Mastering Keyword Research and SEO Competition

Key Takeaways

hey everybody what's up this is Pat Flynn from the smart passive income blog today I'm going to be talking about something really important for your blog or online business and that is keyword research now whether you're doing keyword research on your own using tools like the Google Keyword tool from AdWords or you're hiring out someone else to do it for you you got to understand what the number one goal is behind all keyword research and that is to rank on the first page of Google that's what really matters you know if you're on the second page you might as well be on the 30th page because everything happens on the first page it's super super super important that you understand this because that's your goal so whenever you're doing keyword research which I'm going to show you how to do uh in certain ways in a second you got to analyze who's on the first page and know how to beat them now this goes for if you're going to write blog posts and you're looking for keywords for your blog posts or if you're you know looking to get into new niches uh for Niche sites and if you're doing articles like on eHow or infobarrel or squido or Hub Pages or whatever you know you want to be on that first page that's where all the money is that's where the traffic is you know if you're if you're on on a Blog that's where the subscribers are your RSS readers everything so if you're doing any of these things you know writing blog posts creating nich sites or writing articles you got to remember you got to you got to want to rank on the first page of Google so how do you do this how do you properly do keyword research you know if you're doing you know one of these three things now first you have to understand searches you know how many people are searching and for what uh for what keywords secondly you have to understand everything about your competition you know backlinks page ranks uh index Pages you know domain age everything so that you know what you have to do to beat them and then rank on the first page and then be all good so what tools can you use to do proper keyword research well there's a number of free ones I've mentioned a couple already you know Google AdWords keywords uh the Google AdWords keyword tool that's a that's one that you know a lot of people are using I'm sure some of you are using right now uh too but there's a paid one out there that I use every single day you know when I'm writing blog posts when I'm writing articles when I'm you know I'm about to start to do Niche sites as well and it's been helping me out tremendously to filter out through all the uh the crappy uh keywords out there that have no searches or that are too competitive to to to rank for uh for the top 10 listings in Google so if you're doing Niche sites if you have your own site uh and you want to know how to get to the top 10 position this is how you figure it out so you can see me right here in the middle smartpassiveincome.com and number five and it shows me different statistics about my uh my website my page rank number of indexed uh pages that Google has of mine uh backlinks to my page uh back links to to my homepage back links to my entire domain and uh different things that I had I should have in my uh on my website which is like the keyword in the title keyword in description Etc so from here I can look at my competition people that are higher than me and see exactly what I have to do so for instance here you know genius types.com ranked at number four uh they have a domain age of four I have one of zero I'm not even two years old yet so that's probably why it shows a dash there P page rank is the same you know the index pages are are basically the same now this is weird here because I'm ranked lower but I have more page link or I have more backlinks and backlinks are super important to uh to page rankings in Google so I'm curious to know why I'm below and it when I go down here further and I look at here where one of the things is keyword in the header tag I noticed that mine says no this I I guarantee you this is why I am not higher than this guy and I actually just found this out when doing a a run through of this tutorial for you and it blows my mind and I'm really glad I had this tool to figure that out so I'm going to change that right away and I guarantee once I do that once Google reexes our sites I will climb higher than this guy but say that everything was the same and you know he had more back links I could see if he had more backlinks I could see that and know what exactly what have I would have to do and obviously you know a lot of you know that the higher quality backlinks are worth more so if you want to know where his backlinks are coming from we can do that if we click on this Arrow here and click on PR analysis which is Page rank analysis it'll go through all the websites that backlink to him and their page ranks and I'm going to cancel that so that it just shows those now here we right away it shows a number of different uh backlinks from a number of uh different ranking page ranks so I can see there's six backlinks from page Rank 4 websites now I want to know where they come from uh because maybe I can do something so I'm going to click on this one it's a site that I know dod.com really great internet marketing website check it out if you haven't already now when I'm here I'm looking for a link to genius types.com and and if you're the owner of that website genius types.com I apologize for seeing singing you out you just happen to rank one ahead of me so I'm uh using you for this ex example but so I'm here at dod.com coming over from Market Samurai and I'm going to do a quick search for the word genius types or for genius types.com genius oh here it is links to this article number 21 uh link soup help Stephen blah blah blah genius types so this is a link to genius types that was placed here because genius types put a link to this article so apparently do do lists all the different po blog posts in the blog sphere that link to this post so if I want a link on this pr4 website all I have to do is link to this post as well there you go it's that easy now let's try another one let's do uh Daniel soo's site from uh daily blog tips another great site now I'm going to look for genius types again uh genius no I don't see that there you know I just typed in contrl F to find that and I couldn't find it so I'm guessing it's in the uh in the comment section so I'm going to look here and hover over each of their names and see where their sites point to ah here you go Brian Lee genius types.com great so that tells me if I want a pr4 uh backlink to my own site I just have to leave a comment right here and then it'll be you know I'll match this guy and then I'll climb higher than him if if I do more um but you know this guy is has one up on me on here if I do this it cancels it out so I I hope you can see how this works and how powerful it can be I can go through all the high page ranking websites and catch up to him that way now SEO competition is just one of the things uh that I do with Market Samurai to check how my websites are doing and where they're ranking and what I can do to improve there's so many other cool things that I don't have time to talk about uh right now but I will in the future so if you want to give Market Samurai a try I really encourage you to do so it's highly I highly recommend it I hardly ever recommend products to you and and try to promote things but this is just one of those things that I would hate to not promote to you because it's so good um and the link below you can use to get your free trial and it is an affiliate link so if you do end up purchasing the product I do get an affiliate commission I'm just want trying to be honest and upfront with you with that so uh you know if you don't like it you know no worries I don't it doesn't matter to me I'm just trying to help you out and uh if you want to pay me back at all you know you can use my affiliate link down there and uh I do get a little bit of commission so I thank you for that now if you have any questions about some of the other things I do uh with Market Samurai please feel free to let me know and I hope to see you guys uh you know ranking on the first page of Google I'll talk to you soon and uh until the next video I wish you all the best Cheers