no added expenses and things like that. They turn on their head for premium keyword tools, it’s basically flipped.

Pros are you’re going to get a really good competition data at-a-glance. It’s going to be much less laborious than using the Moz bar, we’ll see that. I’ll demonstrate this later in the video when I show the actual tool. You know, it shows Majestic trust flow and citation flow as opposed to Moz page authority and domain authority, and it shows that both for the page and the domain.

For years, Moz’s DA and PA were the go to metrics for SEO because of course google doesn’t publish that data for us to see, and the closest thing we can get is a really good third party tool. Moz over the past – somewhere between the past one to two years, has been kind of overtaken by company called Majestic.

And Majestic is an expensive tool, of course Moz is too but their metrics are much more reliable these days, as far as we can tell, as far as website authority goes, as far as SEO authority goes. So, that is the go to tool for SEO authority these days for people in the industry. The fact that the keyword tool shows Majestic trust flow and citation flow as opposed to Moz’s DA and PA, it’s going to be much more reliable. It’s just going to be a much better, a much more accurate representation of the competition you face.

And overall the data is just going to be a whole lot more holistic. It’s going to be in one place, rather than having to pull from several different tools. And it’s going to be a lot more reliable on the whole than piecing it together with free tools.

Most importantly, in my opinion is it saves a ton of time, I mean a ton of time. You’ll see it when we hop in and how quickly we can knock out some keyword research as opposed to what we had to do manually and laboriously using the free keyword planner and things like Ubersuggest and comparing that with Moz bar metrics where we had to search individually, search individually, search individually.

You know, the only con here is that it’s an added expense. At the time of recording this, annual plans range anywhere from 300 to 500-ish dollars. So there, it’s not a cheap investment. But, it’s definitely investment that is very much worth making. And you’ll see that, again, if you just hang in here for a few minutes and watch this in the video. You’ll see how much more powerful and quick this is.

So the best keyword tool that I recommend is Long Tail Pro. It’s recommended by a lot of pros that have been in this industry a really long time. It simplifies a lot of really complex data into at-a-glance Key Performance Indicators, abbreviated KPIs, obviously.

And also it’s going to allow you to spend a lot more time creating and promoting your content rather than all of this time manually researching the keywords. Basically, you can take that time and invest it into the more important aspects of your business, which in the long run is going to get you to success faster and it’s also going to make you much more successful in the long run. And it’s also going to cut keyword research by 90% or more, no exaggeration. I mean, it’s just going to save you so much time.

Long Tail Pro also has some other helpful tools like Rank Tracking. They also have something called Long Tail University, that’s included with all memberships that teaches you really advance in depth keyword research. What I’m going to give you here is kind of at-a-glance tour of the tool… well, not at-a-glance, we’ll get in depth too. But every membership comes with Long Tail University, which is some really, really, really high quality keyword research training as well that you should check out.

So, this is actually outdated. I should remove that. Sorry that’s from when… I thought I had removed this. This is from when I was recommending Jaaxy. One of the unfortunate things about Jaaxy is that it required double-checking against using the Moz bar and Google’s Keyword Planner because the data wasn’t quite as Long Tail Pro’s is. Just ignore that last bullet that I just deleted off.

If you’d like to help support FIMP and you do invest in Long Tail Pro, this is my link for 30% off. If you went directly to their homepage, you’d be paying about 30% more than this. It’s just stoppingscams.com/longtailpro is my affiliate link. Of course you’re appreciate… your support is always greatly appreciated. “You’re appreciated is always greatly support!” – makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, I don’t want you to feel pressured. It’s an incredible investment in your business, I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m hyping this thing too much because that’s not my intention. It’s just that I can’t imagine my business day to day without a tool like this.

Let’s hop in and take a look at Long Tail Pro so that you can see what I’ve been talking about here. Alright. So, this is the Long Tail Pro homepage. When you log in this what you’ll see. Right now I just have a blank project but I’m going to show you how some of this works too.

This is just your kind of at-a-glance dashboard. You have individual projects in here. I’m actually going to click to Add a New Project and I’m going to title it RueTattoo.com, just so you can see how some of these features work.

You can enter your domain name, as well, so I’m going to enter RueTattoo.com (of course my auto-correct is going to try and fix it for me, which is not helpful at all). Okay and I’m going to add this. What’s really cool about this is that it’s going to tell you right off the bat: okay, this is what your link profile looks like, this is what your majestic trust flow and citation flow look like for this website.

You can kind of get an at-a-glance look at all the stuff. And it’s going to tell you that “Hey! For this particular domain name, this is the range we recommend you stick in for keyword competitiveness.” We’ll see that play in when we start searching keywords, but I just want to kind of give you a heads-up.

It’s pretty unique that you can add your domain name into your project then it’s going to give you a suggested range and say “Hey! Don’t go outside of this competition level because you’re probably not going to have much of a shot at getting ranked but you can probably get ranked within this range as long as you do everything correctly”.

In the next section down here, you can enter keywords one at a time. Or you can, in the default, is enter keyword and then it’s going to go over to Google’s Keyword Planner in the back in and bring in their suggested searches.

The thing to keep in mind here is depending on your subscription level, you’ll probably have somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 keyword searches per month. Every single one of these counts as one of your keyword searches, so keep that in mind. You can go up to 400 but you’re going to burn through 10,000 keyword searches per month pretty quickly doing 400 at a time.

I typically bump mine up to 25, I think that’s enough. And then just enter multiple keywords then we’ll see how this works too. If we just type in Laser Tattoo Removal and we hit retrieve, it’s going to retrieve some keywords. It’s gives a notification here and says it’s retrieving keywords. You’ll see them all start populating down here and you can see this little icons saying the gears are turning, we’ll just let those load up.

But while that’s happening, I’ll also mention any other keyword you put in here, they’re smart about it and they’re friendly about it in the sense that they know you have limited searches so if you want to see this keyword data again, it stays saved until you delete it out of the project. So you don’t have to use your searches all over again to pull that data back in. Any keywords you put in here are going to add to you projects keyword list rather than replacing this keyword list. So just keep that in mind.

Right now, we have 25 keywords. If I put in “does tattoo removal hurt” and I hit retrieve. You can see that the number’s going up, now we have 50 keywords in here. Okay, so I added them and they’re all displayed together. You can set filters and I could type in here or I could go into these filters and say “hey! I only want to see keywords that have to do with hurt”. Just type in “hurt” and get that information in there as well. But for the sake of this video I just want to show you kind of what this all looks like.

You can get global search data here, you can see the location has defaulted to the United States, I can update that if I want, and change to another country. U.S. is typically a pretty accurate representation of what the global search volume is going to look like in the landscape and competitiveness, etc. Yeah, so that’s basically Long Tail Pro at-a-glance.

So now what we can do is we can come down here and… the key performance indicators I talked about, the main one you want to look at is your average keyword competitiveness. Usually what I do whenever I get however many keywords I want in here is I’m going to sort by average KC (Keyword Competitiveness).

Now I can see my lowest hanging fruit right up here at the top. If your website’s brand new, I really wouldn’t go for anything outside of the 15-20 range. I know it’s suggesting “Hey! This is a new website. You can go for anything from the 25-30 range”. But the lower the better and I really wouldn’t go outside of that too much.

We’ll take a look at how these numbers are calculated here in a second. But at-a-glance you can see that Saline Tattoo Removal work which frankly I don’t even know what saline tattoo removal is. Non-laser Tattoo Removal, EliminInk Tattoo Removal (sounds like a product), Tattoo Removal Virginia, How Long Does Tattoo Removal Take – that would be a decent one. It’s a 23, but given my options here, hey maybe that’s something I actually consider. I would definitely… even if you get outside of the 15-20 range and you’re going to go to the 20-25 range, I wouldn’t step outside of the green, right? And this will change in time, you’ll notice that this correlates directly to the target keyword competitiveness it created for my domain name.

You can see that anything that’s under 25 is green. Anything that’s under 30 but more than 25 is yellow. So that’s telling me “Hey! This is the keyword competitiveness. This is the suggested range based specifically on your website’s existing authority”. That’s pretty unique to Long Tail Pro, I don’t see that done anywhere else.

Let’s see if we can punch in some more keywords here. Let’s go… “Does Tattoo Removal Cream Work” see what it pulls there. And you can see over here on the left hand side, my monthly keywords remaining or going down on every search I make, which again is why it’s important to kind of limit this to something other than 400. But you can see now there are 75 keywords in here, it’s pulling a lot of these new ones. While it’s pulling these, I’ll pull you into one of these and show you what it looks like when you click on a keyword.

Now we’re going to see for the Top 10 in Google, all of the competition details, I guess kind of at-a-glance but they’re also really in-depth. You can see for this particular keyword, we get 390 searches a month. This is pulled directly from Google, so this is very reliable keyword search volume.

And you can see the results, it’s 80% Organic, 21% Local, which is nice because I know, if you watched the free training for free keyword tools, you saw a lot of stuff for…I was like “Oh! Some of these are local so they’re ranking better” And so, you can kind of see at-a-glance “Okay I’m going to be competing against some local businesses which are going to have an advantage over me”. I wouldn’t worry about it too, too much unless the number’s pretty high. But just keep it in mind, it’s good to know.

This is probably around a fifth of the first page because they probably have a maps listing. So if I come in here and say “Non-laser Tattoo Removal”… well, I don’t have a maps listing (which is interesting), but I probably have… I mean we’ve got some ads in there for some local people. TattooVanishMethod.com that’s interesting. Let’s just take a quick look here, I’m kind of running off on a tangent. But looks like, Find a Location. All natural, huh. As far as I can see, there isn’t one location… okay, there we go.

It looks like they may be getting a boost because they’ve got so many locations, but I doubt it somehow. At least in my local area, doesn’t look like there are any local listings. But anyways, definitely if Long Tail Pro is pulling in this data, it means that a lot of people that searched are going to get local search results which we’re going to be competing against at a little bit of a disadvantage. So just keep that in mind whenever you see that metric.

All through here, we can see overall keyword competitiveness for the Top 10 Results. And we can also see the domain keyword competitiveness. But the things I really want you to pay attention to are the trust flow and citation flow for this particular page, which are these two numbers right here. This is the trust flow and citation flow for the whole domain, but this is what’s really important. Okay.

So we see this top result as 15, this one’s 6, 4, 0, 24 – this is the only really high one besides all the way down here. For me this is a very rankable keyword. If I look at the first page of Google and I see anything, the average trust flow being less than 10 or 15, that is a really ripe opportunity keyword.

Once your looking at a lot of these and you see a lot of 20-25 for brand new websites, I would be a little bit concerned and I would say “Hey look for some better keywords unless you’re at a really high competition niche and everything else is in like the 50s, 60s, 70s”. Then that’s a decent keyword.

But for most niches, you’re going to want for brand new website to find a lot of first pages, as far as when you search your keyword, you want the first page to be mostly something between the 10-15 range and below if you’re going to go for it. So for me, this looks like a pretty rankable keyword, which is really, really nice.

You have some other metrics in here which are really helpful. Like how many External Backlinks this particular page has. Again this is not the domain, this is to the page. This page right here has 1,682 backlinks, which is pretty high. It’s interesting that this one’s only showing 1 backlink because it’s so authoritative. But you can see the number of unique domains referring to the root domain, so that’s to tattooaway.com. You know, just interesting stuff like that.

So, Index URLs. How many URLs this website has in Google. How many index pages this website has in Google. Man! This one’s way up there… ah, it’s ‘cause it’s YouTube, that makes sense! So, some just really, really interesting stuff. You can go pretty dependably off of just the keyword competitiveness but off of just the trust flow and citation flow for the actual page. Right. Again, domain is helpful overall but mainly what you want to look at is page.

You don’t need to worry about citation flow too much. You may be sitting there asking yourself: “What is citation flow?” Citation flow is typically just an indicator of how spammy someone’s backlink profile is. Which isn’t something you need to concern yourself with too, too much. Especially if you’re looking at the first page of Google, they probably don’t have too spammy of a backlink profile. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be getting the rankings that they’re getting.

Trust flow is just calculated on the relevance of the links coming to that page, on the authority of the page, pages linking to this page and this page. Okay. So that’s why I say that’s the most important thing to look at because those are the most important metrics that determine rankings these days.

If we go back here to the project, we probably have more keywords in here now. Let’s see. There’s still “how long does tattoo removal take” in there. There we go. Resort. “Rejuvi tattoo removal cream” (it could be a review), 30 search volume. When you’re young, 30 search volume when your site is still young is not that bad. “How long does tattoo removal take” is still up there. “Laser tattoo removal before and after” – an interesting choice.

Same thing here, we can see all of the same data. But it’s showing the keyword competitiveness, which is also factoring in things like – you can see everything here. Calculated using page title and URLs. So if they’re using their keywords that you searched for in the page title and URL, it’s going to boost the keyword competitiveness, majestic trust flow, citation flow and backlink data. So how many banklinks this page and this domain have.

It’s just crunching all of those numbers at-a-glance. But again, you can see most of these, as far as trust flow, it’s a little bit more competitive than the other keywords. But most of these, again, looks pretty rankable overall. Even though it shows it’s a 26 within Long Tail Pro.

You have a couple of ways you can use this tool. You can spend more time digging much more in-depth and looking at each one of these individually. I’d say in the early stage is it’s definitely good for your learning, for you to get a sense of these things. But other than that, it just comes down to punching in keywords.

And let’s bump this up to 50. And let’s say… (what’s something else that has to do with tattoo?) Let’s go “tattoo removal after care”. Let’s go retrieve, and I’m going to retrieve 50 for this particular keyword. So that’ll take some time. Again…

Data wasn’t available. Interesting. Yeah, maybe it was too long of a term. So, let’s go “how long…” that’s a keyword in here, right? So I’ll just click this one and take a look at the keyword competitiveness really quickly. We can see trust flow. Yeah, so again overall looking like a pretty rankable keyword.

We’ve got, again about 20%. Ow, featured snippets, interesting. We don’t have local search appearing in this one. So again, just a lot of really helpful, useful data in here. But if we go back here, what we can do is we can really quickly, say… plus 20. You know, add 20 results based on that keyword. Add 20 suggestions to this list.

And of course, you can also… favorite (I need to find that keyword again. They’re jumping around ‘cause I just put more keywords in there.) But now we can say “hey add this to my favorites”. So, and it says “hey this has been added to your favorites”. But everything’s resorting and reshuffling in here.

“How to become a laser tattoo removal technician” that could be an interesting post for my site. “Tattoo removal prices” could be a good article, again, especially with 1,900 search results. So if we take a look at this one, trust flow: 17, 3, 12, 0, 9, 0. So it’s a little bit more competitive. But it’s probably a pretty decent keyword, especially given the search volume.

I wouldn’t expect to rank for this anytime soon. But in the coming months as my website authority builds, I could definitely see myself ranking for that. So that’s a really decent keyword overall. I’m going to favorite that one too. Return to projects. “Tattoo removal before and after”.

Let me get into some of the yellow. Ah! This is a good article because there are all kinds of different lasers that people use and some shops don’t have the most up-to-date laser technology. So this could be a really decent article.

I know it’s labeled yellow as far as competition goes but if we come in here and we look at the trust flow, the first couple of pages are kind of authoritative. The last page is kind of authoritative. But trust flow of 2, 0, 5, 0, 0, 0, 0.

I assume these have some authoritative domains which is why they’re ranking. But especially if I created a page and did some (we’ll talk about it later in the training) some promotional things like “Securing Some White Hat Backlinks” to that page if I wrote a really, really good article. You could definitely outrank some of these guys within a few months. Pretty easily, I’d say. So, this is a really good article, a really good keyword. So this is something that I would definitely consider writing for for RueTattoo.com.

So, you see how much quicker that is than going and pulling data from Google’s Keyword Planner and then checking each one of these keywords individually. You just get so much data at-a-glance. And especially with kinds of these color coded keyword competitiveness, you get to see really quickly how something is… how good or bad the competition is for a keyword that you’re searching for. Really unique, really cool, just huge time savings.

I remember back in the day, and the reason I always make it clear to people: “hey you don’t have to invest in this, it’s going to save you a lot of time” is because when I first got started in internet marketing, I didn’t have the money to invest in tools like this. I totally empathize with anyone that doesn’t have the money to invest in some of these tools. But if you do have the money and you value your time, it is hands down one of the best investments that you can make.

So again, if you do decide to invest in Long Tail Pro, please use my affiliate link, help support FIMP: stoppingscams.com/longtailpro,

If you have any questions about Long Tail Pro, don’t hesitate to post them to the members-only Facebook group for FIMP. Of course, it’s free for all members, so hop on there, ask any questions you have and I will be happy to help you with them.

Other than that, they do also have a free trial (probably something I should’ve mentioned 20 minutes ago). So if you want to hop in and check it out for yourself, you can. I think it’s a 7-day trial, So you can check it out and poke around. And if you really want to, what you could do in there is you could sign up for the free trial, do a bunch of keyword research and then cancel before it bills. If that’s something you really wanted to do.

But I highly recommend investing in Long Tail Pro. Actually, keyword tools are going to save you a lot of time. It’s going to set you up for success a lot better. You’re just going to have a lot higher likelihood for the content you write to actually be rankable than when you are passing all this data around between these multiple tools.

And you’re not getting the industry’s best data because it’s not Majestic, it’s Moz when you’re using the free tools. Majestic unfortunately doesn’t have a free tool like Moz does. You just get a lot of advantages that are going to really set you up for success in the long run.

If I keep talking, I’m just going to keep rambling. So I’m going to shut up, I’m going to finish this video. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to post them into the Facebook group.

If you can’t afford it right now, don’t stress about it. Just use the free tools. But again, if you can afford it right now and you value your time and you see how much quicker this works, I strongly recommend investing in it. You can see that I have the plan below and they’re priced personally because I really believe in investing and using this tool.

If you have any questions I’ll keep an eye up from the Facebook group. Otherwise, I will see you in the next video. Or I’ll see you in the Facebook group.

Talk to you then.

5.5 Finding Keywords Using Free Keyword Tools

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In this video I discuss:

  • How to find high quality keywords using free keyword tools
  • The best free keyword tools currently available online
  • How to combine these free keyword tools to get useful data
  • Which keywords to target and which keywords to avoid based on search volume and competition
  • A step-by-step live demonstration of all of this in action

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

5.5 Transcript Below

Okay, let’s finally get into actually digging in and finding some keywords.

I want to start with free keyword tools because I’m well aware that a lot of the people (probably the majority of people watching this training series) don’t have the upfront investment capital to pay for premium keyword tools – especially since all of the really good ones now are monthly fee based instead of one-time fee based. I don’t why that happened. That was a trend over many years. You used to be able to get some really good ones (mainly one really good one) for a flat time fee and even they went monthly based now.

And there are some reasons for that that makes sense as far as their expenses go up – especially with a lot of the data APIs they have to pay for – but at the same time, honestly, I think most of it’s a money grab and it sucks. They did it because they can and because it’s much better for their revenue. Unfortunately. I wish that weren’t the case but that is the way it is.

But you shouldn’t feel at all like you can’t do this just because you can’t pay for the premium keyword tools. I got started with free keyword tools, and admittedly, that was a much different internet marketing climate than now. But it’s still absolutely possible if you know what you’re doing and you’re using the right tools.

It can be a little bit overwhelming so just know that finding keywords using free tools is going to be much more overwhelming because the data isn’t as interpreted and crunched for you. You kind of have to do a lot of that yourself using free keyword tools versus paid keyword tools.

But by no means should you feel like you can’t do this. And anybody that has made you feel like you can’t do this just because you can’t afford premium keyword tools is just out to get another affiliate commission out of you. People do that to make people like you feel like, “Oh I can’t succeed unless I spend more money.” And they just do that so that you’ll buy more things that are affiliate links. And unfortunately, that’s all too common in this industry and it’s just a really scummy thing that I don’t want you to feel like you have to do.

So free keyword tools are absolutely sufficient. You’re going to have to put in a little bit more legwork, but I’m going to show you exactly how to do it in this video.

So I want to talk really quickly about the pros and cons of using free keyword tools. Unfortunately, the cons do fairly heavily outweigh the pros for free keyword tools. But the pro is… and this is going to be enough for the vast majority of people watching this video I think… is that there are no added expenses. After you’ve paid for your hosting and your domain name, you’re good for a year. Those are all of your expenses feasibly if you’re using free keyword tools.

And so, I know that’s a lot of people out there just saying, “This is all I have. I only have, you know, $150 to get started my first year.” And a lot of people in this industry I feel like make you think that’s not enough because most of them charge more than that just for training in the first place. But it is more than enough.

I think the biggest expense in this industry is training – and you’re getting all of that here for free which opens up a world of possibilities – after that, it’s only hosting and a domain name. And if you’re willing to put in the legwork with free keyword tools, you’ve got everything you need to make a profitable internet business happen. So now that, you know, kind of all of this is in place… (not too toot my own horn) but thanks to this really high-quality step-by-step free training being published, this industry should be a lot more approachable than it ever was before.

So the pro (the only real pro) to free keyword tools is there’s no added expenses. And like I said, for a lot of people watching this video, that’s going to be more than enough. And I don’t judge you for that. That’s where I was when I started. So good on you for trying to improve your life! Just be prepared to put in a little bit extra work.

The bad news on free keyword tools is that they don’t give us as much at a glance data on competition. You can get data for competition (and we’re going to look at it live later in this video after we finish talking about some of the stuff in the slideshow), but it’s not as good as premium keyword tools just flat out. Some of the best premium keyword tools will make it kind of at a glance easy to see whether or not you should try and pursue that keyword – nothing like that exists in free keyword tools; only in premium keyword tools. So that can make it a little bit tricky and it makes it a little bit more overwhelming when you’re looking at the data because you kind of have to manually interpret a lot of it; but you’ll get better at it with time. That’s just the nature of the beast. If you’re looking to save money, you’re going to have to spend more time to work around some of these things.

So you’ll see exactly what I mean when we look at the free keyword tool and how we interpret competition. There are some really good ways to do it that are very dependable. Frankly, they’re more dependable than a lot of the premium keyword tools out there; but it’s going to take literally like ten times as much time. And you’ll see why if you watch the free keyword tool training and the premium keyword tool training. You’ll see side-by-side why it takes so much longer.

Another con is that the data for some of these free keyword tools is often not as accurate or reliable. That is not true for the main free keyword tool we’re going to be using – which is put out by Google themselves – so that’s the one we’re going to be using mainly and looking at the most. So this doesn’t really apply to them, but unfortunately, they don’t give any competition data. So we’ll talk about that as we go through, too.

And as I mentioned, it typically is going to take a lot more time for you to find keywords using free keyword tools versus premium keyword tools. And it’s no exaggeration to say that it will (pretty easily) probably take five to ten times as much time using free keyword tools than premium keyword tools. And again, if you don’t have the money to spend on premium keyword tools from the beginning – it doesn’t matter. You’re going to have to spend the time anywhere around it. I just want you to be prepared and know that that’s the case going forward.

So there are a number of really good free keyword tools out there honestly. If you just Google ‘free keyword tools’, ‘best free keyword tools’, you’ll find some really good ones. The ones that I found really helpful – and the most reliable, of course – is going directly to the source and that’s Google AdWords Keyword Planner (also just called the Google Keyword Planner).

You will need an AdWords account to use this. That doesn’t mean you need to spend any money with AdWords. You just need to go through the process of setting up an AdWords account. And even if your AdWords account has been suspended… which has happened to a lot of us as we started in internet marketing, trying to run some pay-per-click ads, and we got kind of slapped on the wrists (myself included)… so don’t worry even if your AdWords account is suspended… you can still use Google’s Keyword Planner.

So when you go to use Google’s Keyword Planner through AdWords… and you can find the Google Keyword Planner, just search the internet for ‘Google keyword planner’. It’ll pop up.

And the first time, if you don’t have an account, it will kind of prompt you through like a campaign creation wizard. And it’ll be like, “What do you want to buy keywords for? How much is your daily budget?” And just either: never launch that campaign or be very careful after you go through that wizard to turn off the campaign if you launched it; because otherwise, you’re going to actually be buying ads on Google which is not what you want to do if you’re trying to not spend money.

So anyways, that’s just a little bit of information about the Google Keyword Planner. But you can find it easily online: just search ‘Google keyword planner’ or ‘Google free keyword planner’ and then it’ll pop up – and you’ll recognize it because we’re going to look at it later in this video.

There are also some other somewhat helpful tools. Keyword.io used to be better than it is now. They’ve kind of locked down so much of their data and filled their site up with so many ads that it’s really annoying to use, but there’s still some useful help there. And Ubersuggest.io is another really good one that we’ll look at really briefly. It gives no search volume, unfortunately, so you have to kind of depend on Google for the search volume which is a smart thing to do – even a lot of the times when using premium keyword tools – because nobody’s data is going to be more accurate than Google’s.

So after finding our keywords, we need to… this is a workaround for free keyword tools… we need to check the competition using the free MozBar and you will need also to create a free account with Moz in order to do that. Both things that you can do very easily. Again, just using Google, just search the internet for ‘install MozBar’. Just like that. M-O-Z-B-A-R. And you’ll get the bar that we’re going to be using in this video.

The only unfortunate thing is Moz metrics used to be… we’ll talk about them here in a second… but they used to be the industry standard and kind of what everyone depended on; and they were the strongest indicators for whether a site was going to rank and how much ranking authority a website had – and that’s not really the case anymore. Majestic is another company in the industry; and instead of Moz has Domain Authority and Page Authority (which will make more sense in a second), Majestic has Trust Flow and Citation Flow. And over the years in the SEO industry – at least in the internet marketing world – Majestic has kind of taken the cake away from Moz and Trust Flow is one of the best components to look at when evaluating a website’s link portfolio and competition and how high authority that page and that domain are. But the good news is – at least for now – Domain Authority and Page Authority are still pretty good indicators. They’re just not the industry leaders anymore.

So when we use MozBar, we’re going to be using Moz’s metrics to analyze competition. And I just wanted you to know going in, I know they’re not the industry leader anymore; but unfortunately, Majestic doesn’t put out any free tools like this (at least as of recording this video) so that we can interpret competition. So we have to use the next best thing which is the second best metrics in the industry for analyzing competition and website authority.

So when we get in here… this is going to make a lot more sense in a second and we’ll reference back to this as we’re going through and kind of doing over-the-shoulder training where you’re looking at my screen and seeing what I’m looking for… but the important metrics that we’re going to be looking at when using the MozBar and trying to interpret competition – one of the absolute (actually, I would say the most important) metric when you’re looking for page authority or when you’re looking for competition – is Page Authority.

The closer you can get to less than 10 (it’s on a scale from 1 to 100), the better. Unfortunately, it’s gotten harder and harder and harder to find anything that doesn’t have at least PA 15, 20, 25 on the first page on Google. The good news is we can find weaknesses and other things which we’ll talk about here in a second… but long story short, you want to get as close to less than 10 as possible and you want to see some big holes in the other things that we’re going to talk about as far as competition goes if you want to target that keyword and have any chance at getting ranked even when your website is kind of building that authority.

So we’ll look at all that in a second but Page Authority is that specific page on their website that is ranked in Google right there in top 5, top 10 – whatever you’re looking at. It’s a proprietary metric based on a lot of different things; but a really, really heavy component of that is their link profile and how powerful the link profile is to their website. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, it doesn’t need to at this stage; but a link profile is everyone else on the internet that is linking to their site. They have created a link from a page on their site to that page that you’re now looking at in Google’s listings. That’s a link profile: what a bunch of different people are linking to and also the links from your own website going to that page. But that’s pretty advanced. We’ll get there when we’re talking about on-page SEO. So for now, I just want you to know that Page Authority is a Moz metric for the exact page you’re looking at on that site – that individual page.

Domain Authority (abbreviated DA) is what the entire domain authority is. It’s exactly what it sounds like. So whereas Page Authority is the individual page that you’re looking at (every page on a website has different authority), the Domain Authority for all of Stopping Scams – for example – stays the same. That does not fluctuate. Domain Authority stays the same across the entire domain.

The exception to that would be subdomains. Subdomains are treated as their own website. So for example… I don’t know… if I had Training.StoppingScams.com, the authority that I have for StoppingScams.com would not apply to the subdomain. So an even better example would be this is why I installed StoppingScams.com/FIMP for Free Internet Marketing Project instead of FIMP.StoppingScams.com because by installing FIMP in a subdirectory (StoppingScams.com/FIMP – so that’s installing it in a subdirectory) I leveraged the Domain Authority for all of Stopping Scams that I’ve built over the past… I guess three years is about how old the site is… so I get to leverage all of that in my ranking authority for my new content that I’m creating for Free Internet Marketing Project. If I had created FIMP.StoppingScams.com, that would not be true. It would be treated like a brand new website. It would have no Domain Authority.

And that’s not just by… Domain Authority doesn’t just exist in the world of Moz. They are the ones that kind of coined that metric but Domain Authority is a thing, regardless of whether or not you’re talking about Moz. So it’s not just like Moz created this thing that didn’t exist. It’s kind of like… I guess it’s kind of like Math. It’s probably a horrible and totally inaccurate analogy; but Math was always there. There were all kinds of laws that kind of controlled Physics and the way objects interacted with one another, et cetera; and so the underlying Math was always there but it took a while for us to discover it and we’re still discovering a lot of it.

The same thing is true for Domain Authority and Page Authority. These things exist even outside of the world of Moz or outside of the world of Majestic, but this helps us give them a name. And also, they have proprietary algorithms that crunch them and kind of represent them in a number form. That may not be totally accurate because they’re not Google and Google doesn’t release that information publicly, but Majestic and Moz are about as close as you can get to having a really good idea of how powerful that site is or that page is in Google’s eyes.

So, talked enough about that. But hopefully, that gives you a pretty thorough understanding of the concepts of Domain Authority and Page Authority – generally speaking – but as well as DA and PA when we’re talking about Moz’s proprietary metrics.

Another thing to look for is the exact keyword you are researching and considering trying to rank for is that in their meta title and description – which if you don’t know what those are, it’s okay. I’ll point it out as we’re going through live here in a couple of minutes. But that’s another very important thing, because fact of the matter is, you’re probably pretty much across the board going to see Domain Authority and Page Authority that are going to scare the hell out of you. The Page Authority is not going to be remotely close to less than 10 for most keywords you look at. So you have to start looking for the gaps in things like the exact keyword being in the meta title and the description, how well their content is ranked for regarding on-page SEO, stuff like that. So we’ll dig in and take a look at that when we’re looking through some of these keywords.

And another good thing to look for is answer-oriented sites Yahoo! Answers, old article directories like Ezine, and of course, answer sites like eHow and other things like that in the top 10 rankings are pretty good sign that probably means that there aren’t a whole lot of authoritative results there. This is not universally true, but it’s going to be true a lot because a lot of those sites rank based on their Domain Authority overall rather than their Page Authority for that individual page. And that’s actually really good for you because although they have really high Domain Authority, if you can come along and optimize them and have a more authoritative individual page, you could bump up above them. That’ll make more sense when we’re looking through the metrics live.

Another good sign is any kind of free blog site like WordPress.com… and I don’t mean a website that’s hosted on WordPress and they have their own domain name… like Stopping Scams, for example, is its own website hosted on WordPress. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about if you saw a website that was StoppingScams.WordPress.com, okay? Those are the kinds of ones that are a good sign. Same thing with Blogspot, Blogger – anything like that in the top 10, generally speaking.

Again, these last two are not universal; but more often than not, they’re going to be good signs that you could get rankings for those terms if you see those kind of really good signs; because again, they’re ranking more on their Domain Authority than their Page Authority. The competitors that are really hard to outrank are the ones that are ranking based on Page Authority. You can outrank someone that has high Domain Authority, but the really difficult thing to outrank is Page Authority.

So we’ll talk a look at all of this now – live – okay?

So the first thing I want to do is I want to pop in and show you a quick overview of a couple of the keyword tools and then we’ll take a look at a handful of keywords – hopefully without dragging things out too much. But I also want to make sure we go through enough that you actually get these concepts, because again, they’re essential for your success in the coming weeks and months and you really, really need to know how to pick keywords.

So let’s go ahead and hop in to Google.

So I’ve already popped in here ‘tattoo removal’. One of the nice things about most of these keyword tools is that you can pop in at what’s referred to as a ‘seed keyword’ and it’s going to give you all kinds of suggestions based on that seed keyword.

I do want to point out that you can change locations. Like I could narrow this down to my home city of Austin, Texas and get data just for Austin. I could do this for Texas, generally speaking; or I could do that for all of the United States; or just for Germany – or stuff like that. Typically speaking, that comes in really handy for when you’re doing research for local SEO… if you’re planning on getting local SEO clients – which, again, I hope to teach somewhere down the road. But that’s putting the cart before the horse for sure.

So when we’re talking about affiliate websites and just information-based websites, we’re going to probably end up getting traffic from all over the world. So we’re not going to concern ourselves with refining this too much. All locations is fine but I would make sure that I narrowed it down to English.

Something that people ask a lot is, “Can I run a website in French or German?” or whatever your native language is. And the answer is yes. Just make sure that you update the correct setting on Google’s Keyword Planner in order to do that.

So I guess that is one pro to Google’s Keyword Planner… that is not true for a lot of premium tools… is that you can change your language and get search volume for different languages. That is not true for a lot of premium tools. So that is also worth mentioning. I wish I thought about that for the slides. But just know that going forward.

So I’m just going to put in a broad kind of seed keyword. And as time goes on, you could take this broad seed keyword and find a handful of different ones and punch those into and come through and do this in several different cycles. I’m just going to – for right now – just show ‘tattoo removal’ generally speaking and we’ll see what this looks like in Google.

So when you’re brought into Google’s Keyword Planner after searching, you’ll get a lot of data here and you can adjust your keyword up here that we just put in on the last page. But you have Ad group ideas… and personally, I don’t spend really any time in here… I look at the individual Keyword ideas – because again, I’m not using this for Google pay-per-click. I’m using this for search engine optimization inspiration. And so, I’m using this tool very differently than it was originally created for – all SEOs do. But just know that. You’ll probably be operating in the Keyword ideas tab close to 100%, if not 100% of the time.

So we can just kind of scroll down here. I have these sorted by the Average monthly searches. And really quick note: Competition here is not SEO competition. The Competition you see here is for pay-per-click advertising which is a very different thing. There may be some overlap, but it is not dependable enough to say, “Oh, it’s low competition. I can go ahead and try for that with search engine optimization because it says it’s low competition.” That’s not the case at all. (Forgive me, I need to remember to breathe here. I’m just talking so much that I’m like running out of breath. Excuse me. Okay, that’s a lot better.)

So I mean, like Suggested bid… again, these are our pay-per-click metrics. We’re not going to concern ourselves with them too much. The main thing we want to look at is the keyword itself and the monthly searches. We can research competition individually.

So before we dig too deep, I’ve also punched ‘tattoo removal’ over here into Ubersuggest.io to give you an idea of what’s going on over here. So you can see all kinds of options here as well and they kind of break it down alphabetically (this is a really great way to get keyword ideas and long tail keyword ideas); and you know, just kind of click through and say like expand this keyword. So now, it’s going to search ‘tattoo removal equipment’; and obviously, this is going to be a much shorter list (because this was a much more specific seed keyword) but still worth showing.

So Ubersuggest is really cool in that sense and very helpful. Just know that it’s there at your disposal. Especially when you get to the point that you’re having a lot of trouble finding new keywords, Ubersuggest is really good. Even though it doesn’t give you the search volume, it’ll give you some ideas that you can then bring over to Google’s Keyword Planner and put them in and check their search volume and also get even more ideas from Google. So these things kind of stack on one another.

Again, I wish I could make it less overwhelming and less confusing; but this is just the nature of using free keyword tools. So you’re going to have to kind of find a groove of how to use these and it won’t be hard once you use them enough that you get a good feel for them.

So I’m going to re-sort by relevance (which is the default sort) and now you can see like this. As much as I would love to get ranked for this keyword, it is not going to happen remotely quickly. This is the kind of keyword that I could probably spend a year or two years trying to rank for and still probably only be creeping up page one. So I’m not even really going to pay a whole lot of attention to keywords that have really high search volume. I’m going to kind of skip down to the ones that have somewhere between 100 and 1,000 searches a month and even the ones that have between 10 and 100 searches a month.

Let’s take this one for example. I think this is a decent one because it’s fairly long tail. But you see there are a fair amount of these here saying ‘tattoo removals’, ‘removing a tattoo’, ‘cheap tattoo removal’, ‘best laser for tattoo removal’… and I haven’t looked at this really extensively before this video because I think (again) in this industry, you get coaches that hop in and they kind of stage a play-by-play and then they get in and then all the dots connect really quickly and you’re like, “Oh wow. That happened really quickly!” And you start doing it yourself and you’re like, “Why the hell is it taking me six hours when it took him 15 minutes on camera?” So, I try to keep it fairly unplanned so that it’s pretty representative of what it will look like when you’re doing it yourself.

So I’m actually going to take this one: ‘can tattoos be removed’. I might look at some others as well (I’m going to close out this tab from Ubersuggest) and we’re just going to punch this into Google. Again, assuming you have already installed the Moz free toolbar… and you can turn it off and on by clicking this little icon up here. Just a heads up: that’s how you turn it off and on because it can get kind of annoying if you’re not using it and it’s constantly popping up. So when I’m not using it, I have it turned off.

So the keyword ‘can tattoos be removed’… I’m not going to search it with quotes or anything like that… we want to see what this looks like. And the other nice thing for Moz is that you see this drop down here. It’s automatically removing the personalization from Google.

What will happen a lot of the time when people get into this industry is say, for example, I wrote an article about ‘can tattoos be removed’. And I wrote that article, I published it, checked it out at my website, I was so happy with it because I felt like it came out really, really well. And a week later, I searched ‘can tattoos be removed’ and of my God, there I am! I’m in the third position on Google! And then, people get super excited – rightfully so – but what they don’t know is Google has started personalizing search.

So you actually need to either de-personalize your search by using something like the Moz keyword tool or you just have to open a new private browsing window when you’re searching for your rankings, because otherwise, you’re going to get your hopes up and it’s going to be really disappointing when you find out that you’re not actually ranked anywhere near page one. That’s just Google personalizing search and they’re showing you that page that high because you went to the site previously.

Okay. So just disclaimer there. I’ve broken a lot of hearts with that information and it breaks my heart to tell people every single time because people are so excited; but it also explains why you rank for a keyword that gets a thousand searches a month and you’re not getting any traffic. It’s because you’re not actually ranked.

So that’s another nice thing about Moz’s keyword tool or the free MozBar is that it makes for non-personalized search results automatically.

So as we scroll down, you can see for the search term ‘can tattoos be removed’ which Google showed had somewhere between 100 and 1,000 searches a month – which sucks that it’s that big of a swing… that it is that broad like they couldn’t be more specific than that. But I know at the end of the day, that’s a keyword that I’m interested in it as long as the competition is low enough.

So we scroll down here for ‘can tattoos be removed’ and the first thing we see is a very, very authoritative site… WebMD.com and sites like Mayo Clinic and stuff like that. For anything health-oriented, they’re going to be very, very difficult to outrank. So I look at this and I think, “Could I get number one?” Very unlikely. But it makes sense that WebMD is ranked there, because at the end of the day, ‘tattoo removal’ is health-related.

So here’s another article ’10 Things I Wish I Knew Before Laser Tattoo Removal’ for RealSelf.com. I’m going to open that up and just see what kind of site that is. Okay, so RealSelf seems to be some sort of cosmetic-themed website where people talk to you, where people can review and write information about different cosmetic treatments… it looks like from dental to plastic surgery to cosmetic… or dermatological treatments which is technically what laser tattoo removal is. And you can see they’re ranked here, too. You can see they have pretty high Domain Authority overall. Here. Here.

Anything ranked on YouTube is going to have a Domain Authority of 100. But again, we’re not looking at Domain Authority too much. We’re looking at Page Authority. And another thing: whenever you see a PA 1 with a blip of all these other PA 50 or PA 47, either there’s been a reporting error from Moz or what’s also potentially happening here is that Google is giving this as kind of a localized result. (Man, I’m getting so tongue-tied today. I apologize.)

So I actually know that Eraser Clinic is a local business. They’re actually my tattoo removal clinic but they have a lot of locations around Texas. And so, that’s probably why they’re getting ranked here. This is not an advantage you’re going to have. So if you see something like a PA 1 or a PA 4 or 6 among all of these other PA 50, PA 40, PA 70 type websites, don’t think that just because they got there, you can too. It’s either a reporting error or there’s a special exception that applies to them that will probably not apply to you as a blogger. In this particular case, it’s because this website has a lot of really, really good unique content and they’re a local business – and again, that is not going to apply to you. You are not going to get that same advantage.

So this is a pretty scary keyword competition-wise. The lowest one is PA 29. And like I told you… I mean, again, without the exception of Eraser Clinic… I told you it’s going to be really hard to find PA 10 or less just in today’s search climate. It doesn’t really happen that much anymore. But I don’t really want to end up in 30, 40, 50, 70 in competing with these guys.

So the next thing you can look at too is how well are they optimized for this exact keyword. The exact keyword ‘can tattoos be removed’… you don’t see in the… remember, I mentioned meta title and meta description… you don’t see that. This is the meta title and this is the meta description right here. You do not see a single instance of that exact keyword ‘can tattoos be removed’ in this meta description or meta title. Same thing here. There is no exact match keyword for ‘can tattoos be removed’. (Good. I remembered the keyword correctly.)

So as we keep going down, ‘it can remove’… again, we see the keyword broken up throughout the content but we do not see anything with a meta title or meta description and also in the URL slug. We do not see anything that is fully optimized for ‘can tattoos be removed’. So that is the only good sign from this page. That’s a tough call.

And again, this is the thing when you’re using free keyword tools: it’s always going to be a difficult thing to call. I would be much more comfortable seeing like a bunch of PA 20-ish, maybe going up to 30; and nobody having optimized for ‘can tattoos be removed’ in their meta title and meta description. If I saw those two things combined, I would think, “Yeah. This is a keyword I’m going to write on.” If your site’s brand new, I would not expect to rank for it for several months; but again, you may have a shot at it as your website authority builds in the coming months. So I might add it to my list as somewhat moderate competition but I wouldn’t really get my hopes up for this one. I would aim for lower hanging fruit.

So it took us all that time. Granted, it will take you less time because you’re not sitting there talking about it over and over and teaching a video on this particular topic. And as time goes on (just like everything else) this gets easier and easier. But it took us all that time to rule out one keyword. And you’ll see how that is night and day compared to the premium keyword tool we’re going to be looking at in the next video. So just keep that in mind. Expect to spend some time here.

And so, let’s look at ‘best laser tattoo removal’ and see if we have any better results there. So I’ll just scroll back up. Moz’s pop-ups get pretty infuriating sometimes so you just have to deal with them unless you want to pay like $130 or $100 a month for their premium subscription. That’s the only way you’re going to get rid of these little pop-ups that keep coming up.

So again, you could see they’ve kind of localized this result by the fact that we’re seeing a map. This is the exact tattoo removal clinic that I go to. This is an ad. In fairness, they’re not up there at the top through SEO; but they are at the top through SEO up here. And again… man, we’re seeing a couple of things… I think Moz may have given me a notification about this as I hit Enter… could be wrong. Okay. They’re loading better now.

So again, when you see this PA 1, don’t think, “Oh, it’s PA 1! I’m going to be able to rank for this now.” It’s actually kind of a bad sign because Google very clearly thinks that this is a local-oriented search phrase. So someone searching ‘best laser tattoo removal’, they (Google) feel clearly like that is someone looking for the best laser tattoo removal locally. They don’t think this is someone that’s looking for the best type of laser tattoo removal. They think this is someone looking locally for the best tattoo removal business. And so, I wouldn’t even look at this one extensively because although it’s possible that we may get ranked somewhere down here at the bottom half of page one, the top half of page one for this term (pretty much across the board) is going to be dominated by local results. And so, that’s not going to be worth my time to get really deep into.

So, let’s see. Let’s look for another 100 to 1K. ‘Laser for tattoo removal’… let’s see what that one pops up. See what Google thinks is relevant there. Again, local listings. Anytime you see this map pop up, that’s an indicator that Google thinks that this is a more localized search term.

‘Tattoo removal clinic’ is definitely going to be a localized search term. (Excuse me while I get some water.) Let’s see because this is different than ‘best laser tattoo removal’. Let’s see if they think this one’s local, too. Yeah. It’s clear that Google thinks that that’s a local result as well because they’re putting the maps up top. You can see that there’s kind of a general discussion just below that. But again, like Eraser Clinic, Eraser Clinic, Westlake Dermatology – those are local businesses. Google thinks that this is a more local-related term.

So let’s kind of flip the script a little bit here. I’m going to sort by Average monthly searches. I’m going to sort ascending so that they go from the lowest to the highest. And another thing that’s worth mentioning is whenever you see a keyword like this that doesn’t make sense syntactically… like someone has just totally cut out a word here and kind of searched the way you search on the internet… and that makes it very hard to optimize an article for that keyword. And I personally just totally skip over these unless there’s a clever way to go about it – and hopefully, I come across an example – but writing an article that the title is ‘Getting a Tattoo Removed Cost’… the best way you could do that is something like that. So technically, that’s fully optimized for that keyword; but it’s just not the greatest user experience overall. And I think it’s also up for debate as to whether or not that actually has any payoff because Google’s algorithms (their bots, their spiders) now are smart enough to know when someone is just writing important English to try and appease an exact match for a keyword. So unless I could do it in a way that really made a lot of sense, I would just skip over those.

So let’s check ‘permanent tattoo removal price’. Ah, good! No local results. We’re seeing some fairly high Page Authority… not as high as before… so I would actually say that this is one that I would write for. Again, we’re seeing RealSelf. That’s apparently going to be a common theme for this particular niche. But these are all ads. This is what’s commonly referred to as ‘result zero’ or ‘position zero’ because it’s above all of the other ones. This only came about within the last couple of years. But you can see I’m not dealing with as high a Page Authority overall. Maybe the top two or three. But again, they’re RealSelf and they are not ranked for the exact match keyword ‘permanent tattoo removal price’.

So I could write an article that was like ‘Permanent Tattoo Removal Price: How Much Does Laser Tattoo Removal Cost?’ and that way, I’m going to rank for a lot of keywords. And this could just be a general topic. It would take a fair amount of research on my end because I know that my particular tattoo cost about $300 a session because it’s a really big one. But that’s not necessarily true for every tattoo. A lot of people have tattoos that are that big that they want to have removed or they have someone’s name that’s this big. Not everyone’s trying to get some almost two-foot tattoo removed from the front of their torso because they were a really, really stupid 20-year old. So yeah, that’s worth mentioning. But I would probably write an article somewhere around those lines.

So if I were doing keyword research manually, what I would do is I would have a little notepad open on my computer somewhere and I would take note of this one. I would take note of the search term; I would take note of the search volume (which of course, again, we’re only getting a range from Google); and I would probably take note of the average Page Authority throughout. You know, just kind of eyeball it. I wouldn’t actually crunch the numbers. So we see 43, 52, 36, 17, 48, 25, 30, 35, 19, 29… so I’d probably say PA 30. And I would also take note along the lines of (I’m just going to have to open up and do this. I’m going to create a new document. Show you how I would do this)… I would also take note of whether or not they were optimized for the exact keyword.

So I would come over here and I would take ‘permanent tattoo removal price’, drop it in here. Okay. And then, I would… an Excel spreadsheet would probably be better, actually. Let’s do that. I’m starting to run around so much. Again, I use premium keyword tools. I haven’t done manual keyword research extensively in quite a while. Fortunately, it hasn’t change that much. The main tools when I was doing it were Moz and Google Keyword Planner and that hasn’t changed. But yeah, so I don’t really keep spreadsheets and stuff like this anymore. My premium keyword tool that you’ll see in the next video keep track of all my list and stuff like that. But I would have a Keyword column, I would have Search Volume, and I would have Average PA, and I would have Optimized for KW?. And this is, again, going to be the meta title and the meta description. Are they optimized for the keyword?

So, ‘permanent tattoo removal price’ (sorry about that, I opened up all kinds of crap here)… okay, ‘permanent tattoo removal price’ number of searches is 10 to 100; average Page Authority was I said 30; optimized for keyword, No. Or I could just put ‘N’ there. So now we’ve got our first keyword. This keyword… we would write an article specifically for this keyword. I mentioned what I would call that article, ‘Permanent Tattoo Removal Price: How Much Does Laser Tattoo Removal Cost?’ That’s going to kind of double optimize for those two keywords and probably optimize for a ton of other keywords. But, as I went through and I wrote the article, I really only focused on doing this. I’d just throw this in there for extra (hopefully) bonus SEO points.

So, that’s one and then we would just keep going through. And I would say in one session, I would aim to get at least ten keywords like this that meet kind of the same criteria. Hopefully, we can get even lower average Page Authority if you kept looking… even lower than kind of an average of 30… and hopefully somewhere, find some keywords around average Page Authority of 20 or maybe even as well as 15. But like I said, that’s going to be really hard in today’s search climate and it’s only going to get harder and harder as time goes on.

So I think this has been really helpful overall. You know, we saw examples of like… what was it? Health MD? I don’t know what it’s called… anyways, the really authoritative website that we saw… and kind of an example of yeah, we’re never going to outrank those guys. But then also, we saw a lot of different examples for local keywords. Remember, if you see the map pop up, it’s probably not worth going for unless you’re a local business because Google clearly is going to give preference to local businesses for those terms. And at the very best, you are not going to rise above the map… you know… you’re going to be bumped halfway down the page just because the map is there.

And you know, there’s going to be all kinds of keywords as we dug deeper and deeper into this that we could have pulled from Google or from Ubersuggest. For example, like I could put in here ‘does tattoo removal hurt’. Get ideas. Sometimes you get a little error like that. Typically, clicking back and forth helps. But I guess not. There we go. This time. Cool. So you saw that I got an error and I just clicked back and forth in these tabs until it worked. Again, just tricks of the trades you learn over time. So this is probably too high a search volume for me to optimize for. But let’s see. Like this keyword doesn’t make any sense: ‘how much is to remove a tattoo’. I wouldn’t ever, ever go for that just because it just doesn’t make sense.

Keyword Planner’s having issues for some reason. Okay, I re-sorted by relevance here. So ‘does tattoo removal hurt’ is still up there at the top. I’m still getting a lot of unrelated keywords frankly. There you go: ‘is tattoo removal painful’. Let’s check that one out really quick. Come over to Google, ‘is tattoo removal painful’, and you can see at least we’re not seeing local listings. But we can see PA 72. WebMD – that’s what I was thinking about, not Health MD. WebMD is all the way down here at the bottom; but again, it’s not directly related so I wouldn’t worry about it too, too much. ’10 Things You Need to Know About Laser Tattoo Removal’… this one’s kind of a coin toss. I would probably lean towards avoiding it because we see some fairly… I don’t know… that’s tough. It’s tough because we’ve got RealSelf again and none of these guys are directly optimized for ‘is tattoo removal painful’.

There’s a lot of ‘does laser tattoo removal hurt’ and there’s a mention of it being painful here. This is actually a really good representation of what we’re talking about, how we skirt around these things. Because you can see here that this site… if they have low Domain Authority… and it’s distinctly possible that this is an accurate readout of PA 1… we can always open up the… you only get a limited number of these every day if you have their free membership, but I just click this little Link Analysis… I think you get three free per day and we can kind of look at the detail metrics. And it does look like they in fact have a Page Authority of 1 and they don’t have any links that Moz is aware of.

Majestic or Ahrefs is another premium tool, but again, they’re very expensive. Each one of those is like $100 a month. But you can get really, really in the weeds with these stuff. And at the end of the day, if you just focus on doing your best as far as these metrics go; and writing really, really high-quality content; and putting out a lot of that really high-quality content – you’re going to see results.

So at the end of the day, if you feel really overwhelmed by all of this… again as always, take a deep breath and remind yourself: big picture. I don’t need to do this absolutely perfectly, I’m doing the best I can, and I’m doing it a hell of a lot better than most people trying to get started this industry. If you can’t afford premium keyword tools, this is what you’ve got. Right? Work with what you’ve got and just stick with it. Work the course. Work the program.

This is a perfect example of what I’m saying that we’ve got some really high Page Authority sites here but nobody is directly optimized for ‘is tattoo removal painful’. The one site… the article is about a little over a year old so that’s about all that has going for it and a little bit of Domain Authority… but the one site that directly optimized… and their meta description isn’t even optimized, it’s only their meta title.

So actually once I saw that, I was about to say I’m not sure I’d write for this one. But now, I absolutely would because you can see what a page with almost no authority, a very unestablished website… just because they optimized for this keyword and there are some other things at play… remember, they do have Domain Authority… they have little bit older website than you would have at this point… so there are other things at play. You shouldn’t expect to publish an article (even a really high-quality article for this) and get ranked immediately. But this is absolutely one of those articles that you could publish – you could write about and publish.

And as you begin to build authority as you’re writing about all of these other topics and people start talking about your website and linking to your website and finding your website and staying for a while and reading, you’re going to see articles like this go up and up and up over time – which is exactly what this person is experiencing right now. They wrote a good really high-quality article, they optimized it as far as even the URL slug has a partial match for the keyword, and let’s… ‘is tattoo removal’ and so if we search ‘painful’, they… wow. They only have one mention of ‘painful’ the entire article so we could very easily optimize for this.

(And my God, this is horrible tattoo removal. Okay, right after the first treatment. Never mind. I thought they were showing these as they’re finalized. I just got lost in the industry. I apologize. I thought they were showing these as finalized results. These are just directly after treatment and they always look a little bit funky immediately after treatment.)

So anyways, this is a perfect example of what we’re aiming to do. That site is writing some really high-quality content and it does look like they’re at least doing lead generation. Ah, no. They’re a local business. Okay. So that’s another reason why they’re ranking – which goes back to what I said of them being a local business. So remember that they’re going to get some advantages that you’re not going to have.

So, would I write about this with that in mind? ’10 Things You Need To Know…’ Everyone else is just so under-optimized for the exact match keyword that I’d probably still do it. I’d probably still do it even knowing that that’s a local business. But so anyways, we’re getting really into the weeds here. I want you to see this firsthand and hear everything about how I interpret things and why I’m thinking about it this way, and why I’m saying it’s good and why I’m saying it’s bad. I would still write an article on this one. I think I could get ranked for this one. Again, it’s not giving total preference to local because we don’t have that map up top.

So I don’t know. Maybe I don’t write about it immediately, but at the very least, I add it to my spreadsheet. So I would come over here, I would say ‘is tattoo removal painful’ (delete that extra line there), and it has 10 to 100 searches a month. Oh, no. That one has 100 to 1,000. So that’s one of the reasons it’s a higher competition keyword, too.

So keeping that in mind… yeah, I probably don’t write for it; because again, higher search volumes is almost always going to mean higher competition – at least at this stage in my business. A year from now… if I wrote constantly for a year and I started building that authority, I would not be so afraid of a higher competition + higher search volume keyword. But immediately right off the bat, just the odds of getting ranked for it are not super high.

So we can see there’s an average. If I had to ballpark this Page Authority, I’d say probably around 35. Optimized for keyword? No. The only one that’s optimized for keyword was that local one and it was ranking okay.

So I would just keep going until I found at least 10 of these. Also keeping in mind, maybe you have another kind of section. You have maybe a column here and a column down here that’s like Maybes? because you’re going to find some that… you know… you’re kind of up in the air about and maybe one day you get to a point and you’re like, “What should I write about today? Hmm. I don’t know. I’m going to do this because I just don’t feel like doing keyword research” And yeah, there’s a chance that we’ll get ranked for it at some point. And you’ll be surprised how many of those over time could pay off.

And the other thing to keep in mind is if you write about this keyword, you will also potentially get rankings for a lot of longtail keywords that you weren’t directly optimizing for that are related to that topic, too. So a good piece of content’s a good piece of content. It’s going to be an asset to your business any way around it.

But just keep these things in mind, okay? Some of these competition authority notes that we’ve talked about. And just, again, work the program. Stick with it. Practice, practice, practice. This is going to be super overwhelming and possibly very confusing even if you’ve watched this video once, twice, three times and you start doing a lot of it yourself. But the more you stick with it, the better you’re going to get.

Now, this in contrast to premium keyword research tools is night and day. And this is where you’re going to see like, “Oh. That’s why people pay for premium keyword research tools even though they’re really expensive.” Because everything we just did… I don’t know how long this video has run… there it is. It’s run like an hour now. We’ve run from slideshow to going through and probably at least 40 minutes of that was actual keyword research. That’s just the process of free keyword research tools. Period. It gets a lot faster when we get into premium keyword research which is the next video.

So if you don’t have the budget for it, don’t feel bad. Don’t feel crappy. Don’t feel like you’re doomed. You’re just going to have to get really good at everything you just saw in this video. Make sure to search the Facebook group to see if anybody else has been talking about this and ask questions there if you have them.

But at the end of the day, whatever you write for as long as you’re optimizing on page, in time (if you stick with it) we’ll start ranking for long tail keywords or the exact keyword you were targeting. Just keep that in mind. Even if it feels like a waste of time today, if you do it correctly and it’s really high-quality, it may start paying a year from now, eight months from now, six months from now, two years from now as you continue building your site. Just know that, okay?

Very important note: you want to keep the big picture in mind, because otherwise, you’re going to get really overwhelmed and feel really defeated throughout a lot of this process.

But that’s free keyword research tool or free keyword research – and I guess, keyword research using free tools would be the correct way to say it. That’s as good as it gets. And you would probably need to carve every couple of weeks eight or ten hours out of your work to just research keywords and find high-quality keywords. The good news is… you know, we went through this; and of course, I walked you through every step… you could probably check out individual keywords within two or three or four minutes of one another and knock it all out much quicker than this. But just remember: it takes time, it takes practice, and there’s nothing wrong with these free keyword research tools. You’re just going to have to work at it a little bit harder.

So I’m done rambling. I hope I did this topic justice. Very, very complex topic… as we’ve discussed also very, very important.

So as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the Facebook group. And I will see you over there or I will just see you in the next video where we’re going to take a look at how different and how much quicker and more efficient this is if you do have the budget for premium keyword research. See you there!

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