There are things where a good practical example brings much more than a thousand words.
How to search for keywords and optimize a content so that Google positions it as well as possible for those keywords and receives from there a good amount of daily visits is one of those cases.
I have already published quite a few posts about SEO in this blog, but comments like this one make me see the need of such an example to really understand how to do all this.
So, today I will develop a practical example of how to do a good keyword analysis to determine keywords that will allow you to position your content as well as possible in Google.
In a second post I will complete this example with another one where we will focus on how to apply the results of this keyword analysis work in the contents of the post.
What are keywords and what exactly are they for?
Google is a great invention because we can find information about anything imaginable with this search engine. It’s obvious, I’m not telling you anything new with this.
But what not everyone is aware of is that this is also true the other way around, that is, Google is also a gigantic market research, it knows what people demand, whether for simple entertainment, for training, to solve a problem, to buy or for anything else. It knows this through the searches that people type in (which it counts).
These searches that people type are precisely what is called keywords.
That is, if you search for “where to buy a cheap Thermomix” the words of this phrase are the famous keywords.
The fantastic thing about this is that you can also access this information. That is, you can know what are the exact keywords that people use in their searches, how many searches for them are made per month and much more.
Therefore, if you know what they are, you have the opportunity to satisfy them by providing content that matches those demands.
Taken to commercial terrain, it is the dream of any entrepreneur: to be able to know with absolute precision and in seconds what your customers demand so that you can design a product or service that you know in advance that your customers will want to buy. Compare this to doing a traditional market research…
Think about it for a moment, think for a moment how incredibly powerful it is to be able to do this and the incredible possibilities it offers you if you put a little imagination and work to take advantage of it.
Now you will understand why there is no crisis for online business and why knowing how to position yourself in Google for the searches you are interested in plays such an important role in all of this.
This is like a new window to a gigantic market with demands of all kinds, commercial or non-commercial, that were not known before with that level of detail.
And when I say market it is important that it doesn’t matter if it is a simple hobby blog without any commercial intention or an online store.
The problem is always the same, getting potential readers/customers to see you on the Internet. It is always a question of supply and demand, even when the “product” is free as is the case with blog content.
If you want to use this to your advantage, SEO will be the key for these people to see you before others and you will be the one who can satisfy these needs.
There you have the secret of online business success, simple, right?
So if you didn’t see clearly if it’s worth getting into this SEO learning thing, I hope you see it very clearly now.
A detailed example of keyword analysis
Having done this prelude, let’s dive in with the following example scenario:
We have a fashion blog whose author, Sonia, wants her content to have a constant traffic, she wants to go beyond the peak of visits of the initial publication and get a constant traffic.
Let’s assume that Sonia has been publishing about 2 posts a week for a little over a year now, and that has already given her a bit of authority with Google. For the sake of concreteness, I’m going to assume she has a domain authority (DA) of 20.
This “DA” metric is explained in depth in our free SEO for Beginners eBook, but in any case we will also see it throughout the post.
To get the traffic she wants to get, obviously, the most effective thing Sonia can do is to position herself in the top positions of Google search results for one or more searches that people regularly perform on Google and that are related to her topic.
Sonia already knows that a well done SEO On Page optimization work starts with a keyword analysis related to the subject of the content she wants to publish.
It is not about guessing keywords at random without having any idea if people really use them to search in Google, but to find real keywords that people really use, that have a certain volume of searches and reconcile them with the topics she wants to write about.
In addition, you also have to see the level of competition that exists in the search results for those words to estimate if with the level of authority that your blog has reached it is realistic or not to compete for those positions.
And let’s also remember that our goal will always be to reach the first page sooner or later, preferably the first 3-4 positions, which are the ones that get the big pieces of the pie.
How to find the best keywords for your content
The topic she wants to write about this time is a post about where to buy cool party shoes at a good price.
Sonia knows that the best way to do a good keyword analysis is to use professional tools like SEMrush. These tools “sing” you what people are really searching for on the Internet and allow you to research which of them are the ones you are most interested in.
There are also free tools like AdWords Keyword Planner, but Google increasingly restricts free access to this tool and the other tools are very limited in their free modes. More on this later.
So, Sonia gets down to work and starts her keyword analysis with the first seed keywords.
The idea of the seed keywords is that they are words that you intuit that may correspond to typical searches that people do and the tool will tell you that there are specific searches that use these words, if they exist. And if they don’t exist, then simply try other ones.
In addition, with the help of the tool, from these seed keywords it will find other interesting keywords.
The seed keywords are the “classic” keyword analysis strategy that you can follow with both free and professional tools. Then we will also see a more modern strategy which is the competitor analysis, but that is only possible with the professional tools.
Sonia starts with the most obvious: “party shoes” in the keyword analysis tool and the tool presents her with a long list of real searches that actually contain the words “shoes” and “party”.
Best of all, after also analyzing the level of competition, Sonia discovers that it is surprisingly affordable, even the most generic search “party shoes” (12,100 searches/month) is not as tremendously difficult as one would expect for such a voluminous search in such a difficult and competitive niche as fashion.
Anyway, Sonia looks at a more specialized and easier search that fits very well with the idea she has in mind: “cheap party shoes”.
It’s a search that even for a young blog like hers and the authority that corresponds to it, seems pretty easy. Moreover, it still has a very interesting number of searches (880 per month).
How to find out the level of competition for a given search
And now you may ask: And how can Sonia know if it is easier or more difficult to be positioned in these searches or others?
This can be seen with a tool like Mozbar, a free extension for FireFox and Google Chrome that allows us to measure the level of competition with two metrics that are calculated from the links received:
Page Authority (PA): this is the fundamental metric that is determined by the number of links received by the page.
The domain authority (DA): It is determined by the number of links received by all the pages of the domain in question. Less important than the first one, but also important.
You can already intuit that the higher these values, the more difficult it is to compete with them.
It is complex to give general rules because there are several factors of great weight to take into account, especially the links that your page receives and that are those that are raising the authority of the page and making it change positions and SEO On Page optimization of each of the pages of the competition that modulates the real strength that will have its PA for the case.
With this in mind, I am going to assume that you are going to get 1-2 good quality links (from pages with an authority greater than or equal to 25-30). On that basis I can give you a very rough guideline to give you a rough idea of where things are going in this context):
Competing with a page with a PA of max 10-15 will be relatively easy for almost any website with a bit of authority (let’s say with a DA of 15 or more).
From a PA of 20 or so you will notice that the thing is not so easy and a page with a PA of 35-40 will be a hard nut to crack (but not impossible) even for a blog with enough authority like ours (DA 40).
And a page with a PA of 50 or more, unless you have a site with a huge authority and the possibility of having several incoming links of very good quality (from pages with a high PA), you better forget about it…
However, I insist: this scheme is very very indicative, it depends on the factors mentioned and the authority of your site, and you will have to test with your site in particular to gauge how much it costs you to compete according to what metrics of the competition.
Another important issue is that these values are not exact, this is rather a bit “fuzzy logic”, but it is quite close in practice and although at first all this may seem quite strange, with practice you will see that this is a fairly quick, intuitive and reasonably reliable way to estimate your chances to position yourself in a particular search.
The reason is that Google doesn’t give out this information, it keeps it secret. But companies like Moz have their own systems to get estimates fairly close to reality.
However, sometimes there are weird anomalies like in the example where you can see an unexplainable first result if we take into account their PA and DA values.
Notice that the search results page you are viewing contains gray bars with the PA and DA values for each result. That’s what the Mozbar does and so you can get a pretty good quick impression of how the competition is doing for a given search.
By analyzing several searches in this way, Sonia already comes to some very clear conclusions:
“Cheap party shoes” is a micro-niche (very specialized niche) of searches with a very important demand. It seems a very good idea to publish content that fits this niche if we want to get constant traffic.
The parent niche “party shoes” seems to have, in addition, a very interesting long tail (now we see what this is). We have to investigate this further to find opportunities.
By the indicators that Mozbar shows us (page authorities of 1, 22, 26, etc.) we can see that it does not seem to have a very high level of difficulty for a blog like Sonia’s that already has some authority, although the difficulty is not negligible. Moreover, already in the second result we see that it does not even correspond to the exact search (it lacks the “cheap” in the title).
However, the PA and DA indicators of the first result are very strange. These are rare inconsistencies that are sometimes seen in Google and that is why we chose to ignore this case. We take as reference the PA values of 22 and 26 to gauge the difficulty of competing here. Anyway, anyway: more on how to analyze the difficulty to compete based on the PA and DA values of the results in the SEO eBook.
It is also interesting to note the large number of AdWords ads on this page (this is therefore a niche in demand by advertisers). It is an indicator that suggests that this niche might work well to monetize it with AdSense online advertising or affiliate marketing.
All in all, Sonia sees it clearly: she has found a very interesting niche. Therefore, she is going to focus her On Page SEO on “cheap party shoes”.
