How to do Long Tail Keyword Research With Market Samurai (Part 5/6)

If you’ve followed everything to the tee then we’re ready to get into what you’re dying to know.

How do I start getting traffic?

The simple answer to this is using Market Samurai as a long tail keyword tool! Long tail keyword phrases are those 3-6 word keyword phrases that are much more specific. The advantage to long tail keyword phrases is that specificity usually tells us that potential visitors are ready to buy or know exactly what they’re looking for.

Dominating the long tail keyword phrase game brings in the highest targeted audience from organic search traffic and it’s actually a lot simpler than it sounds. The perfect example of a website that dominates long tail keyword phrases is Wikipedia.

You’ll learn how to find keywords for SEO, how to use keywords which essentially boil down to long tail keyword research.

I’ll show you exactly how to start getting traffic quick to your website using Market Samurai as a long tail keyword tool. As promised in part 4, my bonus templates are available for download in the resources section just below the video.

There is a transcript available below that will help you go through the material carefully. This ones important!

Review of Part 4 and Introduction to Part 5

I mentioned sending you guys a bonus for getting this far in the series. I’ve created some templates that I use that help me to stay focused and on track with my content marketing goals. After I’ve created what I like to call my “content schedule”, I know exactly what I’m going to be writing about for the next month!

These templates are ones that I’ve never shared before, and don’t plan on posting them publicly online. So, if you want these templates to use while building your site, head on over to my site at www.moneyjournal.com/bonus and subscribe to my newsletter. I’ll send you over those templates as well as a full out guide on starting up an online business effectively and efficiently.

Just so you know, I don’t send spam or any sponsored ads through my newsletter. It’s basically my way of communicating more intimately with people who I know are serious about building an online business. I send out my latest tested tips and tutorials and information that I think people like yourself will care about.

I’m going to be using a couple of the templates in the next two videos, so if you want to pause the video and sign up, then please do. You should get an email with the bonuses as promised sooner than later!

Just a quick recap: In my last video, I talked about a few different options to use your niche and keyword research to make money online. You probably have some great ideas of what you want to do, but how do you get people coming to your website?

So if you’re ready, let’s dig deep into how you’re going to get targeted traffic the quick way!

In part 2 of this series, I hope I was able to get you comfortable with your way around the Market Samurai software. We did some keyword research using the keyword phrase “Market Samurai tutorial” and found some great keyword phrases that I’ll be using on my Money Journal blog.

Rather than micro-targeting something like Market Samurai, in this video, we’re going to choose a different niche and find keyword opportunities to get traffic faster than going for head-terms!

Examples of How to get Traffic

We’re going to use a really broad topic and a very popular one on the Internet. Celebrity gossip! I’m not into this myself, but it will be a great example of how I use Market Samurai to get traffic quick.

I’ve already prepopulated the data, but I’ll run through exactly what I did for a quick 15 second refresher.

So assuming my website is about celebrity gossip, I started a new project and typed my primary keyword phrase in as “celebrity gossip”. I went to the keyword research tool and chose a minimum phrase length of 2 words and a maximum of 6. From here, I generated a list of other keywords using Market Samurai which uses Google’s data to populate these results.

I took about 1 minute to filter through the results and added a few negative keywords like 3am, BET, Bollywood, TMZ, UK, Style, dresses, birthdays and a bunch more. I also added a positive keyword “celebrity” to make my niche a little more specific.

I basically took the list down from about 800 results to 260.

I then clicked on Keyword Analysis, made sure that my filters had all of the organic filters on, all of the commerciality filters on and the SEO competition filter on.

I clicked on Analyze keywords and voila! There was a plethora of information I could use to start planning my blogging schedule.

Okay. Let’s analyze the data. You can see that there are about 550,000 searches alone for the keyword phrase “Celebrity News” followed by 301,000 on “celebrity gossip”. As nice as it would be to have an authority site ranking in the top 3 of Google for these keyword phrases, it takes a lot more time to rank for these than phrases with lower SEO Competition levels.

If you’re catching on, the way to get traffic to your website quick is by hitting lower competitive keyword phrases. These will usually have a lower volume of searches, but it gets people to your site, reading your content and hopefully subscribing, buying something, sharing your site, or at the very least, remembering your site the next time they find you in Google.

This is one of the single greatest methods of getting traffic to your site quick with minimal effort. It took me about 5 minutes to generate these results and I would have never known what to search for without Market Samurai.

Rather than scrolling through all 282 results as I go cross eyed looking through the data, this is where filters are absolute money! The two filters we want to focus on the most are SEO Traffic and SEO Competition.

Again, SEO traffic is 42% of the estimated monthly searches in Google each day, week or month depending on how you set up your report settings. I always use monthly.

SEO Competition is the number of indexed pages in Bing that use this specific keyword term in the same word order.

These kinds of keywords are often referred to as long tail keyword phrases and most of the authority sites you see today started with long tail and are actually continuing to dominate the long tail keyword research game because they are continually building on them. With search traffic, it’s all about cumulative value. You may rank great for the keyword phrase “Celebrity News” and get a whole bunch of traffic, but when you compare it to a site that ranks for 30,000 long tail keyword phrases with monthly traffic between 30 visitors to 1000, it doesn’t compare.

Setting up Long Tail Keyword Research Filters

Let’s set up our long tail keyword filter! Generally, what I look for in a long tail keyword phrase is SEO traffic of about 30 visitors/month and an SEO Competition of less than 10,000 pages to compete against. Some people choose SEO Competition levels of less than a thousand, but I find that the results are scarce.

So I’ll set my SEOT to a minimum of 30 visitors. And then I’ll set the SEOC to a maximum of 10,000 pages.

You can see that some of the SEOC values are set to 0, and it doesn’t mean that there are 0 other competing pages using this keyword phrase, but it simply means that somewhere along the search, data was lost. The same goes for the ones that haven’t populated at all. Market Samurai has over 400,000 users as of January 2012, so the amount of requests that they send to Google and Bing are ridiculous! It’s not the software itself that’s preventing you from getting your results, but it is Google or Bing that is preventing that much data to be sent so quickly or timing out themselves. All you have to do is reanalyze your keyword phrases and you should be good to go.

Market Samurai knows this and that’s why they’ve left a link so you can check out the information yourself. So if we click on the arrow by celebrity blog which is showing an SEO Competition of 0, then your browser should open Bing.com showing you the number of results on the page. You can see that there’s about 647,000 results.

Moving back to using the software, I like to organize my SEOC in ascending order. The ones with zero, I normally just open really quick to see what the competition is like and if it’s lower than my threshold, then I like to keep it. I can already tell that phrases like celebrity blog and celebrity stories will be well over my 10,000 threshold.

Now you can see that there are a good 20 or so solid topics that get a decent amount of traffic that will be a lot easier to rank for than my original keyword phrase of Celebrity Gossip. You just need to make some killer content on this and engage your audience!

So the next time you’re searching for long tail keyword phrase opportunities, you might want to keep the filters that we set here. Market Samurai lets you save custom filters like this one. All you have to do is click on the save button, then you choose whether you want a new name or to overwrite an existing one. So for this one, I’ll create a new one and set it as “Long Tail Search 30-10000” which basically tells me that my SEOT is 30 and my SEOC is 10,000. You can always create more long tail filters if you find this one is too aggressive or maybe not aggressive enough. Then click the save button.

How to do Keyword Research for SEO

Now on to organizing these keywords so you know exactly what to write about and when you should write about it.

I’m going to export these results into a new folder which I’ll call Celebrity Gossip. I personally like to create another folder specifically for keyword research because I use it that often! And I’ll type in my primary keyword and hyphenate it with long tail keyword phrases. Now you just need to navigate to the folder where you saved the file and open it.

We’ll filter down this list with the keyword phrases that I want to target for my new celebrity blog posts. We’ll first remove the ones that don’t fit our criteria of 30-10000 like celebrity blog, celebrity gallery etc. We’ll remove the primary keyword phrase since that’s not what we’re going for here. And now we have a list of over 20 keyword phrases that are going to make great pieces of content. So if we do a quick excel function, and you were able to rank as number one in Google for these keyword phrases, you’re looking at getting 1753 new visitors in the month searching for these specific terms. I’m not promising you that you’re going to rank number one in Google for these keyword phrases, and that these numbers are perfectly accurate, but it’s a good ballpark range of what you can strive for.

It’s not just a matter of writing content, including keywords and then reaping the benefits, but some off page SEO like link building will help you get your results quicker. I’m not going to get into link building in this series, but I’ll be blogging about it on www.moneyjournal.com and sending out some tips to my newsletter subscribers on my website.

If you haven’t gone to my website and signed up for my newsletter yet, you may get lost here as I’ll be using my own custom templates to filter through these words and set up a schedule of when and how I want to write these articles. I’ll let you pause the video and grab the free templates on my site right now at www.moneyjournal.com/bonus

Organizing your Content Marketing Schedule

Alright, so now that we have a decent amount of blog posts to write about and we know approximately how many people are searching for this specific keyword phrase in Google, we can begin setting up our schedule using the template that I set up for you. If you actually went ahead and signed up for my newsletter and confirmed your e-mail address, you should have gotten an e-mail from me with this template and a few others that are really going to help you structure your online business well. The one I want you to open up is “Content Schedule.XLS”.

In this free template that I give to my subscribers, there’s a quick overview of the worksheet. The part that you should pay attention to most is the “Before you use this Template” section. What you should have prepared before creating your content schedule is a domain that is hosted, know what your niche is, have a vision for your website and be working towards that and you should have completed some keyword research the way that I’ve shown you.

If you haven’t done all of these, then I’d recommend looking at my resources tab first. I have a direct link to some resources as well as my own how to resource links that I’ve written about in my blog. It’s basically a fool proof way to make sure that you’re on track with your website development. Now we’re on to our content schedule.

Now using my exported file of long tail keyword phrases from Market Samurai, I can simply copy and paste the keywords and its data into my content schedule.

So I’ll filter down my Market Samurai export first to have the information that I have set up in my content schedule.

• Keyword
• Searches
• SEO Traffic
• SEO Competition
• Single CPC value.

How to use Keywords and 3 Golden Rules

For each page or blog post that you create, you can target more than 1 long tail keyword phrase. I normally select these by grouping them! There are 3 rules that I follow:

• Rule #1: Group relevant content together! So, I wouldn’t want to group South African celebrity gossip and Miley Cyrus Celebrity gossip since I don’t see too much relevance in these together. But I might want to combine something like Mzansi celebrity gossip and South African celebrity gossip because they are perfectly related.
• Rule #2: I generally like to target a higher competitive word with higher traffic as a primary keyword phrase and then another 2 or 3 long tail keyword phrases that have low competition value. In this case, I might want to target “Celebrity gossip USA” which has 480 monthly searches, but a competition level of 3000 with Miley Cyrus celebrity gossip which has a competition of 22 and latest on celebrity news which has a competition of 14. But remember, they must be relevant and when incorporating the keyword phrases into your writing, they should be used naturally. Don’t try to write it just because it has traffic. If it doesn’t make sense, save it for a future post or ditch it completely!
• Rule #3: Keyword phrases are awesome and helpful, but please do not write only for the search engines! Your primary target audience are actual human beings who are taking the time to read through your website. Search engine algorithms are getting more and more sophisticated. They know what you’re talking about in your post.

Rather than organizing through all of these, I’ll show you an example of how I use the template to set up one or 2 posts.

So if I have a celebrity gossip blog, I might want to use the keyword phrase “Celebrity Latest Gossip News Today” as a keyword phrase for my home page instead of making a blog post about it. It’s highly related to what my home page is all about, and it’s just a matter of making a heading using the keyword phrase and adding it into my on page SEO for the home page. So to make a note of that, I’ll write it down in the Ideas column (“Add keyword to home page after block 2”)

Then I’ll set a deadline date for that.

Then there’s the status column. You can see that there’s a little drop down here where you can set the status to one of the following:

Completed, Late, Working or just leave it blank. The descriptions for these are up here if you want to know exactly what these mean, but it’s pretty self explanatory.

The reason why I added this column in here is to keep myself accountable to getting my work done on time! If you’re noticing that you’re late all the time, maybe you’re setting your timeline goals too aggressively. You can always adjust them as you need to. So I’ll set this one to “Working”

Now let’s take the “Celebrity Gossip South Africa” and “Mzansi celebrity Gossip” and combine them. The way that I do this is to create a new keyword and enter a simple formula.

I’ll copy and paste the first keyword, south African celebrity gossip and then I’ll edit that new cell and separate it with a comma and add “mzansi celebrity gossip”. Then I’ll go to Monthly searches and type in “= the cell where south African celebrity gossip is + the column where mzansi celebrity gossip is”.

Then do a quick mental check to make sure that I copied them from the right cells. Now I’m going to click back on the cell where excel added the information for me, and drag it across. So now I know that I can expect about 222 monthly visitors from this blog post with a competition of 1313 pages in bing. The CPC figure won’t be accurate now, but in this particular post, CPC is probably not my best monetization method.

Now under ideas, I can say that I want to create a blog post about south African celebrity gossip with a focus on Mzansi . Then I’ll set a deadline, and leave the column blank since I don’t plan on starting this for a little while.

From here, you should have a good idea as to what you should be writing about and start getting traffic quick to your website!

That’s it for Part 5/6 of my Market Samurai series. In part 6, we’re going to hit the bigger keyword phrases and I’ll show you how to use them to realistically start ranking for more competitive keyword phrases. Let’s get traffic both quick and slow!

I generally respond a lot faster on Facebook, so if you have any questions, suggestions or comments feel free to hit me up on Facebook or leave a comment below.