Why are keywords important?

When someone does a search on Google for a product (e.g. mortgage), Google will look at its database and list all the sites they think are relevant to this search. There are about 140 different factors that influence how high Google will rank a site, the two most important ones are:

1. if the keyword is actually present on the page (in other words, the pages they list must have the keyword “mortgage” in their content)
2. and how many sites related to the keyword “mortgage” link to that page (preferably, the link to that page will have the word “mortgage” in it.

So if you are a smart business owner, you want your site to rank well in the search engines for a keyword relevant to your brand, product or service. This means that you will get targeted traffic: people who are actually looking for your product and will want to buy it.

But with millions of competitors trying to rank for this keyword, that is an almost impossible feat.

Start with the low hanging fruit

You don’t want to start with the most competitive keyword first. They way to rank for a difficult keyword is to first start ranking for an easy keyword.

This is where keyword hierarchy comes in.

Some easy keywords that people actually type into Google when they search for mortgages are:

• best fixed rate mortgage (266 searches a day but only 20,000 competitors)
• jumbo mortgage rate (325 searches a day but only 10,600 competitors)
• fixed interest mortgage rate (398 searches a day but only 26,100 competitors)
• fha mortgage rate (398 searches a day but only 11,400 competitors)
• mortgage quote online (266 searches a day but only 11,000 competitors)

(You might wonder how we determined this. Keep reading, we’ll show you how you can find out how many competitors you have in the field, what people actually search for and how many searches there are on average a day).

26,000 competitors may sound like a lot, but trust me, if you follow our guideline, you’ll beat them all.

One you start ranking well for the keywords above, Google will conclude that your website must be relevant for the term “mortgage rate”, because you already rank well for the keyphrase “best fixed rate mortgage“, “jumbo mortgage rate“, fixed interest mortgage rate” and fha mortgage rate“.

As you can see, the term “mortgage rate” is present in each of these search phrases. Once you start ranking well for various shorter keyphrases with the word mortgage in them (e.g. “fixed mortgage“, “best mortgage“, “home mortgage”, “mortgage deals”, etc. your site will start to look very relevant for the keyword “mortgage”.

In other words, the trick isn’t to try to rank well for the most difficult keyword in your industry but to get in via the backdoor by trying to rank for easy (”long-tail”) keywords.

This is what the keyword hierarchy looks like for the term “mortgage”:

Keep in mind that this is a simplified list. At the bottom, you will need to rank for more than four “long-tail” keyphrases. In the middle you will need to rank for more than two keyphrases. At the top, you will eventually rank for the one word keyword, but by then you will already have millions of visitors.

The important thing to remember here is that for each of the bottom keywords you rank for already bring you visitors. The four bottom keywords in our example alone will expose your listing to 1387 views a day. Worst case scenario only 6% will click on your listing. That’s 83 clicks a day. Imagine only 2% actually decide to buy from you (onsite marketing can improve this ratio). That still culminates in almost 2 sales a day. With no effort on your part, and no other cost than your time or that of a SEO specialist). And once you rank well, chances are high that you remain ranking well for years. So there is no repeat cost.

That is why SEO is so powerful: it automatically generates sales for you while you sleep.

Establishing the keyword hierarchy for your site.

The model you will be using is the following:

You already know the Major Keyword you want to rank for. Now you need to find a number of niche keywords. Each one of these niche keywords has a micro niche that you can easily rank your site for.

But how do you establish these niches and micro niches? Two words:

Keyword research

The truth is, it’s easy. Google itself will tell you what people type into its search engine and how many searches there are on average a day for that keyword. Google also tells you how many competitors there are for that given keyphrase.

If you want to find what keywords people search for, and how many searches you can expect a day (on average), go use the Google Keyword tool.

Make a list of all searches you think people might type into Google’s search box and enter them into the the box.

Note that at this stage, you don’t have to have a clue what people are actually searching for. You just have to guess. Google will analyze the keywords you enter, and match them with actual search results!

Make a list of five keyphrases that you are interested in. Make sure they have a minimum of 80-100 searches a day. Research these keywords on Google.

Now do a search on Google for your keyword preceded by ” (e.g. “plumber Dallas). This will then list only the competitors who actually have the words plumber Dallas in their copy.

If we do this on Google, we find that 25,100 sites have this keyword in their text. This is a great indicator that these sites aren’t optimized for this keyword and that we can beat their listings with ease.

The rule of thumb is that if a keyword search returns less than 30,000 sites indexed by Google, we have stumbled upon a keyword that is non-competitive. Nobody is actually trying to rank number 1 for this keyword in an organized way.

So go ahead, and research your 5 chosen keywords in Google. If the search returns more than 30,000 pages in Google’s index, take it off the list. Find another keyword, until you have a list of 5 keywords that have more than 80 searches a day (the more the better of course) and have less than 30,000 pages indexed by Google.

Now you have a list of 5 non-competitive keywords we can start ranking your site for these keywords.

Market Samurai

If you have $149 to spare, then Market Samurai can make keyword research easier for you. It essentially will do the exact same task as what I’ve shown you so far, but it will speed up the process for you:

Over to you

If anything isn’t clear to you, or you want additional information or know of other great ways to research keywords, let us know by leaving a comment. We respond fairly quickly to all your questions and suggestions.