Keyword research & Topic Selection

Transcript of this lesson

Austin Distel:

Lesson number two now. So how do you do some of your keyword research? Do you have any SOPs there that you could share?

Osama Zahid:

Yeah, I do. So our main tool for keyword research is through Ahrefs. It's a very popular tool, it's a very common tool, but to be able to find the right keywords, we have two or three different approaches and strategies you can say, that help us identify the right keywords for the website that we're working on.

Austin Distel:

Okay. Cool. Maybe could you share your screen and walk us through Ahrefs? Of course, it's a very common tool used in the industry, but perhaps that you use it differently than others do and you're here, the king of this, so what's your secret sauce?

Osama Zahid:

Of course. Let me just set it up and then share the screen with you. Yeah, so this is the keyword research SOP. If you can view my screen, you'll know that there's method one, method two, method three. So these are the main three methods that we use. We also have a method four but that's reserved for those specific Keyword Researchers that we hire to do content research for. So we allow them to use their own strategies if they have another secret sauce, but I definitely like to consult with them before they proceed onwards for quality checks and co-relevance.

Osama Zahid:

So yeah, starting from method one. So it says that, "Go to the dashboard and enter amazon.com." This particular method typically applies for affiliate sites because amazon.com means that only those websites will appear that have a link back to Amazon. So it typically applies to those kind of websites or clients who prefer product descriptions or affiliate sites, those who have affiliate tags, and we particularly use this method for them. So yeah.

Austin Distel:

Method one is for affiliate marketers, right? And you're trying to scale up those blog posts?

Osama Zahid:

Yep, exactly. This is for typically commercial content or product reviews, product comparisons or those whose links can be traced back to Amazon. So we simply write amazon.com. We'll proceed with the referring domain. So these are the domains who have linked backs to amazon.com in different web pages or block posts and these are what we'll be targeting. Yeah. While that loads, I'll tell you how we proceed.

Osama Zahid:

What we do next is that what we check out a list of websites, all of those. If this webpage will open, it'll give you a search bar. Yeah, it's opening now. Yeah. So this is the search bar that we search the term or the main niche of the website or to see keywords that the client provides. So for example, let's say that our niche is related to food. So we'll just search over here food, though that typically doesn't really apply to affiliate content because it's more of product based than food based.

Osama Zahid:

So it will provide us a list of all websites that have their links traced back to Amazon. What we'll do is we can simply export this list onto our Excel sheet. And once we download that, we'll put in a little filters, we'll check out what websites have specific domain ranks. Typically, we target those which have a very low domain, but with high traffic. So we'll get to see that, okay, this certain website has a very low domain banking, domain rating, but yet it still manages to do pretty well in terms of traffic. What are the keywords they're using? What's the type of content they're publishing? So that's how we target the keywords for affiliate content typically. [crosstalk 00:04:39].

Austin Distel:

And I'm guessing that this is also based on the onboarding questions that you received, that really dictates the industries that do your research in here, so you did food, but that would only be for a food client?

Osama Zahid:

Exactly. If this was a website that didn't want us to focus on product reviews or product descriptions, we would not be typically using this method. We'd mostly be looking at other methods, the remaining two. But since this is mainly, we're assuming that this is a product based site, we'll be checking out the websites that have their links traced back to Amazon. So yeah, this is the basic interface of spreadsheet, what Ahrefs provides us with. So we'll just apply a little filter over here, in all of them. Yeah. Filtering this out. So the first filter to apply is the domain rating. So if a website has a high domain rating, it shouldn't come as a doubt that they have lots of traffic. So that's really not our concern or not our area of focus because since we're working with new websites ourselves, which would typically have a very little domain, we're going to skip these out. I'm just going to clear out all of these and exclude them from the filter from our list of websites.

Osama Zahid:

The threshold I would typically set would be under 20. But if this is a rare niche or, because food is a rare niche in terms of affiliate products, we can go as far as 30 as well. Yeah. So let's just filter it this way. So you will see that all of those domains that were over 20 do not appear in the spreadsheet. They've all been excluded. So now we're left with, is all of the domains that are under 20.

Osama Zahid:

The next step is to check out the traffic for them. We're going to... Yeah. So this is the traffic bar, traffic column. This is what we're going to set to from, yeah, we're going to set this from largest to smallest. We're going to be this from... So yeah, based on these two factors, we now have low domain rating websites that have very good traffic, that have the highest traffic in descending order. So the first website igeorgiafoodstamps, it has a domain rating of 15, but still manages to produce over 70,000 traffic. So what we can do is we can simply use this website and scrape out the keywords that they're using. So we'll go to the dashboard again over here.

Austin Distel:

And so you're looking at them, and you're like, "This web property is bringing in so much traffic and it'd be pretty easy to beat because they only have a 15 domain rating." So looking for low hanging fruit, easy wins here to figure out how to outrank them.

Osama Zahid:

Because we're only working with websites that are completely new or very old with no traffic, so to make sure that we get recognized by Google, we need to target those websites that have similar specifications, but with very high traffic. So they'll have low domains as well, low domain ratings as well, but they'll have like a huge amount of traffic and they'll be growing. So we'll be scraping off the keywords and using it for our benefit. So once you add in the website over here at the Site Explorer, we'll choose the option of top pages.

Osama Zahid:

Yeah. So these are the top keywords, these are the different webpages that are based on this website. It's important to note that we've typed in the generic website, we haven't typed in extensions of it, certain extensions, because that would only limit the number of the keywords that the Ahrefs would provide us. So what we do is we generically add in this website, generic URL, and so it outputs all of the keywords that this is using. So what we can do is we can simply explore each keyword individually based on whether it suits our requirements or whether it aligns with the website's niche. And if it has a low difficulty and a relatively high search volume, we can simply add it in as a potential keyword.

Osama Zahid:

Yeah. Yeah. So this is something that typically only applies to affiliate sites and we only use it for product reviews and product comparisons. The next method is...

Austin Distel:

And it seems to me that doing this method here, you can pretty quickly start gaining new traffic that's qualified in your niche with these keywords because the competition's pretty weak and it looks like the traffic is pretty strong. So you can go and eat their lunch.

Osama Zahid:

Exactly. Yeah. That's why keywords scrapping thing is an important factor, knowing your competitor, this is exactly why the onboarding process is so important because we know what our client's niche is, what our client's website is based upon, we can look for competitors. We can search for competitors, direct competitors that have a similar domain rating, or maybe not as many back links, but they're still doing pretty well. They're still gaining traffic and they're gaining organic traffic. So what we do is we simply steal the keywords that we are using in simple terms, not steal, but scrape off and use it for our own benefit, and that can help our website to grow as well because we're also assumingly working with a very low domain site that is still thriving to green traffic, and this can be a great way to do that.

Austin Distel:

Fantastic. Let's roll into method number two here, and who is this focused on?

Osama Zahid:

So the method number two is based upon mainly general websites, informational or how to content, general informational sites, and this specific method targets our direct competitors as well, but it also compares their rating to our direct rating. What we can do by using this method is recognize as to where our website stands in terms of traffic, in terms of domain rating. And we can then compare it with websites that have similar domain ratings or lower domain ratings, but still doing well in traffic. So we can use the same process, we can check out our competitor websites and use the keywords that they're using to work on our own. So yeah, the second method simply we have to go to the Content Explorer. In the Content Explorer, now this comes in handy when, again, the onboarding process comes into play here as well.

Osama Zahid:

We want to know what our client's niches or what the website's team has aligned on. So when the client provides us with seed keywords, and sometimes the seed keywords can be related to something that we have no information about. So for example, I would have no information about construction, real estate, I don't have any knowledge about that and naturally, the client does. But for me, it would be difficult to find content that are similar to the seed keyword. So this method is something that we can use to get to know the client's niche a little better, and even use the associated keywords for our own website. So yeah, let's just search for construction as to see keyword.

Osama Zahid:

So it'll give us a list of websites. There are over 8,900,000 websites that are based on construction. So we want to filter these websites to the ones that suit us because naturally, with all of these websites, so for example, this one is not based on English. We mainly target websites that are English because of a wider audience which increase our chances to rank. And also, they have a very high DR, so it's understandable why they would have such a higher traffic volume, but we're not going to be targeting these. If you move back to the SOP... Yeah. So we're going to be setting up some filters based on this. Let's see, referring domains should be up to five. Here we go. Yeah. Referring domains can be up to five.

Austin Distel:

I just want to say for everyone listening, think about all the time it took to figure out this recipe here. And so I really just appreciate you two sharing this and walking us through how you think about it, because the amount of time that you're saving all of the audience learning from you right now is insane.

Osama Zahid:

Yeah. Honestly, the websites that we deal with, for example, if a client orders a set of hundred articles, and we need essentially to come up with a hundred keywords and to come up with them, working with all of these recipes can take quite a bit of time, especially depending on the niche. If the niche is not so popular, it can take maybe up to like seven or eight hours if we work consistently. So yeah, this helps us, this eases up the process for our own clients. It's very hands off for them. They don't have to worry about the keyword research or anything related to it. We just simply provide them with the spreadsheet containing all the keywords with their difficulties and their search volumes and they just send it to them for approval.

Osama Zahid:

So yeah, coming back to the method, the next, the remaining two filters that we use will be page traffic should be a minimum of a hundred, or we can also keep it at 50 because it's a new website, it's a thriving website, we don't really have to target such a high volume right at once. Even if we get 50 views or 60 views on it, that'll be pretty good for us considering it's a new website and it'll be gaining traffic at a very short time span. So yeah, let's move on and set the page traffic from 100 and the last filter should be the Domain Rating up to 30. You can obviously lower it down to 20, maybe even 10 for more chances of getting ranked, but typically, we keep it up to 30, so we have more websites to choose from. So these are the three filters that we've applied.

Osama Zahid:

Now, those thousands and thousands of websites have been reduced to 52,000. We're still going to be adding a couple of more filters because, let me see, yeah, one page per domain because we only need the general URL. We don't need the extensions and what Ahrefs does is it's providing us with different extensions coming from the same website, but we don't need that. We're going to be using the generic link, so that'll give us the keywords to all of the other webpages as well. Web domains. And yeah, lastly, we're going to be setting... Yeah. One more filter is, this typically applies to us because we mainly deal with websites that are in English, but for all our diverse audience out there, you don't need to add in this filter if you're from another country or you're targeting a specific region, because there are different options, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, all of the languages you can think of, but we're going to be specifically targeting the websites that are based in English.

Osama Zahid:

So yeah, from 58,000 to 29,000. Those are all the filters that we've applied. We now have 29,000 websites that we can use to scrape off keywords. And this provides, if we search a single website, it's going to give us a pool of keywords to choose from. You can go all the way down to the end and even to the next pages and search for different websites. How we search them is pretty simple. We open up the website, but we choose the generic link. We don't want to add the extensions such and such. Hat Air Balloon Construction, I don't think we would need this though.

Osama Zahid:

Yeah. Okay. So Dog Gates For Your Deck, that we can use, it's essentially a construction site. So we use this URL. We open up, yeah, we can just write it down over here. We go to the Site Explorer, we add the URL, but we're going to make it generic because this is focusing on a single article or a single keyword. If we post a generic link, it's going to give us a list of all the keywords that this website has been using. Again, we're on the main interface. We're going to go to top pages, the top performing pages, meaning the ones that have the greatest amount of graphic on them.

Osama Zahid:

Yeah, here are the keywords. So for someone like me who doesn't really have an idea of what the construction business is about or what kind of categories are under construction, like [inaudible 00:19:42] intended, there's a house construction category, there's a specifically room construction, bathroom construction, kitchen construction. So these keywords give us an idea as to how the seed keyword construction can be derived into further categories. So based on what the client has provided us, for example, if it's related to bathroom construction, we can use this keyword, we can open it up. Yeah, let's just open it up. I'll show you. We don't add them as it is because this is a plain keyword. We don't know what the specifications of this particular keyword are, in terms of the difficulty and the search volume. So we open this up in a new tab and we look at it. Oh, okay. This happens to be a very good keyword.

Osama Zahid:

It has a keyword difficulty of six, which is pretty good for us considering it's a new website, and if we search at the global volume, the traffic potential, they're pretty good, 3.8K and just from the US, it's 2.5k, 300 from India, United Kingdom 150, so this gives us an idea that, okay, this is a really good keyword with low difficulty and high volume, we can use this as it is. Typically... Oh yeah. Just one important note, what we typically do is we have a certain range of keyword difficulty that we choose from. In our case, we set a range of keyword difficulty from zero to 10, ideally seven, but when we feel as if the keywords for this specific niche are getting exhausted, we can lift it up to 10 because if the keyword difficulty goes beyond 10, then you would need more backlinks, more referring links, more domain authority and as a new website, we don't have any of that yet. So it's very, very important to target those keywords that have a specific or very low difficulty, ideally between zero to seven, the lower, the better.

Austin Distel:

Right. So you're looking for how do, in a full SEO strategy, content is one slice of the pie. And there's a lot of other things that contribute to getting ranked and domain authority is a huge part of that, but it's not something that you, today, can just snap on a switch, and then that goes up. Of course, you build up to it, but what is something today that you can do to impact your traffic is content and backlinks of course, but in today's scope, we're really training on specifically content. So if you're looking for a strategy to grow your organic traffic for first page rankings purely just on the content side, then merely focus on domain or keyword difficulty under 10, and here are some keyword research paired with content written by AI and freelancers to come together and you can really grow your traffic quickly there.

Osama Zahid:

Yeah, exactly. Since we're working on new websites that have very little authority and little to no backlinks, will mainly be dependent upon the keyword difficulty and the search volumes, because some keywords can typically have very low difficulty, but at the same time, they would have little to no search volumes. So even if we tend to use them, it really wouldn't impact our traffic because no one's really searching for it. So we got to have that golden ratio between the difficulty and the search volume and that those are the two aspects that we focus on. So the last method is pretty simple. There's no competition involved with your competitors. You simply go to the Keyword Explorer, you search, for example, if you're aware of a niche like food, everyone knows about food, right? We know that there are fruits, there are vegetables, there's meat, there's plant ba.... Different categories of food. So what we can do is we simply go to the Keyword Explorer. We search for the secondary keywords associated to the main keyword, which is food. So in this case, we can narrow down our search to vegetable. Okay.

Osama Zahid:

Or something like, "Our vegetable is healthy" if it's an informational article we're looking for. So yeah, this gives us a direct evaluation of the keyword itself. But since this is a super hard keyword and we can't really use it, we go to these suggestions. So con intended has this amazing quality of providing us with relevant keywords that are similar to the ones we search. So we can simply open up these suggestions in different tabs and we can skim through them, skim through the list of similar keywords and choose the ones that suit us. So this is a keyword difficulty, this is the volume, so let's just say that, okay, this seems like a good keyword, "Are grilled vegetables healthy." It's a long tail keyword and it has a low keyword difficulty of nine with a traffic volume of 90. So yeah, it wasn't essentially related to this, "Are vegetables healthy" but you can see that they similar, "Are grilled vegetables healthy." So we'll simply pick up this keyword and add it to our content plan and just move on. This is what method three essentially is.

Austin Distel:

Awesome. And so when you're looking at that explore page here, what are some of the other filters besides the keyword difficulty here? What would make it enter your spreadsheet? And so is it traffic amount or other things? What else are you looking in the other columns?

Osama Zahid:

We're looking at the volume and the global volume because ideally, our clients are mainly based in the US, but the greater audience we have, the better. It doesn't matter where it comes from. So the global matters a lot. We have 90 from the United States, 10 from the Philippines, 10 from the UK and 10 from Singapore. So yeah, these are all potential viewers that can help us to grow our traffic. So global volume is important, but the main focus is on the keyword difficulty. We can't really... For example, let's say if this global volume was a 150K, that's a lot of traffic, right? That's a huge amount of traffic, but if the keyword difficulty is 75, then that would practically be useless for us. So like I said, we have to balance, come up with a golden ratio and select keyword that have a difficulty between zero to 10 and a volume that is the greater, the better, but should at least have a volume of 30, 40, 50, and onwards.

Austin Distel:

Okay. Awesome. That makes a lot of sense.

Osama Zahid:

Yeah. So these are the three methods. Method four is essentially what we assign to are the Keyword Researchers that we hire online. I ask them to discuss them with me. Different people have, different Researchers have different strategies, but they all come down to the three methods that I've told you. These are the main primary strategies that we use for our Keyword Research.

Austin Distel:

Awesome. So you would onboard a client. You would take their niche, you would go through here and do some keyword research. Can you show me what a finished result, the definition of done of keyword research, what does that look like? Is there a spreadsheet? Is there some kind of software tool that you use?

Osama Zahid:

Yeah, there is definitely a spreadsheet. Let me just quickly share that with you.

Austin Distel:

Madeleine, I can see why Osama is the CEO of your agency. He is very intelligent.

Madeleine Lambert:

Yeah. He's totally nailed it. And really just took the ball and ran with it and refined our processes really tightly.

Osama Zahid:

Yeah. So here is the content plan template. We like to call it the content plan because it measures all the keywords, their titles, their difficulties. This is the finished version that we send our clients for approval. We give them a list of keywords and assign associated titles with them, along with other specifications like keyword difficulty and search volume. And once they approve it, we assign writers to it and I ask my writers to give me an update date or the time taken. These come later on, but the essence of the content plan lies in these four columns, the keywords, the title, the keyword difficulty, and the search volume, because this is what the client will be looking at. The client, having a new website, would be looking at keywords that have a low difficulty, a higher search volume, and the keywords and titles should be aligned as well.

Osama Zahid:

An important SEO factor, I'm sure that most of your audience knows already, that it's highly important for the keywords to be present in the title. They need to be added in naturally, not forced within it. So even with keywords, we have to be very selective because we'll be using those keywords to come up with the titles. And if those keywords don't fit in the title naturally, then that could potentially impact our ranking factor in an adverse manner, like negatively. So yeah, this is the finished product of the content plan that we send out to our clients. They approve it for us and then we move on to the next step, which is content production and publishing.

Austin Distel:

And when you hand it off to your client, they're probably looking at this and saying, "What's the relevancy here to whatever their goals are." And it's likely to sell a product, get more leads in sales from that organic traffic. So they're looking at the keywords and titles and thinking, "Can I get qualified high intent people to my site?" And that may influence the prioritization of this content to be written for the roadmap. Is that right?

Osama Zahid:

Yeah, exactly. Again, it all comes down to the onboarding process and communication because in between this process, we are constantly updating our clients on what's going on or as to if we have any confusions or if they have specific preferences, we're constantly messaging them back and forth. I'm connecting them with the Keyword Researcher that we've hired. I'm passing on their messages or I'm in contact with them directly. I ask them what they require, what kind of audience they would want, and whether these keywords are suitable for them. So if someone doesn't really like some of these keywords let's say, they would highlight it for me and they would ask me to change it, and I would ask them in return as to what kind of keywords would you want? What's the main ambition or what kind of traffic are we aiming for here? So they give me all those details. And then I follow that up with my Researcher. I ask them to come up with alternative keywords and we send them for approval instead of the original one, we update them on it.

Austin Distel:

And what if a client was a little bit more aggressive here and they wanted to go for keywords in their industry that were a little bit more difficult, but they came to the table with a higher domain authority and were willing to put a backlinking team to this content. Do you think that a higher authority site plus backlinking and then this content strategy, would still work?

Osama Zahid:

I think, no. I mean, it would potentially work, but this content plan is specifically for websites that are completely new or have little to no traffic. If you visit our website, rocketcontent.ai, we've put a disclaimer which verifies that this service is typically, it's only appropriate for websites that are new or have a very old domain or are neglected altogether. So we haven't really had any clients with a very high domain or are looking for keywords that are suitable to that kind of domain. So yeah, I wouldn't say that this would be suitable for them. This is typically for the new websites. Yeah.

Austin Distel:

To piggyback on that, our Jasper website has grown from pretty much zero to an over 60 domain authority over the last year with a similar content strategy using slightly different tools, using a slightly different spreadsheet, but they're like 80% the same. And so you might have to do more backlinking because we have backlink outreaching, we also have affiliates, so there's content created. All of this kind of pairs together, but I'm of the opinion that this is getting you an 80-20 rule, this is getting you 80% of the way there with 20% of the effort on a content side of the strategy.

Osama Zahid:

Exactly. Yeah. Let me give you an example. If you have a high authority domain as you said, you wouldn't really want to offer keywords that have 50 traffic, you would potentially want to target a higher traffic, so your website can further grow. So the keyword and the content plan can vary based on the domain authority of the site.

Austin Distel:

And when our team comes with us with a keyword content strategy similar to this, the way I will vet it is I'll be like, "Great. Where's the competitor keywords? Where's the higher intent traffic keywords?" And then from there, that'll make a prioritization of the roadmap, but also, we are really trying to get into a cadence of publishing a blog post every other day, so about 16 blog posts a month. And so at that volume, our organic traffic is really growing. So just giving hope for everybody on the call like, "This strategy works, give it time, but it won't pay off today like turning on an ad. However, over the course of a year, you build a moat and you build a long-term strategy of organic content coming in. That's defensible and diversified." So if you ever want to turn off your traffic, if you ever want to not rely so much on influencers and partnerships, organic traffic via content is incredibly powerful, and I just really can't be a bigger advocate of this kind of strategy.

Osama Zahid:

Exactly. It's what Rocket Content stands for as well. We, even with new websites, our main objective is to publish content in bulk and in a very quick time. So we give our clients a date between 40 to 50... A delivery date between 40 to 50 days to publish a hundred articles or even up to 120 articles. So yeah, content is definitely king. You, as someone who's just built a website and is looking to grow, it's essential for you to populate that website and the quicker you populate it, the more chances you have to attract traffic, to generate ads, and all of that.