“Definite Wins” in Keyword Research: Why it’s the most important part!

definite wins in keyword research

Keyword Research is a mixture of best practices, theory, and often times great copywriting.

I believe all three are essential for you to become a great keyword researcher.

“​Best practices” exist to keep your processes tight, “theory” puts you ahead of the curve, and “copywriting” helps keep your eye on the ball.

Apply the following to lay the perfect foundation for your new Amazon niche site.

What You'll Learn Today

  • Structuring with primary keywords
  • Determining commercial intent
  • Search volume vs. clicks
  • checkThrowing around weight with site age
  • checkWhere are the results leaning?
  • checkBeing aware of ad space
  • checkDefinite wins vs. unknowns

Primary Vs. Secondary Keywords

These types of keywords exist on both the page level and the site structure level.

Primary keywords for your site mean it's the focus of your categories. Whereas Primary keywords for a specific article correlates with the main keyword your focusing on.

If we were to move from a macro to micro level. You should focus on the silo structure first. Finding your primary pillar keyword and then building supporting articles with secondary keywords around it.

With each supporting article having it's own primary keywords and secondary keywords. Providing for optimal search engine organization.​

Silo Keyword Structure

Think of the Silo as a funnel. If someone were to read one of your articles, you want to take them on a journey that always leads back to your pillar article – with your primary keyword.

Here's an example:

Best hairdryer's for women (pillar)Best hairdryer under $50 (support)How to best dry your coloured hair (support)Do hairdryers damage your hair (support)Are hairdryers safe (support)

In this example, there are actually two articles that have the possibility of generating affiliate commissions for you. The pillar and the first support.

Include a link from your pillar article to “best hairdryer under $50's” and gain a better chance of appealing to a budget friendly reader.

The best way to find keyword ideas is to enter a seed keyword into a keyword research tools like SECockpit, Long Tail Pro, KWFinder (we have a discount available here), or Ahref's.

In this example, we would use the word “best hairdryer” as our seed and see what these tools return back to us with ideas.

best hairdryer seed keyword

I like using keyword tools, but my favorite would be finding competing niche sites that have low DA ratings and search for them in SEMrush.

First, download the Moz chrome plugin and search around for review sites in your niche. For our example, something that can be as closely related to hair or beauty would be perfect.

Turn on the Mozbar and you'll see the DA rating associated with each site. If you find a site that's in your niche and has a rating of under 20 – then take that site and put it into SEMrush.

Mozbar example

You'll find all the keywords that your competitor is ranking for and since they are of a low domain authority – it just means you have a chance for ranking for those as well. It's actually a way easier approach to initial keyword research.

On-Page Keyword Structure

Coming back to primary and secondary keywords, when it comes to putting these words into your content – it's fairly simple.

You will notice that with many keywords, you'll see pretty much the same results. When the keywords are different but the search results are the same – you can group these keywords and put them into your content.

Trying to rank for all of the keywords with one article.

Your primary keyword out of all of those keywords (with similar search results) would be the one with the highest volume.

We wrote about implementing on-page SEO previously, but here are some quick tips right now:

  • Use the primary keyword as close to the beginning of the H1 title (main title) as possible.
  • Use the primary keyword in one of your H2 heading (subheadings.)
  • Add the primary keyword naturally in your content 1-2 more times.

Commercial Intent of a Keyword

We spoke about commercial intent in our post about niche research, but it's ingrained with the keywords that you choose at the very beginning.

You need to choose keywords that have the ability to make you money.

I referred to this as transactional gravity as well. That's how far you are from the actual transaction. In the case with Amazon, usually someone who is very close to making a purchasing decision will type into google “best X” or “review for X”.

They just need a little advice on which product to choose.​

In other words, commercial intent is based on your affiliate URL being the last one a potential buyer clicks before making the final purchase.

Search Volume, Clicks, and Returning Visitors

We're going to step into the theory of keyword research and SERP (search engine results page) analysis for a bit…

Search volume is the amount of monthly searches that occur for a given keyword. Even if one keyword is very similar to another, they will both provide different search results.

For example, “how to build a niche site” might have 6000 searches per month and “building a niche site” might have 500 searches per month.

Both provide the exact same results but just have different ways of asking the same question. Google assumes all the searchers are gravitating towards the same answer.

The interesting thing about search volume is that it doesn't include clicks.

A keyword might have 6000 searches but Google's Quick Answer Box might be all that someone would need. Therefore they won't even click on any of the results.

Google's quick answer for how to plant a tree
Google's quick answer for “how to plant a tree”

You want to go for keywords with the highest amount of clicks per keyword search. This just means that Google isn't providing the best answer for people and they are bouncing from one page to the next for the right answer – before typing in a different question.

If the clicks are lower than the searches, it doesn't mean you shouldn't go for that keyword – but I would definitely look for opportunities with more clicks.

Returning visitors represent those that are coming back to the same search result and clicking on a specific page.

I personally do this all the time because I'll find a page I want to reference and instead of bookmarking it – I'll just search it in Google again since I first found it there first.

It increases the click through rate for that specific page, which in turn raises their rankings.

But, think about this:

If you aren't on that page first, then it makes sense for you to avoid keywords with lots of returning visitors.

These keywords are either highly correlated with one page specifically or the page is constantly changing because the results are very sporadic.

High amounts of returning searches usually involve news types of keywords but could also be from people look for promotional codes.

High clicks and returning visitors come from a variety of reasons but good examples would be news related searches and promotional code searches.

amazon promo code metrics
Metrics from Ahrefs.com

On a sidenote:

I think it's important to keep in mind that click through rates are very important and your ability to get more traffic and generate click-through-rates is not solely dependent on being a first-page result.

The top 3 results on each page receive the most clicks. So if you're on the second page at the top, you likely have a better chance of clicks than being at the bottom of the first.

Unfortunately, there's a time where you may end up in the 10th position and will have to increase your rankings by changing your meta description for more clicks or other extra mile SEO efforts.

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Site Age of Your Competitors

Google's job is to provide searchers for the best results. Inherently, the value of the answer comes from the authority of the site.

A site that's been around for 15 years (and has continued to produce content) can and will be able to throw it's weight around. This is the same reason why Google has their “sandbox”. They don't deem new sites to be trustworthy yet.

As you are analyzing the results on prospective keywords, make sure you see 3 or more younger sites there. This just means that as a new site, you'll have a fighting chance to make it on the first page too.

SERP Leans

Hayden Miyamoto of No Hat Digital coined the term for “SERP Leans”. It's basically a way of explaining how certain search results are favored towards either e-commerce results, local businesses or educational/government sites.

Although a search result may have e-commerce sites in them, it doesn't mean there's an e-commerce lean. This is one of the main reasons why depending on keyword difficulty scores from keyword tools will never be as reliable as manual keyword research. 

In a quick analysis of any SERP, if there are at least 3 info-affiliate niche sites in the results – then it's OK to proceed further in your analysis.

Ad Space

In the recent times, Google has started pushing out organic results in favor of more ads. Which makes sense for them to do in a way since they generate income acting as the ads broker.

Just be considerate in your keyword research of how many ads appear in the search results. You'll have to check back a couple times through different browsers during incognito mode to really see how many ads Google is placing there.

They're constantly changing their results to test how effective their ads can be.​

The more ads that appear, the less organic results that appear and the more competitive those 1st-page results will become.

Definite Wins vs. Unknowns

Depending on what keyword tool you are using, there will be standards for what is acceptable for keywords to build your site upon.

In a very very general rule of thumb, these are the “acceptable keyword difficulty scores” for brand new sites:

definite wins in keyword research

Again, I want to say that these are rules of thumbs. Use them as a filter only.

Then examine the SERP for each keyword the tools provide and analyze the metrics.

For example, I use Long Tail Pro mostly and I find keywords with Keyword Competitiveness scores under 45. Then looking at the individual results – I want to find at least 5 results that have…

A Trust and Citation Flow under 70 and a page level Keyword Competitiveness under 50.

Each time I find a site that is under all of those metrics, I then count it as a win for me. Each SERP should have at least 5 wins for me to consider targeting.

Put It All Into Action

In my eyes, it would be best to stick with one tool and learn the crap out of it. I'm the best with Long Tail Pro, so generally it's my go-to.

However, if you're more familiar with KWFinder or you think it's a better suit for your budget – then by all means use it. Learn the best practices from successful people that have done well with that tool.

Keyword research is very important and you should definitely place a lot of care into this step.

If you would like to bypass the keyword research phase and get a site up and running as quickly as possible, come check out our new niche sites we have available. You get all the research done for you and an entire site is built and transferred into your name. Then you can jump straight to the fun part of growing it.

2 thoughts on ““Definite Wins” in Keyword Research: Why it’s the most important part!”

  1. Hi Kelvin, I really enjoyed reading your article. It’s very useful that you list the different difficulty scores.
    I’m curious to know how do you usually handle the websites that hide their links and so appear extremely easy to outrank in these tools but they are obviously not weak.
    Thanks
    Marco

    1. Hmmm… For site that are hiding their links, I suppose it’s a matter of you deciding whether or not it’s worth trying to rank for that keyword if the other site has PBN’s.

      The best keyword research is done by looking at the SERP’s manually, alongside the tools of course, but at the end of the day – just like any business… You’re the decider of what you plan to build your site on.

      If your niche site is a house, and you put it in a bad neighbourhood – then it would your fault. So I would just look for other opportunities. Usually if someone has a site that’s hiding their links, they probably aren’t as ‘content marketing’ focused. So you can attack other low competition keywords.

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