Internet Marketing Tutorialsby D-SOL Media Marketing

Most businesses that have a web presence often find themselves lagging behind their competition in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords they think will bring them more traffic. The first reaction that most businesses take is to call their web design company, who sometimes have a half qualified SEO consultant on staff, and tell them to get them higher on the result pages for their chosen keyword or keyphrase. The company dishes more money out to their web designers only to find out down the road that their return on investment is far below what they were hoping for. This is a sure fire way to loose a client. You need a search engine optimization company that knows what their doing if you want to succeed.

I am telling you this short story to set your frame of mind to something I see almost every time I am consulting for a company. Inevitably, both the company and web design company are targeting keywords that are high traffic and very competitive. Unless the company is willing to spend countless hours and huge sums of money trying to outrank their competition, focusing on these types of keywords can often seem like a loosing battle. Chances are, the competition has been doing what this company is about to do, but for a lot longer.

To come out ahead, simply change the game!

The Keyword Change-Up!

Goal

Fly under the radar. Have your highly competitive / traffic keywords sit on your home page while you dominate the profitable long tail keywords for easy rankings.

The Game Plan

To properly execute this plan, I have to assume that you have done some basic keyword research in the past. If you haven’t, I’ll try my best to walk you through it.

Step 1. Lets first start with Google’s Keyword Tool. Visit https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

1. We want to generate keyword ideas from a competitors website content
2. Enter the website address of the competitor you want to analyze. Don’t forget to click on the “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL”
3. Click “Get keyword ideas”

Step 2. Lets filter the results

1. First, and this is optional, show or hide columns of interest. I typically will show all columns.
2. Change the match type to “Exact”

Step 3. Identifying Your Real Competition

Once you have your list of 50+ keywords that were generated, it’s time to do some manual work. Yeah, yeah, I know I hate it too, but this is a key step that makes this whole this work.

From the list that you generated, choose as many keywords as you would like. Typically I’ll choose between 30-50 keywords depending on the competition. Also, the more keywords you choose, the more hidden gems you’ll find. With each of the keywords that you choose, Google each keyword separately (start from the highest volume keywords and work your way done). If you choose 50 keywords that means you’ll do 50 searches in Google.

Print off each SERP making note of the search volume of each keyword.

Filtering Out Major Competitors

Identify the major competitors that are appearing in the high volume keywords searches that you did. As you go through this list, finding out which keywords your competitors are doing well in, make another pile of where your competitors are not showing up for the keywords that you chose. This pile will help you identify potential untapped markets that you can quickly get into and rank well in. Chances are that your competitors don’t know what golden nugget sits right in front of them and therefore are not even checking their rankings for these keywords.

Filtering Out the Niche Competitors

In every market that I have looked at, more often than not, there are some niche players in the game. These are the people who don’t go after the top keywords, but rather focus their whole business and website around the second tier keywords. These people are probably keeping a close eye on these keywords, so again we will filter them out too. From the pile that you set aside earlier on, identify the websites that seem to focus their website solely on your secondary keywords. This should be apparent, but in some circumstances, you might have to do a little digging around. Once you find a keyword list that neither the major competitors nor the niche players are focusing their attention on, set aside that sheet and start making another pile.

This separate pile will be your profitable keyword list that you should focus all your attention on at this point.

Here is an example of a Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 keyword list.

Tier 1 = Dog Training

Tier 2 = Dog Training DVDs

Tier 3 = Gun Dog Training DVDs

In the above keyword list, it’s always best to have your top level Tier 1 keywords sit quietly on your home page while you optimize you site for the Tier 3 keywords. Build internal links through your website utilizing the Tier 3 keywords, along with external links and some decent on page SEO, you’ll be able to quickly and effectively dominate the Tier 3 keywords. This will allow your site to generate some decent traffic to begin with. Once your satisfied with the ranking of your Tier 3 keywords, start to optimize your site for the Tier 2 keywords. Once your snag the Tier 2 keywords, start to optimize your site for the Tier 1 behemoth traffic keywords.

SEO EXPERT TIP: Did you know that most of your converting traffic will come from your Tier 3 keyword list. Doesn’t it make sense to attack these keywords first?… Then just do it! Your SEO company should know this, if not, you might want to consider a different seo company.