Keyword CountryMaking high ranking 10 times more profitable
When starting your quest to rank high on keywords, you need to ensure two things before deciding on the keywords to target:
- How much money / leads the traffic coming from those keywords is going to make
- How much efforts you may require to get rankings on those keywords.
You are going to loose money if you invest (time and money) in keywords that cannot commit enough return on investment (ROI). Traffic from every keyword is going to behave differently on your website. The time spent by visitors, their motivation to click money buttons or fill up forms is going to vary from their sibling keywords.
So, choosing the best keywords to target for high rankings is critical than you thought. If you have not done this profitability analysis, probably you are shooting in the dark and may end up loosing time and money.
By the time you are done with this wiki, you will know:
- Profitable keywords that are worth to rank for
- Kindof content pages that rank high on those keywords
- How much traffic you can expect
- How much money to expect from that traffic
Lets get started.
Step 1: Initiate a keyword research
The first step ofcourse is initiating a keyword research. This step can practically make or break it.
- Initiate keyword research and set keyword expansion limit to 1500 (set it to more if your industry is more competitive).
- Add keyword suggestions from the bottom of the keyword worksheet. This makes sure that you cover all the keywords where your audience is looking for you.
- Analyze top ranking competitor websites with ‘Rip competitor keywords’ module. This makes sure that you are a step ahead of your competitors.
Here is a wiki on how to get best keywords for your website.
Step 2: Analyze profitability with PPC keywords
In this step, we will start analyzing the profitability of those keywords. The best way to analyze the profitability is to monitor the PPC campaigns of your competitors.
- Click Show groups in keyword research tab. This reveals all the sub niches that you can target within your niche theme.
- Right click any group > Copy > List of Groups
- Goto PPC Analysis tab > Paste all keywords > Click Analyze
Keyword Country goes out and digs the PPC campaigns that your competitors are running on these keywords. It will show you:
- Number of keywords your competitors are bidding upon
- Number of ads they are using
- Estimated traffic they have captured via their PPC Campaigns
- PPC engines they were found on
- Average position of their ads
Filter out and carefully observe the competitors who are present on more than 5 keywords. These competitors are possibly high rollers and know what they are doing.
To set the above filter:
- Click on Filter icon on the header of Keyword column > Number filters > Greater than or equal to > Set it to 5 > Click OK
Click on any competitor URL and KC shows you a complete 360 degree view of complete ppc campaign of your competitors.
You can see:
- Keywords they are betting on
- Ads that are being used
- Optimized landing pages
- Search Engines on which PPC campaigns are active.
Why these strategies are important?
Since PPC Campaigns are easier to setup and change, the competitors change the ad campaigns till the time they are profitable. The strategies that you see above seem to be working for your competitors.
Now, these competitors might be just bidding on some irrelevant keywords and happened to appear here… right? This is kindof an instantaneous picture of who is bidding where. We need to see how they are performing on the keywords overtime.
Step 3: Verifying profitability of keywords
To verify profitability, you need to monitor the PPC campaigns of your competitors for atleast a week. The combination of profitable keywords, ad and landing pages will exhibit this behaviour:
Longevity: Since the keyword, ad and landing page is profitable for competitor, he will tend to bid on the keyword for a longer period of time.
Rankings: A high performing combination of ad, keyword and landing page will always climb up the ad rankings.
To make KeywordCountry track the longevity and rankings: Click on Set Alerts link on the top of the project tab > Save the project with a name > Check PPC Alerts and set the time when your machine is usually ON. This step tells KeywordCountry to check for your competitors every day and note their activities.
You will see some extremely important data after letting KeywordCountry collect the data for a few days. Here is how to access this critical data and its significance.
Accessing Longevity of competitors:
- Open project file in Keyword Country
- Goto PPC Analysis tab > Click ‘Show Gantt Chart’ link from the top right corner of the screen
Here is where Keyword Country shows you the longevity of the PPC campaigns of your competitors. Longer the bars represent stronger the presence of those competitors.
Its time to analyze what combination of keywords, ads and landing pages is making them profitable enough to keep their ppc campaigns running.
Access Rank climbing – high performance ads :
When in ‘Show Gantt Chart’ mode > Click on any competitor URL > This will open a complete 360 degree view of their ad campaigns. Here is how to reveal a precise picture of what keywords might be working for a competitor:
- Goto Keywords tab > Click ‘Show Performance Trends’ > Click Play Icon
KeywordCountry will show you colors dots dancing around the screen. Each dot represents a keyword and their movement is the ranking of your competitor across various keywords.
Carefully observe the keywords who are rising in rankings slowly. These keywords are the ones on which your competitor is showing better CTR and quality score. Furthermore, the keywords that rise quickly and start falling gradually are the ones that got a booster shot in terms of CPC, which may mean that these keywords are actually driving sales for your competitor.
You can do the same in Ads window to see which ads are working on what keywords.
- In the Ads tab > Click ‘View Position Trends’ > Click Play icon and KeywordCountry will show you the performance of that ad across various keywords in that period of time.
This information precisely tells you how well an ad is doing on which keywords. A simpler way to judge the profitability of an ad is how many times it was seen on any given keyword. KeywordCountry shows a green profitability bar beneath every which represents how many times the ad was spotted on your keyword list.
Step 4: Look at the entire combination of keywords, ads and landing pages that drive profits
Your competitor is able to drive traffic from this combination. You need to study the entire combination to make it work for you.
Go through all the tabs to find out most profitable Ads, Keywords and most importantly – the landing pages. Try to incorporate the same in your SEO strategy and try to convey the same meaning and motive in your page targeted for most profitable keywords.
Step 5: (Optional) Get long tail variations of most profitable keywords
Before jumping into building content for most profitable keywords, it would be great to expand the topics into long tail keywords. This will give you loads of ideas on what to write on to get rankings on your most profitable keywords.
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