The next step is to gauge whether a keyword is valuable for the niche you’re writing for. Why are some keywords in your niche valuable while others are totally worthless? This comes down to whether the keywords you’re selecting are attracting qualified traffic versus unqualified traffic.
What Makes Traffic Qualified?
Simply put, qualified traffic is traffic from visitors who are likely to take action on your website. These visitors are likely to subscribe to your mailing list or buy from you or your affiliates. What makes them qualified is that they are actively searching for what you have to offer. This is why it’s important to take their intent into consideration when selecting keywords.
Not All Traffic Is Created Equal
Just because a keyword in your niche has high search volume and low competition doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s viable. If the visitors that your keywords attract aren’t likely to take action on your website, they’re worthless. It doesn’t matter if they’re interested in reading your content or if there are 10,000 of them a month; if visitors don’t take action on your site, they are useless. Unqualified traffic is worthless traffic.
This is what it all boils down to: not all traffic is created equal.
I wish someone had explained the concept of qualified traffic to me when I started out. This mistake is more commonly made by new Internet Marketers, but I’ve also seen it done by people who are five-figure monthly earners.
Even now, I see plenty of very successful advanced Internet Marketers who aren’t paying attention to this concept. They go after ALL the traffic they can without even considering whether or not it’s going to result in anything that’s beneficial.
If you’re unfamiliar with this concept going into Internet Marketing, it can really bite you in the butt. Getting 30,000 visitors a month in unqualified traffic won’t get you more than $1,000 a month no matter how much you optimize for conversions or what offers you promote.
My Story: An Example of How Unqualified Traffic Can Hurt Return on Investment
StoppingScams.com is where I provide honest Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing product reviews. When StoppingScams.com was fairly new I was trying to build authority. I wanted to transition from doing reviews to something more holistic, so I decided to write an article about how a Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) company ruined one of my friendships.
I had a friend who tried to recruit me into an MLM company called Nerium that sells anti-aging skincare and wellness products. The experience destroyed our friendship, and I wrote about it both as an honest review and as a cautionary tale about success in MLMs.
If you’re interested, you can read the whole article on https://stoppingscams.com/ titled How MLMs Ruin Friendships – My 100% Honest Nerium Review.
Since then, I’ve received thousands of visitors for this article because it ranks well for terms like “Nerium scam” and other long-tail keywords related to Nerium. Of course, when you receive that kind of traffic, you want to try and convert it. And try I did. However, no matter what conversion optimization technique I did (and I know plenty), that traffic just would not convert for Internet Marketing training or how to build an online business.
To this day, I still receive over a hundred or more visitors a day from this article. But I don’t get anything out of it because they just don’t convert into my particular funnel.
You would think someone interested in knowing about an MLM opportunity is also interested in building an Affiliate Marketing business or blog, but they’re not. They’re only interested in that specific MLM opportunity, not making money online.
I’m not alone in this. Other marketers who compete in the same space as StoppingScams.com write a lot about MLMs and see a ton of traffic. However, they don’t see a whole lot of conversion into Internet Marketing training because there just isn’t an overlap between visitors who are interested in both extra and passive income.
So that’s my very real, very painful example of unqualified traffic that doesn’t convert.
The moral of the story is clear: just because there are keywords with search volume that you could potentially get rankings for doesn’t mean it’s worth your time or that it’s going to make you money.
How to Avoid Unqualified Traffic
When looking at high search volume keywords, consider first if that keyword is actually related to what you’re promoting. Your new content should relate closely enough to your existing content, as well as the offers you’re promoting, so you can convert the traffic you do receive.
Between a higher search volume keyword that’s only loosely related to your existing offers and content and a lower search volume keyword that seems to only have a few people searching for it but is much more related to what you’re promoting, go for the latter.
As you’re looking at keywords and building your keyword list, think:
“Is the person searching for this keyword in my target audience?”
A lot of the time you can tell whether or not you’re attracting the right kind of visitor by the keywords they’re searching. As you build your website, pay attention to how well the traffic to certain posts is converting. Take note of which keywords are performing better than others to achieve higher conversion rates and, in return, earn income with qualified traffic.
