How to do Keyword Research: #8 in Google in 24 hours
In How to research keywords I explain in a step by step guide, aided by the use of screenshots, how to use the free Google keyword research tool to help with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This Keyword Research method helped get a Squidoo lens ranked #8 in Google just 24 hours after it was published.
I had decided to make a Squidoo lens about cupcakes. Do a search for the phrase “cupcakes” on Google and it will return 12,200,000 results – yes that is twelve million, two hundred thousand pages all competing for the term “cupcakes”. There was no way I was going to be able to rank high for that keyword phrase.
As we all know, to have any chance of ranking high in Google and getting good traffic as a result, our pages, whether they be Blogs, Hubs, Ezine articles or Squidoo lenses, need to have a narrow focus – we must narrow the niche. I had to find a cupcake topic that had relatively high searches but low competition.
Bearing in mind that I blog about Going Green Ideas, I decided to add environmentally friendly and eco friendly into the mix by using the cupcakes to promote baking equipment that was made from either recycled or sustainable materials.
I did the keyword research and was shocked to find that some of the key phrases that I assumed would be my top phrases had ZERO searches. These included “environmentally friendly baking” and “unbleached cupcake cases”. Both have pages on Google competing for those phrases but the problem is that NO ONE is searching using those phrases.
However, I did get lucky with a great list of keywords with which I felt I could compete and then it was a question of choosing the phrase I would use for the URL and checking out the actual websites that ranked high on Google for that phrase.
According to the Google keyword tool, the phrase I was looking at had 9,900 searches per month and 57,200 pages competing. Now some people may feel that those numbers are too high when it comes to trying to get a high Google ranking. But……
A great SEO strategy is to make sure that your keyphrase is in the URL and the title tag. Only ONE website had the URL using my phrase and it did not appear to be that active. I reckoned that if the Squidoo URL was free then it was worth going ahead.
On 28 July 2010 I published Green Cupcakes and 24 hours later it was ranked at #8 in Google!
I fully expect my How to make Green Cupcakes lens to gradually slide down the Google rankings at first until I can build good quality backlinks, but given that most of the competing sites appear to be not recently updated, providing I put the work in, then the lens should do pretty well once it is established.
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Author: AJ
AJ is Always Juggling on Squidoo and Wizzley and online. I also share what I have learned on Squidlog and Writing Online.
This author has published 35 articles so far.