Question

My thoughts and questions about keyword research.

It’s no doubt that keyword research can become an in-depth yet important step.

In the manual research video,(which for no other reason than my own..I prefer doing research this way,)you leave us with several key points for a proper analysis.

After watching the video more than once and then watching it and doing it at the same time, I admit it started to click. I recommend to anyone new to not try to get it by watching and doing it only once. This seemed and seems to be an important fact.

Even though it requires multiple steps repeated and although everybody’s learning curve is/will be different, it took me every bit of a few days to do it right and not have to refer back to the video to get it right.

What I came up with was enough deeply culled keywords to make me feel a little better about the niche keywords I had analyzed. I also back the suggestion of picking two favorites and running them both through the same extensive deep cull cycle.

Anyway by doing it this way I was surprised with the end results as I ended up NOT going with the one keyword I originally believed I would.

I was left with the following questions about my results and then doing the deeper searches for posts within a cat.?:

You say that the lower the domination factor the easier it will be to dominate and the more profitable. And the lower the comp. the easier it is to dominated. Understood. > > Did you say what the cap for comp. should be is it 500,000 or less, is this for both the main keyword, the category keyword and the sub-categories as well?

What about the Dom. factor? Should we stay within certain range? 10.0 or less, 500.00? What’s the break-over #’s for both to insure domination and profitability?

In the video you demonstrate inserting two long tail phrases below one of our chosen 10 keywords and explain that these will become posts within the category. Understood.

I was wondering…in actually performing this important step I find that it can get deep. I understand you said we should test the comp. of these post phrases. How far down the google keyword search list should we consider for post phrase titles? Should we only be looking at the ones with zero ad comp. as you did in the video? Should we stop at a minimum search vol.? Is it again 1,000?

Once we get these 3 word phrases, do we go all the way and duplicate all the prior steps we did with the main keyword and then include all this into our original spreadsheet?? I guess that’s a no-brainer but had to ask?

For instance, when I looked at one of my first of the ten chosen cat.keywords for sub-cat. post probability, I found around 30 or so that I felt would/could serve as a potential post title. I think this is probably not always the norm but should we go this far with it or stick to the two like you said, for now?

I know you said that you could go a lot farther with them and all. It does seem that one could really spend a ton of time breaking down the main keyword and then breaking down the categories and so on and so forth.

It did seem that the more I played around with the phrases I started seeing category possibilities within cat. and so on.

Are we only scrapping the surface for now and testing these first chosen two just to get going with the blog?

How important is it at this stage of the blog to get these 100% right? I guess when we go out and look for product etc. this question will answer itself maybe?

If some of this will be explained/re-reviewed or gone into deeper in an up-coming video then sorry for unnecessary questions?

I’ve watch the next video and will be watching it again and looking for anything pertaining to these questions that I might have missed.

The next video and process seems really slick with the Samurai and all, for some reason though I’m getting the feeling that the manual way although a longer process…might be a preferred way by some. I’d almost prefer the manual way of doing it unless you tell me that the time value vs. the outcome really makes it more worthwhile to do it the Samurai way.

When thinking these thoughts I had no idea it would turn into such a in depth request, it almost seems that a whole video could be made about in depth keyword research alone but I don’t know. That’s why I count on your expertise!

Thanks for your wisdom!

Answer Provided

Quite a question you have here!

First off you should target all the keywords that have a low domination factor no matter how many Search Engine Response Pages (SERP’s) there are. These will take longer and be harder to dominate but as you build your domination of the keywords with the lower SERP’s you will automatically start coming up the ranks with the ones that have the higher SERP’s (as long as they are related keywords)

The keywords you start out with should be the ones with the lowest amount of SERP’s because they are the ones that you will rank highly with first. It is important to get your keywords mostly correct when you start because these are what will bring the targeted traffic to your site and without traffic you don’t have a site you have a place holder on the internet.

Believe it or not the more traffic you get to your site the better you will rank. I know it is a catch 22 when it comes to search engines but there is a reason for this and I will try to explain here because it isn’t just the traffic. It is your content!

If you don’t have good content people won’t come back to your site, they won’t tell their friends about your site and they won’t bookmark or post links to your site. All of these things have to do with the content. The more high quality content you have the more traffic you will get because of the things above and the better you will do in the search engines if all that content is on one topic (your overall niche).

Because your site will get more backlinks, bookmarks and have a better stickiness (see my article The Truth about SEO for Blogs at http://www.HowToBlogSite.com) this raises you in the rankings and gets you more traffic.

If all your categories relate to your niche this will help your LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) that Google uses and push you up the ranks in the search engines. LSI is basically the search engines being able to tell that different words are related. This is how Google comes up with the Other Suggested Keywords.

What does this mean?

Like I said don’t ignore the keywords that have 20 million SERP’s go ahead and use them but to start out target the keywords that are related to your main niche and in the long run it will help you rank for even the busiest keywords.

Yes, it will take time and it will take content but once you get there the rewards are worth it.

Make sure you do research in your niche and that you keep up with what is new and try to get it on your blog fast. To catch the surge that always happens when something is new.

Now on to the manual and automated keyword research.

I too prefer the manual research but as you have noticed you can spend a long time going deeper and deeper which is good but time consuming. My usual method is use Market Samurai to generate a list of 50 or so keywords and then double check those with the manual method. This does save me some time and I still get ideas for keywords.

The more keywords you have the better off you are BUT if you spend all your time on keyword research and no time on content you might get traffic but you won’t get that repeat traffic that you want to keep your site hopping.

So go ahead and go as deep as you want I would start with keywords with under a million SERP’s and put good content on your site for all those keywords but if you want to make a post for a keyword that has 20 million SERP’s just because you have some great content for that keyword then do it.

Stop your research and (as Wizzer would say) “Do It Now” you might not rank for it right away but as the site grows it will move up the ranks.

A good example of this is Wizzer and my competition for the term Blogging Instructions. I stopped building on it and left it and Wizzer kept creating new posts and people bookmarked his post and now I have dropped back to page 3 and he is on page 1. At least for today, I might have to take some action on that now. But again the quality of your content is something that you really need to pay attention to as well as the keywords.

The is an article that I really like at Steve Pavlina’s site http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/how-to-build-a-high-traffic-web-site-or-blog/

When you have the time read it.

I think I covered everything but if I missed something let me know.