Using Keyword Research to Work Out The Competition

effective keyword research

I kick myself when I think of the times I’ve wasted on bad keyword research. I’d be able to make a killing on the search engines according to all the experts. However, it never seemed to work out for me the way they said it would.

Over and over I watched the same videos. I made sure I bought all the courses. I hung on their every word. And yet, I couldn’t for the life of me find a keyword that I could rank for, on the first page of Google, that would bring me enough visitors so that I might actually be in with a chance of converting some of them into paying customers.

And if I doubted what they were saying, up they’d pop with another video showing me how keyword research was done properly. Or another expert would appear with some other trick up their sleeve that promised to make it even easier.

Pfft.

But I could never understand why they said I had to search for the keyword in quotes? Surely, the people I wanted to find my content wouldn’t be using quotes. After all, until I started trying to earn money online, I didn’t even know you could do that. I’m betting you didn’t know it either!

So why would I? Oh yes, to find out the competition. If I didn’t know how strong the competition was I couldn’t figure out if the keyword was worth going after. And of course ‘competition’ was defined as whoever else was targeting that particular keyword.

Being new to the game, said nothing and just tried to make it work. After all, these were experts, they’d been doing it for so much longer than me and they were making gazillions of money so why wouldn’t I listen to them?

Eventually, I just got sick of it all and I quit doing it their way. (Yeah, it’d be nice to tell you I just accidentally stumbled upon it but that would be a lie). I decided that if I was going to get people to actually find my content then I would check the keywords that they were typing in to the search engines. I had to go after the ‘exact match’ of what they were typing in to the search bar. Which, of course, meant leaving out the quotes.

Because true competition is nothing to do with who’s targeting what keyword. Keyword competition is down to whoever’s ranking for them. And I mean ranking for them without quotes.

First page of Google, no quotes, targeted to the keyword or not, is your competition. By beating them you can beat the rest of the silly buggers who are targeting it in quotes.