Choose Your Keywords

Keyword research is essential to your success in SEO.

Fun Fact: I almost never use keyword tools, unless I’m entering a new niche.

Most of my keyword research is done by checking out competitors in the space. If I want to get started selling mortgage leads, I don’t go type “mortage” in some keyword tool. I go to Google, search for “mortgage” or a phrase like “home mortgage loan” and go through each competitor’s website; taking notes on what topics and subtopics they cover on their site.

• Do they have a blog with many finance and mortgage related articles? I should look into doing the same and try to do it better.
• Do they have a how-to section? 
• What about product reviews, service reviews, comparison tables/tools, and detailed subpages covering specific questions about the products and services they review?

If you start your journey by just running “mortgage” through your keyword tool of choice, you’ll get a bunch of random keywords which will all be super-high competition and not really useful when it comes to getting ideas for content which you can rank and get traffic + leads/sales.

I’m not saying there are no good or useful keyword tools. I do personally have a favorite, but I still rarely use it. It’s called Term Explorer and it’s kick-ass (opens in a new tab. Not an affiliate link).

So what do I use Term Explorer for, then?

Term Explorer and other keyword tools are useful for finding the most highly-searched topics in a niche/vertical. They’re useless to me for finding super-longtail keyword phrases with low competition. For that, you need to use your research and creativity like Mr Dos Equis above. 😉

Tip: Tell your writer or writing team to post real helpful articles, tutorials, how-to guides and resource lists in your blog section of your website. Give them freedom over topics (tell them to do their own research and come up with their own topics). Don’t send them a list of general keyword phrases from your keyword tool and say “please do it” because it just doesn’t work in your benefit that way.

Please note that everything I just said is NOT just a transcription of the training video below. Please watch the video to get the full value from this course.