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Keyword Competition

It’s amazing how much time I wasted trying to work out how to do keyword research properly. All the gurus were falling over themselves telling me how I’d dominate the search engines once I figured it out. However, it never seemed to work out for me the way they said it would.

I kept going back to their videos again and again. I paid for every course. I listened to every word they said. But there was no way I could find one that i stood a chance of ranking for that would bring in enough traffic, so that some of them might convert to paying customers.

And whenever I doubted what they were saying, up they’d come out with still some other video showing me in outstanding detail how ‘proper’ keyword research was done. 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? Certainly, average folks, (the ones who I wanted to really find my stuff) wouldn’t do that. After all, until I started trying to earn money online, I didn’t even know you could do it. I’m betting you didn’t know it either!

So why would I? Oh, I forgot, to find out the competition. Becuase I had to know how strong the competition was to work out if the keyword was worth going for. 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. Besides, they were experts, and they’d been doing it for so much longer than me so why wouldn’t I listen to them?

Eventually, I got sick of the whole thing and more from laziness than anything else, I quit doing it their way. (Yeah, it’d be nice to tell you I just accidentally stumbled upon it but that would be lying). I decided that if I was going to get people to actually find my content then I had to go after the keywords that normal people 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. And that, of course, meant leaving out the quotes.

Because true competition is nothing to do with who’s targeting what keyword. It’s more to do with who’s ranking for them. And that means ranking for your keywords without quotes.

The first page of Google, minus quotes, whether the page is targeted to the keyword or not, is your competition. If you can beat the first page you can beat the rest of the silly buggers who are targeting it in quotes.

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