Gotch SEO Masterclass #2: "Trace Minerals"

Key Takeaways

hey so in this new video series i'm going to show you how to rank in google step by step please keep watching to learn more about this new series so the way this series is going to work is really simple you can submit a keyword to me anonymously and i already have a large list of keywords that people have submitted for me and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to select one of those keywords and then i'm going to show you step by step how to actually rank for that keyword and basically the thought process that i would have if that was a keyword that i was targeting and i'm not going to personally pursue ranking that keyword but i'm going to give you exactly what you need to be able to rank for that keyword so i'm going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you and then it's ultimately just going to be up to you to go out there and actually take the information and put it into action and most importantly execute on that information so with that said let's jump into the video okay guys so i am on my computer and the target keyword that i'm going to show you how to rank is trace minerals and this is a keyword phrase that was submitted anonymously by a member of gotch seo academy so the first thing that i would want to do if this was my target keyword is i would want to qualify this keyword make sure that it's actually a good keyword to go after so how do you actually qualify keyword well the first thing that i would personally do is go to the keyword explorer on ahrefs and then put that in there and so ahrefs is going to give you a 30 000 foot view of what's going on with this particular keyword and you'll be able to qualify this keyword with just this data alone but i'm going to show you a couple extra steps that you can take to qualify these keywords even further to make sure that your targeting keywords are actually worth going after so looking at this data alone you know ahrefs is going to give you this keyword difficulty and this is useful uh you could certainly make decisions based on the keyword difficulty at this show here but i wouldn't recommend keeping at that service level i would probably go much deeper in fact i would go much deeper but the other things i want to look at are does it actually have search volume so ahrefs is saying it has around 13 000 searches per month that's a pretty good amount of searches so that would be something that would be worthwhile the second big qualifier that i would look at is are there paid results for this keyword phrase so according to ahrefs there are paid results about 21 of the results are paid so that is qualification that this is a keyword phrase that people are willing to invest money into or companies are willing to invest money into therefore that means there is a potential to make a profit with it and there's a good potential for it to be a great term to monetize around so that is a really great qualifier so the next thing i would want to do is look at the keyword ideas that ahrefs gives me copy all of these keywords and actually what i'm going to do is i'm going to copy all the keywords and all the work that i'm doing now i'm actually going to have all of this below the video as a free download so i'm literally going to be doing the work for whoever keyword this is so you can take the information and jump on it as fast as possible and execute as fast as possible on it i'm just giving you the framework i'm giving you the road map to rank for this keyword but like i said i would copy these and i would and then the next thing you'd want to do is go down to the bottom and what i'm looking at right here is to determine if this particular keyword phrase is link worthy and so i'm looking at these results here and then all i have to do is go to domains and this is the total linking domains going to these pages and so you know obviously it's very lopsided this exact match domain here is getting the majority of the links but that proves that people are willing to link to this particular topic and that's important for when you're thinking about targeting a keyword you want to know that people are actually willing to link to the topic because there are some topics that are not going to be as link worthy so the good news is that this one definitely is and so that's the beginning portion of qualifying the keyword now i want to show you a couple other things that i like to do to qualify the keyword further so the next thing i like to do is go to buzzsumo buzzsumo serves two purposes the first purpose is to qualify the keyword based on social engagement and social activity around the topic so all you have to do is just run a search for the target keyword phrase and once you're in here all that you're trying to look for is to see if this particular topic which is trace minerals has social activity around it and it clearly does it looks like it is a very shareable topic and so that is a really good sign and of course you know this is not always going to be the case but in this case this is definitely a qualified topic from a social activity standpoint and then the second piece of buzzsumo that you want to take advantage of is to do this view sharers option and so i would just click on this and then this one i'd go through all these and i'd get view shares and then what i would do is i would export these shares and like i said below this video i'm going to have all of these in a google sheet that you can just take and you can reach out to these people later on after you create your actually keyword targeted page so buzzsumo is really great for qualifying keywords and the social engagement around those keywords and most importantly getting access to the people that have shared this particular topic because if you can find these people that means you can reach out to them and let them know that hey i just produced something that's very similar to something you've already shared and it's better so more on that later and the final qualification technique that i like to use as well is to go to google trends you just enter your keyword into google trends and all i'm trying to see is if this topic has been trending upward over the past 12 months or even a couple years so over the past 12 months it's been somewhat flat but it has been rising a little bit really what matters is we want to look more at like maybe the past five years just to make sure there hasn't been any steep declines in interest in this particular topic it doesn't mean if there's a decline that you should completely avoid it but it is a good sign if it is going up because therefore you know at least in a year or maybe five years from now this topic will still be driving the organic search traffic so that's kind of a nice qualification metric as well okay so now i want to show you the final qualification technique that i like to use which is to look for user engagement around the topic so in this case the first thing i would do is look at forums so you can just do something like forum and then you can do plus trace minerals or you can do vice versa you know trace minerals plus forum and we're going to do is we're going to go into these forums and see if there's user engagement around these particular topics so looking at this first page here it looks like there's a little bit of engagement around this topic we at least have a forum thread about this topic so there are people that are interested in it and there are people that at least have some knowledge of it as well so that's a good sign and the same is true for this page as well it looks like there are responses to this and of course they're a little old but at least you see that there is engagement around this particular topic and then on this page it also looks like we have some engagement around the topic as well so these are all really good signs people are talking about this topic people are have a lot of knowledge about this topic and people are asking questions about this topic so that is a good sign because it's showing that you're going to be targeting a keyword that people are actually interested in that's pretty important and of course you know you could just qualify a keyword based on search volume because that is a strong qualifier but i recommend going through each of these different qualifiers to make sure that it really is a great idea and most importantly if you have a huge list of keywords this is a great way to to prioritize those keywords based on the ones that have the greatest amount of qualifiers visible but i do want to make one important point and that's if a particular keyword doesn't have a good qualifier for example let's say it doesn't have a lot of social engagement around it that doesn't mean you should just avoid the keyword this is more just the process of prioritizing your keywords based on these different qualifiers but there are going to be times where certain keywords are missing qualifiers and some have all of them so it's not always going to be a good idea just to avoid it if it's missing one or two maybe even three qualifiers but as long as it has at least one good qualifier you'll probably be doing pretty well so then another way for you to see if there's any engagement around this topic is actually just to go to youtube which is the second biggest search engine and to look to see if there is interest around this particular topic so the best thing to do is just look at the videos and look at how many views each of these videos has around this particular topic and then one last thing you can do is actually use amazon especially for a topic like this that is basically a supplement you should go to amazon and see if there are products around this particular keyword phrase so as you can see there are definitely products just for this specific topic so that's a good sign because it's showing that companies are willing to invest into this topic so there's a lot of money in this topic so that's a good good sign because one of the biggest qualifiers is actual cold hard cash so this is a really good sign we can basically conclude that this keyword is qualified and there are so many factors showing that this keyword is qualified so it is way overqualified as a keyword to go after so now what is the next part of this process well the next thing i would do after i've solidified the fact that this is a good idea to go after i want to do a deep competitor analysis for this keyword so there are two parts to a effective competitor analysis and the first is going to be examining external signals so those are going to be backlinks and social signals and then the other part of the analysis is to actually analyze the pages that are ranking so i'm back here on ahrefs and i want to start looking at the quality of links that these particular websites have or at least these pages have and so the one thing i love to do is i like to export these results then what i like to do is i like to copy this information here and then we'll just go ahead and paste this here okay so then what i want to do is i want to actually clean up a lot of this stuff because it's not really important from a competitor analysis standpoint so things such as you know last update return rate all this stuff is going to be pretty useless for keyword analysis and then we'll also get rid of this as well so then what i like to do is i'd like to get an average of each of these categories okay so once you have all your averages laid out this is a really good way to get a 30 000 foot view of the competition for this keyword versus your website so i'm just going to show you a hypothetical situation so what you want to do is you kind of want to just look to see what you're up against so in this case you know i can tell that you know one person or one competitor is just dominating the backlink quantity and so the problem with looking at this from an average standpoint is that clearly the first result is is overpowering this number and so if we disregarded this guy it would probably look a lot different as far as the average backlink total so we're looking at about 231 backlinks and that's much different than what it was previously but still this can definitely distort it and the other big column actually i would say probably the most important column here is the linking root domains because this number right here 70 is the high end of probably how many linking route domains you would have to get to rank for this keyword or to at least probably compete with this number one person so you know you'll probably you can obviously get much less depending on how strong your website is relative to the competitors so the other big piece is domain rating and when you look at this it's pretty interesting because the top ranking domain only has a domain rating of 49 but they're able to make up for their lack of domain rating because they have an exact match domain and so you know there is kind of a balancing effect that goes on here but these other guys are much stronger except for this one here so this is a really good sign and then also this guy here these are two really good signs that you can compete in this for this particular keyword because you have two very weak domains that are ranking mixed in with domains that are much stronger like this which is amazon of course 95 and you can usually beat amazon because it's just one product so you can beat them from a content perspective but i would be concerned if this domain rating was much higher if it was around like 70 or 80 that would be a lot more concerning but in this case you know seeing that the number one ranking result is you know a 49 domain rating which is still pretty pretty strong it's not it's not super strong it's not weak but these are really really exciting so i would get excited if i saw this particular circumstance because these guys could definitely get pushed off but the big takeaway here is to always compare your website against the competitors and that's really what matters so if you have a domain rating of let's say 50 you know you can compete for this keyword because there are websites ranking that have domain ratings far lower than yours but if you have a lower domain rating than every single ranking result then you know you're gonna have to work way harder to rank for this keyword in most cases and by working harder that's gonna mean maybe getting more backlinks or creating a far superior page than everything that's ranking so the next thing i would want to do is i want to look at the actual quality of the backlinks that these competitors have so in this case you know these guys don't have a ton of backlinks going to their pages so i would just look at this first guy to see what his backlinks actually look like so i'm back here on ahrefs and i'm just going to put the target url in here so this is the number one ranker for that keyword phrase and then once the analysis is finished go to backlinks and so basically what i want to do here is i want to see does this number one ranking result the guy who's dominating for this keyword phrase does he have good high quality backlinks and so you know right away the first thing i notice is a lot of his top links are no followed so what i would do is i would go ahead and make sure that we're only looking at do follow links okay so now we're looking at just the do fall links that this particular person has so right away the first link that i notice that they have is a gov link yeah so they legitimately have a do fall link on a gov website so that is a huge boost for them but that's not to say that you can't get a link on this page as well because clearly this page is willing to link out to external websites so you could definitely craft a way to get your link on here with a little bit of outreach so you don't need to go super deep analyzing every single link it's more just to see you know are the majority of their links high quality and if the answer is yes you know that you're going to have to get very high quality links as well and so the next thing i would do is i would go through each of these competitors and i would export all of the links that are linking to them and this is going to be the beginning of building your link prospecting database so i will have the link prospects here below this video so you can get access to those immediately for whoever's keyword this actually is but that is a really important part because you want to be prepared already out of the gate as opposed to having to scramble after you publish so you already know that as soon as you publish you have link prospects ready you have potential shares ready and you're just ready to promote this page like crazy so you can push it up as fast as possible okay so now it is time for my favorite part of this process which is to analyze the actual pages that are ranking and this is the most exciting part for me because i really love creating content and trying to rank it in google it's like a weird obsession of mine so let me show you kind of the way that i would go about analyzing a particular set of results and showing you how to find weaknesses in your competitors that you can jump on so that you can beat them very very fast okay so i am here on the website that is ranking number one for trace minerals and right away you know one of the biggest reasons why they are ranking is because they have an exact match domain and it's probably likely that this domain has been around for a while but that's not the most important part we want to just want to just look at the possible reasons why this page is ranking so when we look at it it looks like it is just a company selling trace minerals and this home page is just dedicated to the products that they sell it's not a comprehensive piece of content by any imagination and it's literally just a home page of an exact match domain so in this case i'd be pretty excited to see this because i know for a fact that i'd be able to beat this particular page with a more comprehensive piece of content because just a home page like this is not super exciting in any way but the one thing we really want to take note of is what types of results google is serving for this keyword because that's going to give us an idea of how to satisfy search intent for this keyword so in this case we know we have a home page ranking without much content you don't need to get super crazy about this but you just need to take notes of the intent that's going on here okay so i have moved on to competitor number two okay so a few things i noticed right away they have a low word count but first let's say what the search intent is so it's just an article so right away one thing i noticed is that i could definitely create way more words and content on this page than they have so it looks like they have about 1900 words give or take so we know right away that we can beat this person just on word count alone and so continue looking at this a little bit further they are doing some things well they have good outbound links they're linking to authoritative resources so that's great but it looks like they're using stock photos what you can do is search this image in google and see if this is a stock photo in any way so it looks like this photo's been used across multiple websites and yes it is a stock photo 100 so that is one thing that you can take advantage of is you can create unique photos for your brand as opposed to using these stock photos so i put that in here and as you can see kind of what what i'm doing right now is i'm i'm basically trying to poke holes in their strategy and trying to find small things that they're doing incorrectly that i can take advantage of in with my piece of content so the other big thing is i wouldn't have a huge picture like this to push the content way down so that's one thing that i wouldn't personally do so from a readability standpoint we can definitely beat them on that as well and also the fact that this entire first block is all bolded are all things that we wouldn't be doing so the other big thing that i've noticed is this page does not have video it does not have audio and it doesn't even have any infographics which are all golden opportunities in this situation so now the third competitor is amazon i don't normally do deep analysis of amazon because clearly they're ranking because of how authoritative they are but the one thing i recommend you do when there is an amazon result is go to the reviews and also go to the common questions and answers because you can find all kinds of topics that you can cover in your content asset right here just looking at this product there are 507 reviews so there is all kinds of information about this particular trace mineral product so you can find all kinds of stuff in here that you can use to deepen your content even further so what i would do is i would just literally take some time and dig through this and look for certain points that i could maybe address in my piece of content okay so i'm on to the fourth competitor so i'm just going to analyze this competitor and one more because i'm already seeing kind of the trend around this particular keyword phrase just looking at this alone right away you know you can tell this is probably a stock photo so looking at about a thousand words on this page and looking through this content it looks super dry super boring and does not look fun or entertaining at all so you could take advantage of this very very easily it doesn't look like they put very much time or effort into this at all so you can definitely beat this particular person so that's a good sign right away is you see a result that's clearly not well developed and it's ranking well so that's a really really good sign okay i'm on the fifth and final competitor for this target keyword just like the other ones it looks like they're using a stock photo once again and we'll go ahead and check the word count so it looks like got about 1900 words for this particular competitor and i do not believe there is any video audio infographics or unique media at all looking through this you know once again looks relatively interesting but it's not going to be anything too exciting just a huge block of text and most internet users would not get through this because of the way that their content is designed and the readability around it so you should get super excited when you look at these results because there is a ton of opportunity to dominate for this keyword and so this competitor analysis as you can tell is just to see what we're up against and now you have to actually figure out how you're going to compete for this keyword what are you going to create what are you going to do to actually beat these people so just looking at this information alone we can figure out how to tackle the search intent for this keyword phrase so we know three out of the top five results are articles so we can create an article and that's my always going to be my preferred way to satisfy search engine because obviously you can go super in depth with an article or a guide and generally they're much easier to rank than a home page a product page or a category page for example so the first step is we're going to write an article and then we're going to look at the total word count so our target word count would probably be in the three to four thousand range okay so these are the main things that came to my mind right away if i was going to create a piece of content this is basically what i do for every page that i want to rank i just created a little basic strategy so in this case we know it's going to be an article i would be prepared to write at least 3 000 to 4 000 words for this single keyword i would then take unique pictures for the content so if you're promoting a particular mineral you should try to get your hands on that mineral or you should get your hands on a product related to that mineral and take real pictures for real professional pictures and put that in the content because it makes it way better and way more unique then the next element is to record a video around this topic so that you can most importantly put it on the page you want to rank so you can increase dwell time and none of your competitors have video so clearly you're gonna have an advantage on that front and then you also will have it on youtube which is the second biggest search engine where you can actually rank for that keyword phrase in youtube as well so it's a double whammy and then this the other thing you can do is create an infographic which i say is optional and so what i would do is i would go through this process of writing the article getting the unique pictures and recording the video and then see how well that performs and if you still feel like it's lacking a little bit you can add more media elements to it to increase the level of uniqueness and quality and then some other micro stuff you should be adding more external links to authoritative resources so that's going to be gov websites or any authoritative resource in the health industry use more headings break the text up more and most importantly simplify the content because this seems like a pretty dry topic so you need to figure out a way to make it not as dry and make it way more interesting and entertaining most importantly dumb it down a little bit you're not writing to people with phds you're writing to the average person who's just wondering how trace minerals are going to help them and one thing you can do is you can actually use hemingway writer which will help a lot with simplifying your writing okay so now i'll just real quickly cover how i would go about actually creating this piece of content so the first thing i would do is i would outline the content so just make sure you set up your ball points then i would go out and find unique data and unique research and even just any unique information that i can and throw that in there because that's going to increase the depth of the content so look through journals and really authoritative resources for real data and real unique research and then as i mentioned previously in the video go on amazon and find those little ideas so that you can deepen the content even further because then the people that are reading it they're like wow it seems like this person read my mind but in reality you just looked at all the information available to you and you created the most comprehensive and most valuable piece of information for them the next thing is to actually put in the work you have to actually write the content or you need to hire a subject matter expert to write the content for you then after that you just have to edit the content and then lastly you need to optimize the content once it's optimized you just need to publish it and then from here all you have to do is just actually go out there and promote this great content asset and obviously you know how you go about creating this content asset is going to totally vary but the main objective should be for you to create the most valuable piece of content around this topic and to be the most informative page on this topic that's really what your main goal should be and if you do that well it makes the process of promoting it much easier and the last thing that i didn't cover is actually the first step really is headlines you really need to obsess about creating a strong headline and one of the best things you can do is use one of my favorite tools this tool here from advanced marketing institute is probably one of the most used tools that i have every time i come up with a headline for my blog post or a sales page or an instagram post anything i always use this tool to see the quality of the headline we'll go to one of the competitors we'll actually just take their headline and we'll see how well that headline performs in this tool so that that headline does not perform very well at all so you know that you can create a way better headline that can generate more clicks more shares and generate way more interest for the topic so the one thing i recommend is writing at least 10 to 20 different headlines and then just running them through here and eventually you're going to move these words around you're going to figure out a headline that is really captivating and cool and so that's pretty much it guys this analysis was actually really easy because my conclusion is that this is a good keyword to go after it's low competition for the most part and there is a huge opportunity to dominate with a really amazing content asset i would be excited about this keyword and i would definitely be going after it if this was the niche that i was in all right guys so that is all for the first video in this new training series how to rank in google step by step so hopefully i'll come up with a better name as i go on through this process but i am just going to be iterating to try to make this series better and better but for now just bear with me as it's kind of a rough idea so i hope you got a lot of value out of it and as i mentioned the beginning of the video we're currently running a giveaway for you to get free lifetime access to gotch seo academy which is a total value of a thousand dollars and so all you need to do is subscribe to my channel and like this video and comment on this video and make sure you do that for every video that we publish for the next couple weeks because then we're going to select one person to get lifetime access to the course i hope you got a lot of value out of this video i had a really fun time creating it and thank you so much for watching my videos and engaging with my content i'm so incredibly grateful so thank you so much for watching and i will see you in the next video