“Keyword Difficulty Checker” – Keyword Research Case Study
It is commonly known that online marketing industry is a very competitive market for any SEO professional to optimize and rank a website for.
There are just so many content out there that talk about almost every kind of online marketing topics that you can think of.
So, this is why I decided to do a small keyword research experiment to see if there is a way to rank for an online marketing or even a SEO related term here on DigitalReadyMarketing.com.
How “Keyword Difficulty Checker” became the target keyword?
I have already provided an outline of how to do keyword research and how to sprinkle the target keywords within the content previously so if you are interested in the general process outline please take a look at those posts.
Let’s just dive right into the actual process.
Step 1: Find something that is trending (or somewhat trending)
Since we are talking about keyword research, I thought why not look for a keyword that is relevant to “keyword research”.
I wanted something that people care about, so the variation of the keyword would at least have some search volume (that was my thinking).
After typing various “keyword research” related terms, I settled with “check keyword”.
Majority of the people who are interested in this term seems to be in India, but some people from the US are also interested (see the “Regional Interest” image below).
Also, there are related terms to SEO such as “SEO keyword check” and “SEO check”.
Step 2) Find a keyword with enough search volume
Now it’s time to head over Google Adwords and use the Keyword Planner tool. Below are some of the criteria I had in mind.
- The content will be tailored to someone who at least have some interest in SEO
- The content will target high up in the buying funnel
As you can see I did not do a full blown Persona development or in depth thinking about how this content will play out with other stage of buying funnel, because I just want to do a quick experiment.
So since we are targeting high up in the buying funnel, most phrases in this funnel contain ; How; What; Where; When etc
lately, I have been working on about how to find low competition keywords so I typed in “how to check keyword competition” and got about 524 related keywords.
If you like a more systematic approach, you could try “how check keyword” or “what check keyword” at this step. So basically combine typical question phrase words with the target keyword.
After downloading the keywords to CSV file and playing around with the list by filtering with various filters, “keyword difficulty checker” stood out to me.
It has 70 average monthly search so likely has been flying under the radar, especially from large corporate guys.
Disclaimer: up till this point, it sounds like everything is going smoothly but I did spend some time flirting around with other keywords as well. It did take me sometime to settle with “keyword difficulty checker” so don’t just believe everything that you see. There are a lot of behind the scene things going on even with a blog post like this. :)
Step 3) Ensure the keyword has low competition
This is probably the most interesting and most critical part out of all the steps.
Over the years I have done keyword research in completely different ways and at one point I was able to rank for a keyword with 1,000 average search volume /month without any backlink building but with an Exact Match Domain and well optimized 500 words content.
Thanks to Google’s continuous algorithm updates this is no more the case and it seems finding low competition keyword is the best way to go if you do not want to (or do not have the luxury to) spend time in link building.
The first thing to do is to use “intitile” search operator. As you can see there are about 69 other sites that have “keyword difficulty checker”.
It is always better to use more than one indicator so the next step is to use Majestic.com to see how many of the sites in its database have “keyword difficulty checker” in the title.
As you can see, there are 37 URLs have “keyword difficulty checker” in the title.
Based on these two indicators alone, it tells me “keyword difficulty checker” seems to have pretty low competition.
Additionally, we can check the competitors and see what kind of sites Google thinks are relevant to the search query.
The first two (in the red box below) are essentially forums. The two sites in the green box have very thin content. This further shows the competitions do not seem to be fully optimized for the keyword.
Time to create content for “keyword Difficulty Checker”
Now that we have found the target keyword and ensure that it has low competition, it’s time to create the content! – which we will discuss more in the next post.
Please feel free to let me know your thoughts and how you think this experiment will turn out in the comment section.
Ranking status update
After publishing this post titled with
“Keyword Difficulty Checker” – Keyword Research Case Study
It started ranking for the keyword “Keyword Difficulty Checker” after a few days. In fact, it is ranking on page 2 of Google when check it with incognito mode using Chrome browser.
It’s crazy isn’t it!
Obviously Google will make a result jump up and down to test out user interaction (a.k.a “Google dance”). So the question now is how sustainable this position will be. Let’s wait a few weeks and see……
I build websites and use them for testing various SEO strategies and tactics.
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