Keyword Research

Welcome to our Keyword Research module where we will show you how as affiliate marketers we dig through and find keywords that will drive us relevant traffic. While we never shy away from a bit of competition it is always beneficial to try and source keywords that have a worthwhile search volume but little in the way of competition. These techniques can be used for Affiliate Marketing but also for standard site SEO and expansion of your keyword sets.

You will rarely find a keyword with good traffic with very low competition, especially for affiliate products however we try and find a happy medium between competition and traffic.

Because of one of the main dangers of Affiliate Marketing which is “analysis paralysis” we try and automate as much of the work as possible because it is about acting on the keywords rather than just finding the.

keyword Research follows a basic guideline which is:

1. Brainstorm
2. Research
3. Analyze
4. Check

The check part is in there for a very good reason. Automated tools are simply robots that go out and pull information. Obsessionally they do make incorrect judgments about potential keywords so before you start targeting your keywords you need to double check that the results are correct.

Because a picture paints a thousand words we try and show you by Video exactly what we do to source our keywords and you can simply copy what we do. However remember that our methods are what we do, there is no set in stone way to do Keyword Research or what tools you should or shouldn’t use. We are aware that there are many other tools out there but we just show you what we do. You can go as deep into keyword research as you like, or even just grab a few basic keywords and start targeting.

For this task I have picked a product from ClickBank. It is called Panic Away, I do not promote this product, and I am not necessarily saying it is a good product to promote, I am simply using it as an example of finding keywords that you can drive traffic to from the SERPS.

Regardless of how you promote your keywords after you have built your content, whether it be with SEnuke, another link building tool or even totally white hat manual link building the principles remain the same. The only difference is, if you don’t use automated link building tools then you will have your work cut out for link building.

For the main part of this method we will be utelizing 2 tools. The  first is

Keyword Extreme

For regular users of our site you may or may not need Keyword Extreme as if you already have Keyword Researcher then that will be fine as the part of the software which we use works in exactly the same way.

Long Tail Pro

This is really the software that is going to be doing all of the analysis of your collected keywords. We will explain in the video what you should be looking for however this software comes with our utmost recommendation. Where tools like market samurai have started to become less useful because they are not kept up to date or improved upon, Long Tail Pro really is utilizing metrics from all over in order to give you a good idea of what you should target and what you should steer clear from.

Keyword Research – Brainstorming

First of all we need a brainstorming session to get a base list of keywords. I try to get a huge amount where possible and analyze them later to weed out the chaff.

The first stop will be Google’s Keyword Planner, you will need an Adwords account (I believe it is free to set one up) in order to access the tools.

Once we grab some seed keywords from this we then use Keyword Extreme to pull keywords from the Google Instant results. This will give us hundreds, if not thousands of keywords that people actually search for.

Keyword Research – Research Phase

As I mentioned earlier we should never take the keywords and results given by any tool as gospel and always double check the results. The search volumes are never more than just a guide. When a website draws in traffic, 90% of the traffic will actually come from Long Tails that you never even dreamed of trying to rank for. This is why the relevance factor of the website is so very important.

A very primitive way to tell if a keyword has traffic is if the search term has Adwords Ads appear in the search. If they do then you would assume that there is potential for a sale from there otherwise the Adwords users simply would not target the keywords.

Most of all though the research section is all about confirming whether the keyword is a viable option. If you are an Affiliate Marketer and you have just chosen a product to promote then the chances are that you will be starting a new site. When you start a new site you will find it very difficult to rank for very competitive keywords so we use our methods to pick out some keywords that offer a good opportunity for rankings and driving traffic. As time goes on you will build the authority of your website and in turn you will start to rank for more competitive terms.

Authority will be gained through link building so this will not happen overnight. You should still focus your site on the heavy weight keywords but it will be the individual pages that will start to rank first.

Keyword Research – Analyze

By using Long Tail Pro we will then be looking more at the general competitiveness of the keyword rather than searching for more keywords. The tool uses many different factors in creating its evaluation which is known as a KC Score. Many things are taken into account such as Page Rank, Domain Authority, Page Authority, Moz Rank as well as inbound links. There is also a row called “Juice Links” which shows the amount of links that are not only do-follow but also hold some sort of authority.

In the video below you will see me analyze a small portion of keywords to pick out some that I could start with. Remember with Long Tail Platinum you can add in up to 10,000 of your own keywords that you can pull from other sources like keyword extreme or the Google Keyword Planner. Set it running and let it find the keywords for you.

Checking Your Results

While in my opinion Long Tail Platinum is the dogs swingers of a tool, if I am about to spend a lot of time setting up a website, writing content and promoting the site then I want to make sure that the results are accurate. The main things I will double check will be the search volumes (check with Google), and I will double check the sites on page 1.

If you have access to a link checker then you can double check the amount of links going to the pages that are showing on page 1 for your selected search terms.

Video – Double Click For HD