BEGINNER SEO 2: Website Optimization, Research & Writing (free course)

• Posted On - January 28, 2023
• By - adminjon
• 0 Comment
• • SEO

okay so we are going to talk about in this module everything that needs to happen before you actually write a blog post that's eventually going to rank in google so i want to quickly reiterate why this matters first of all you're just gonna have to trust me when i say that research is incredibly important for seo and i mean research in two different ways one researching what people are searching for that we call keyword research or competitor research that would be looking at other sites in your niche that cover the same topics and seeing what keywords they rank for what do i need to be targeting when i produce a blog post just what keywords do i need to be targeting in google what are people actually searching for that my site might show up in the results for i hope that makes sense uh that would be one type of research another type of research would be okay i have this these keywords that people are searching for on google there's it gets lots of searches a month that is what i want to try and rank for because that'll be you know relevant to my blog and i can produce that content i'm knowledgeable or whatever uh okay what actually needs to be written like on the page in order to satisfy the user intent right that we'll talk about what actually needs to be on the page what should i write about what should my headlines be do i need to make sure i cover all my bases the answer is yes okay what are my bases what do i need to talk about in the post what does a post actually need to contain we call that seo content research keyword research content research it's incredibly important the more you do of that the easier it is to actually write the content that will perform well in google i'm gonna say that one more time the more and better not just more but the better and more the more and better research you do on choosing which keywords to target as well as how to shape your content the blog post the easier and quicker probably it will be to actually have that content rank in google you got it good outside of research however there's one more thing that we're gonna talk about specifically in like the next two videos and that is just getting your site ready other than the words on the page the content google cares about their user experience again we're talking we're going to talk about this in a couple of videos from now but in general your website has to be fast it has to be mobile first those are the two big things and you have to tell google what your site is about again we're going to go through this step by step in the next couple of videos here but i just wanted to give you like a reason like why does this matter why does my site need to be mobile friendly mobile first because if it's not google's not going to rank it why does my site need to be fast because if it's not people are just going to leave and they'll be frustrated because they clicked on this google result and the page took way too long to load they're just going to go back to google and look all over again google don't like that they want to make their users happy so your page needs to load quickly it has to be fast it have to be mobile friendly slash mobile optimize slash mobile first we'll talk about that in the next couple of videos but that's extremely important and then we're gonna move on to talking about research which is absolutely huge for seo let's go okay so we've learned that our website needs to be mobile friendly and it needs to be super speedy it needs to load quickly in people's browsers on the computer because google cares about that this is mandatory stuff this is not this is nice have stuff this is must-have stuff luckily you can do it today and you can do it for free i'm going to walk you through it right now let's start with being mobile friendly and then we'll get to the speed stuff i have here petemcperson.com i only have like one or two plugins there's not really a whole lot of content on this site but i'm just going to use it as an example what you can do right now is go to search.google.com i will also provide this in this course as a link you can just click on and you just enter in your url here is the page mobile friendly you could do your home page or you could do a blog post i actually recommend doing both just to see just to make sure let's go ahead and do my home page let's just enter it in here i'm going to copy paste and just hit run test and we're going to see where it pops up is my site mobile friendly now if it is great you don't really have to worry about anything if it's not here's what you do you're not going to like this are you ready you probably need to get a new wordpress theme 99.9 of all themes developed now these days 2019 at the time of this recording or 2020 if you're watching later 9 out of 10 wordpress themes are default very mobile friendly and responsive whatever you want to call it right nine out of ten my page is mobile friendly the theme i am using is the default wordpress theme it's literally called 2019.

And most of the themes you can find in your dashboard if you go to appearance themes and you just click add new right you're browsing for new wordpress themes most of these are going to be mobile friendly they just will right out of the box most of them are now if you're using an old theme it may not be like that if you're using a custom theme that somebody else built it may not be like that if you've done a lot of custom css and html changes to your own theme it may not be like that i don't know but it needs to be this should be a green dot if it's not well you need to change it you need to change themes you just do i recommend any of the genesis themes you can go to studiopress.com studiopress.com these are paid if you don't want to do paid i'd recommend using either the default wordpress themes 2019 2020 later on if they release that one uh they're fantastic themes i really do think that or just come and use this browser most of these in fact you can even do feature and kind of choose some theme options that you want i'm not going to do that right now but in general most of these are going to be mobile responsive and in fact when you click on these details and stuff matrix is a responsive it seems the first three words it says it's responsive it should be responsive always test it you come over here to the mobile friendly thing and test it but in general that's what you need to do if you have a green light you should be just probably fine good to go maybe i'll actually open up a blog post url to test let's grab this one right here this is a example blog post let's try it again i'm going to paste that in there hit enter we're gonna see what pops up on this one but if it's not you probably just need to change themes i'm really sorry to say that but that's the truth okay let's move on while this is loading to talk about website speed there are three things you can do to easily enhance website speed that sounds like a good blog post title doesn't it three simple steps to making your website lightning fast and it really is like that okay and these are gonna be free totally free one we're gonna talk about images this is uh mobile friendly by the way it might be ugly because that's just an example but page is mobile friendly looks like there's some page loading issues which we could talk about later on but in general page is mobile friendly cool right so step number one is going to be just to test your speed all right we're just going to plug it in let's go to my home page right here i'm just going to grab this i'm going to throw it in gt metrics is my favorite analyzer it's completely free there are a few other ones pingdom is one uh i'm just gonna put this in here click analyze google also has another site speed testing tool but i like gt metrics uh just because i don't know really it's great it works great so the step number one is just a test we're gonna see what happens here it's gonna give us a letter grade don't fret if it's like an f or an e or a d a being the fastest right don't fret we're gonna fix all this stuff uh in three steps so well while this loads let's go over the three steps number one we are going to install short pixel or another image compressor images slow down websites they just do and a compressor you can see this is the original image this is the compressed image you can't really tell the difference it just makes the file size that much smaller and later on in the tools i can give you more examples in this video i'm just going to use short pixel because you can start for free you get a certain number of free image credits every single month and it's really easy to install and use it's incredibly easy you don't have to do anything once you set it up you just upload pictures to your blog and it automatically compresses it that's pretty awesome uh that's number one number two is going to be installing a cache c a c h e i'll show you what that means in just a minute a caching plug-in i don't know what it does you don't know what it is it doesn't matter it speeds up your website by compressing a lot of the website files on the backend stuff some crazy technical stuff it will help you and we're going to use w3 total cache because it's free we're gonna do that in just a second the third thing i'm gonna point people to is using a cdn specifically cloudflare it's absolutely free for one website and you can set it up relatively easily what this does actually i'm going to tell you what it does let's just say that it takes all of your website files and it distributes it all across the globe like in this picture here so that wherever people are when they load your website in their browser it pulls from a server that's close to them rather than your server with all your website files if somebody in singapore is loading your website in austin texas it's going to take a while this distributes all of your website files not all of them but a lot of your website files like images and stuff so that that person in singapore will pull your images from a singaporean server and it'll be lightning fast that's the three steps one images two cache plugin three cdn let's do it right now first thing i'm going to do i'm going to install short pixel they do have a paid plan by the way i highly recommend them i'll put my affiliate link below if in case you want to do it in case you upload a lot of images or you need more or whatnot you're welcome to do that but you can actually install it for free right here in plugins add new i am going to search for short pixel short pixel it's going to pop right up i'm going to click install and then activate once that's done and there will be just a few settings that we'll need to take care of if you do buy some bulk image credits or a monthly plan or whatever you will need to put in your api in fact you might even need to put in your api even for the free version you just go to sign up right here on shortpixel.com and you can take care of that but it'll be down here in settings short pixel here's what you want to do leave most of this alone okay you can see i already have my api key up there if you want if you upload images you take from your phone with like huge uh wide resolutions like 4 000 pixels 3000 pixels wide or tall or whatever you can automatically set short pixel to resize them you can choose like oh let's just you could leave this blank if you wanted to original aspect ratio is preserved and image is not cropped in any way you just put in like 1200 or 1500 or something like that or maybe even 2 000 that will help significantly reduce the file size and therefore the loading speed of your website so i would highly recommend uh resizing images right here i'm gonna leave it blank for now and then next you're gonna go to advanced you're gonna leave all this the same except for here if you want to exclude thumbnail sizes i don't know if you know this or not but when you upload an image into wordpress wordpress automatically duplicates that image for a few different thumbnail sizes medium large you might even see more options here depending on your theme seriously um every single image that you upload will be multiple image credits for short pixel so if you have 100 credits a month which i think is what short pixels free plan is and every image you upload takes up five credits well then you can only upload 20 images a month on the free plan at least you'll have to pay for more so you can click in here check these to exclude those thumbnail sizes so right now every image i put in is doing like four one two three thumbnails and then the original image that's not bad so you can update that right there after this is installed you can go back to your media and compress old images if you want to you'll have to do it in this list view not the grid view right here and you can see these are already reduced because i've already look at that this one was literally reduced by 86 the file size that's crazy right i uploaded this big image right here it reduced the image size by 70 and it still looks exactly the same that's pretty incredible so you can compress old images in this view right here and when you add new images it's going to automatically compress it that's step number one compress all the images on your blog every time you upload a new image now it's going to automatically compress with short pixel again i'll make a separate tools video later and give you a little bit more options but short pixel is by far my favorite the best you can start for free today that's awesome moving on step number two to getting your website nice and speedy would be to add a caching plugin i use wp rocket but it costs 50 bucks there is no free version of wp rocket is by far the best by the way but another good one is let's just search cash cache i don't really know i think it's produced cash but in general so these are the big ones right here actually this one's another big one right there w3 total cash and wp super cash these all function pretty much the exact same way but i well again i use wp rocket uh but that's paid that's like 50 bucks i use this whenever i want a free one i just use w3 you can experiment with some of these other ones i've never used them i'm sure they're fantastic this one's actually made by automatic the company that makes wordpress so there you go you can use that i'm going to click install niall on w3 and then activate once that's done now one thing i don't like about w3 specifically is that it has a ton of settings it's super overwhelming quite frankly so i tend to leave it like this right out of the box like i've done like i don't do a whole lot you could go through and edit where the oh it's under performance right here you click this i don't know why it's called performance is that w3 it's kind of annoying um you got to accept some things here you can upgrade to the pro version if you really want to you can just click empty all caches have you ever changed anything on your css using elementor or any other page builder that you use divi or beaver builder or something like that oftentimes it can mess up if you don't clear the cache but in order to do that after you change some custom css or you use page builders to build a new page if it ever doesn't load correctly come to your cache plugin and empty your cash and see if that helps oftentimes that can help a lot so like i said before there are a ton of settings right here a ton of settings a ton of settings uh one thing i would do is just enable the page cache this is like this by default and then i would well why don't they do this on purpose i would probably minify the you can read all this if you want to minify css and javascript files you don't really need to know what this does for now i understand the risk i would just do that uh it decreases file side makes the page load faster it looks like a bunch of these browser these are all like enabled or whatnot you can actually hook this up your cdn we'll do that in a second um i really this is too much this is way too much in my opinion this is why i use wp rocket it's a lot simpler but in general right out of the box just installing this plug-in is going to do great things for your site speed it'll help it might cause some other issues like i said with some page builders but hopefully you should be able to just come back to your dashboard and empty the cache no matter what cache plugin you use they will all have a button that says empty cache mpl caches try that out that's number two we already got our images compressed and compressed future images upon upload we have a caching plugin installed that'll uh help us out there and the last thing would be to sign up for a free cloudflare account i'm not going to go through it in this video please come to the blogger use slack channel if you encounter any issues they should walk you through this entire process step by step it's pretty easy except for the fact that you have to modify one file in your backend settings wherever you host whether it's bluehost or siteground or namecheap or godaddy or something else you'll have to log in to your cpanel account and update one little thing just one little thing they should walk you through this entire process uh in the free version too you just get started today enter in your email choose a password click sign up it'll walk you through step by step how to set up the cdn again like i said you'll just have to choose uh like change like one little thing cloud player might even do it automatically for you now i don't know it's been uh a year or two since i've gone through the process no it hasn't it's been six months i did it relatively recently um it's pretty easy if you have any questions please email pete do you even blog or better yet come to the slack channel and get some help but it's it's fairly easy they'll walk you through step by step once those things are done you are 95 of the way to having a mobile friendly and speedy site get a good theme run it through the mobile friendly test grab a compression plug-in or otherwise compress your images upon upload using something like compressor.io we'll talk about that in a later video i use shortpixel i recommend it i use wp rocket for my cash plugins wp rocket um you can use w3 total cash like we did here or if you want to splurge a little bit this one's a lot better and a lot easier to use wp rocket and then set up a free cloudflare cdn account they'll walk you through it step by step and you're done that's it you have to have this stuff for google google needs your website to be super speedy and mobile friendly so do those three things that's 95 yes you can do a whole lot of other things you can limit the number of plugins that you have activated by the way if you have some that you know i don't really use this all that much anymore delete it or deactivate it at the very least like the fewer plugins you have the speedier your website is now everybody uses some plugins you don't have to have like five you could have like 10 or 15 or whatnot but in general the more plugins you have the more likely it is to take up space on your website so uh let's leave it at that for now again this is like a 80 20 sort of analysis on site speed there are many more details if you know anything about site optimization you probably realize that already but for now for most beginners you can do this in just an hour or two like installing those three things image compression caching plug-in a cdn and you'll be 95 of the way there you can move on to other things tweet let's go after you have a website that is mobile friendly and nice and speedy one more thing you need to do before you start producing content or as you produce content is make sure that google knows what your site is about let me give you an example first of all i pulled up this awesome picture of i just googled google spider because i thought it was funny they call it a spider but it's really just some crazy technology uh that comes into your website and looks around that's how you get pages indexed in google meaning they show up google knows they exist to begin with is by allowing this google spiderbot to crawl your site quote unquote it really just means google looks at all the website files all the blog posts all the pages on your site all the images everything the urls and they're like what is this site about and you tell google this stuff without even knowing it when you produce a blog post in wordpress the title of the blog post is an h1 tag what does that mean it means a header one that helps tell google what the site is about you can actually use yoast seo a free wordpress plugin to specifically change your meta title and your meta description for each blog post right maybe you know we'll go through the yoast a little bit to tell google what your site is about but even more broadly you need to tell google what your entire site is about not just each individual blog post this is actually a great image right here i didn't do this somebody else did apologies anonymous marketing homepage categories subcategories you can see this like little hierarchical uh structure here i have created another little template that you are welcome to steal and use to basically do the same thing so here's what we're gonna go through right now i'm gonna show you a few ways you can tell google what your site is about okay oh by the way a quick example why does this matter let's say i wanted to rank for student loan refinancing keywords in google those are highly lucrative uh student loan refinancing companies are highly lucrative right but i have a travel blog in fact i have over 100 posts on my travel blog all about travel hacking and traveling in europe and south america and you know et cetera et cetera et cetera right a hundred blog posts on travel zero on student loans debt personal finance right all that great stuff how likely do you think google is to see that one blog post i'm trying to rank for student loan keywords on my travel site oh which by the way is called like travelhackingforbeginners.com that's the name of the site how likely are they to look at that one post out of my 101 blog post now 100 put your travel and rank me for student loan keywords very low it doesn't matter it's the best post on student loan refi on the entire internet it doesn't matter google's looking at my site like this is a travel blog bro like why would i rank you for this other topic this other niche right uh now if i had two or three more posts on student loan stuff that i produced over the next month and then another 20 over the next year google would start to see that as like oh wow this would be really confusing by the way travel and student loan debt but in general they would see like oh this person this blog is talking way more about student loan debt they have 25 student loan debt posts now maybe that's what their site is about i will try and rank them higher in google search results so how do you do this for beginners there's uh well just really one big thing and that would be your categories if you actually go to google and typed in seo category pages who ranks number one that would be me i have written an entire post about this you're welcome to go read it but i'm gonna sum it up for you right now as well you can actually just follow this so in three words or less what is your site about what's your niche travel personal finance parenting food recipes keto diet blogging digital marketing facebook ads what is your website about and three words or less it's an example i'm just gonna do personal finance again you can steal this i'll provide you a link to it below okay i have a personal finance blog what are my sub topics what are my categories my big broad categories that every single post on my entire site are going to fall into okay they need to be named this is lesson number one they need to be named such that google knows what they are let's say you have a category name on your website literally mean categories like if you go to your dashboard you can see these i'm actually going to close that right here uh go to my dashboard right here you hover over posts and you can change your categories categories you can add new ones right here you can edit the description and the name both of which google see by the way you see i've already created some test categories just in a previous video uh you can name them right here now what if i had one called featured what does that tell google exactly featured what does that mean featured what i don't know what if you have a category named best of what does that mean best stuff what about roundup lots of people do roundup blog posts and you have a category named roundup what does that mean it doesn't mean anything it doesn't tell google at all what your site is about i suggest and lots of other seos suggest by the way not just me that you name your categories on your blog that cover seriously like all blog posts you're ever going to write like they should all fall into some of these categories these big broad categories name them specifically so that google recognizes what your site is about again i shall give you one more example from my own before we go through this if you go to my website even blog.com you hover over the word blog look what happens look at that there are my categories seo blog traffic blogging tools blog monetization email list building blogging for beginners technical blog tutorials and monthly blog income report those are pretty descriptive not just for google but also for my users right roundup i don't know what that means no one knows what that means featured no one really knows what that means either maybe it means the most popular maybe me is the most widely read i don't know name your categories such that they'll help google and help your users find more content that they're interested in name your categories so let's go through it right now as an example in these yellow slots right here i'm going to name my categories you should always have roughly less than 10.

you just should you should not have any more than 10 maybe 12 or 15 broad categories that's too much that's too broad right even lifestyle bloggers like if you go to the savvy couple kellen's lifestyle blog friend of mine look right here he has one two three four five and he has a shop over here like a search thing but like five big broad categories and you'll notice we're about to cover this too he has sub categories as well cool but he only has like five roughly big save money make money manage money lifestyle again i don't really know if i agree with this one kellen this one's a little rough but i think he has to do that because he talks about blogging and money and some other stuff in here this one's a little tough because he is a lifestyle blogger but in general five big broad categories i love that so i talk about personal finance i'm gonna talk about budgeting i'm gonna talk about uh student loans or even student loan debt i'm going to talk about what uh investing i'm going to talk about mortgages i'm going to talk about i don't know just create one more frugality right i'm just gonna leave it at that for now that's what i got those are my big five categories i'm gonna go into my website literally this is like you should do this and add these i'm gonna add budgeting and then i am going to put description uh this category talks about all things budgeting which will help you save money and have more money at the end of every single month includes budgeting uh spreadsheets to help track where your money how to misspell your your money is going and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah right i'm gonna include some keywords you notice i got budgeting spreadsheets i might do budgeting templates budgeting ideas zero-based budgeting i might talk about a few more budgeting things in descript this description and i'm gonna click add new category boom now i have a category it's like literally peatmanperson.com budgeting is where you can find that i believe yeah the slug budgeting you can edit that if you want uh then a description now i'm telling google i talk about budgeting on this website that's one of my big categories i would do the same here for student loans investing mortgages for reality cool all right uh what if i have more p what if i want to do more go for it add them in here what if i have sub sub categories good you should remember the google spider picture this right you can have some sub categories too kellen had uh some of these over here right here yeah pretty much those right household recipes health and wellness relationships travel he's a lifestyle blogger so he covers a lot on this blog but in general what i might do is budgeting okay now i can have budgeting spread sheets budgeting strategy um i don't know what else i would have here budgeting apps that's a great one budgeting apps student loans i might have debts pay down strategies i might have student student loan refinance reviews i might have gosh what else is there i don't know forgiveness examples or might have um a few more you can do more than three again if you use this template you can insert some rows as needed you can totally do more than three uh student debt success stories maybe okay now go to investing um how to use index funds um a beginner uh investing for beginners investing for beginners you see what i'm doing i'm just coming up with a my big broad topic less than 10 big broad categories of which i'm literally going to create here in my wordpress dashboard and then a few subcategories this is creating a structure these google spider bots will come along and see and realize what your site is about why is this important because if you want to rank in google for anything that you talk about any of this stuff it helps it's not going to be a make or break sort of thing but it helps tell google what your site is about you got it i will provide the link to this below you can come in and do this stuff by the way you can add these as subcategories as well in this i can add a budgeting apps let's do that budgeting apps slug will be budgeting apps parent category i'll choose budgeting so it'll be a sub sub category right uh a review and testing of different budgeting apps okay add new category it's gonna show up in here budgeting apps this little line means it's a parent category of budgeting and now i'm good to go right right so one last thing how do i actually tell google these things they will pick up on it eventually even if you did nothing one way well actually it's pretty mandatory actually now that i think about it you need to connect it to google search console google search console it's completely free it's really easy to use you'll go to this website right here google search console you'll click start or start now or whatever when i log in you're gonna see stuff because i already have a search console account if you don't have any of this yet you'll have to answer some questions you have to put in your google email you'll have to connect it you'll put in your url of your property quote unquote right that's what these are called you'll add a new property you'll put in your url it'll ask you some questions and then basically you'll hit go now there are a few different ways to actually connect your blog your wordpress blog to google search console you can do it manually or you can just use the yoast seo plugin which most people use in general like a lot of people use this plugin you can actually go to seo you can go to search console right here i already have mine hooked up probably actually i don't even know if i do uh you can allow yoast seo to fetch your google search console information uh and hook it up that's awesome right you just literally go through this get google authorization code it'll bring up this thing you'll log into your account it'll give you a code to copy and paste you come back here you copy you paste it in here you hit authenticate you're pretty much done this little article right here will provide you way more information if you need it how to add your website to google search console why should i even tell you in this video step by step right here again it's really easy though you click this button once you create a search console account in general you hit authenticate you're done okay it's going to connect it's going to allow google to crawl your website much better and it's going to start looking at this stuff and it's going to know what your website is about that's it i actually had to come back and shoot this video because i i i thought it might need its own explanation so there are very broadly speaking two different types of content you can produce for seo one type would be just like kind of normal seo keywords based on keyword research and competitive research which we're talking about in the next video but it's just kind of like normal everyday blogging maybe the keywords you target are anywhere from like maybe two words but more likely like three to six it's like not super long tail because that's pretty much dead but just like kind of in the middle and they're just like the blog post that you would normally create i don't know what else to say that's what i mean the other type of post remember there are two the other one is called pillar post or cornerstone both of these things these are generally speaking supposed to be your bigger post your better post the post you want your blog to be known for and you can actually specify i'll show you in just a second uh in yoast which so if you go to google and you just type in cornerstone content you'll see this essentially right one big post and then all these other ones around the side here this is your pillar post your your cornerstone content right there uh basically this is targeting the bigger that's all i can really say if you copy your competitors categories it's a tactic i teach just to kind of get a general feel of what other people are blogging about in your niche so you're in finance and you came up with like budgeting investing earning more uh loan repayment i don't know you came up with like five to ten categories those could be some of your big pillar posts targeting those big keywords right they're gonna be difficult to rank for but you spend a lot of time and energy creating amazing content post trying to promote it as much as humanly possible trying to get backlinks etc you can only do like a few of these a year maybe like between three and ten a year like these are not like you produce these every single week right these other ones however are much smaller not as good but they're just like focusing on the little bullet points that would be in this big article so this big article is 10 000 words and it covers like 20 bullet points under topic like the a to z guide to investing like it covers all sorts of dividend stocks it covers real estate investing it covers like early stage startups it covers everything in investing these posts would be like the bullet points to that post so you might have a post on early stage investing you might have a post on friends you might have a post on retirement accounts you might have a post on blah blah all of that falls under the category of investing which is your big pillar post and these lines right here on this page i drew are actually links like you are linking to this cornerstone that helps tell google this is cornerstone content in fact let me switch right now uh so you can see right here in yoast again this is yoast premium if you don't have your premium you might not see this but the point is the same it's actually not telling you can actually identify hey this is a cornerstone post for me blogging tools i want to rank in google for blogging tools although it's not that big of a keyword but i just do i marked it as cornerstone content and now when i edit other pieces it'll actually show up at linking suggestions you need a link to this one and you can see right here my how to start a blog post is another piece of cornerstone content i have and it said consider linking to this and it said first and then on these other suggestions down here but it recommends the cornerstone pieces first and again you don't have to have yours to really use this but just going back to this idea that there's two types of posts one would be the big monstrous i put a lot of time and energy into these posts they target bigger keywords it's just it needs to be like the best thing i produce period a month working on this one blog post that sort of thing versus all the other everyday blog posts that will follow up underneath that like they're related but they're like a little bit longer tail keywords you're targeting not quite as few monthly searches it might be just like one bullet point post you could make a whole separate post that sort of thing so i just want you to understand that concept as we go forward and start talking about keyword research and all that great stuff i just wanted you to understand what cornerstone content is hello everybody before you watch the next video on keyword research i have to give you one or two quick updates number one is that this tool which i'll show you in the next video is no longer free it's paid oh no they had a free tool and they took it away for paid don't worry they made it paid for a very specific reason by the way and that is they were getting spammed with bots and the only other option would have been to shut it down so they're charging you for credits now one keyword equals one credit we're going to use this tool to see a bunch of keywords and a search volume and stuff like that and for each keyword it uses up one credit they are extremely affordable ten dollars i just paid for it by the way i got 100 000 credits for 10 bucks and they even say down here there's no monthly plans but if it was it would roughly equate to less than two dollars a month that is very affordable for a tool like this and if you only use it like sparingly like in bulk like trying to generate a bunch of keywords it's gonna last you even longer so don't freak out that is now a paid plan i would suggest forking over ten dollars that'll last you probably years i would imagine is unless you're seriously using this like all the time which i don't think you probably will be it's gonna last you a really long time and ten bucks that's super cheap i just want to share it let me do one example search here again i just paid ten dollars for keywords everywhere i have 100 000 credits right here i'm gonna go to google solve and then youtube and see how many credits are used up so first of all i'm going to put in personal finance okay you see how this keyword information like populated here a bunch of stuff in there a bunch of stuff in here i can add all these keywords we'll go over a little bit of this in the next lesson but i just wanted to show you okay that used up uh 50 something credits right there that's a that's a pretty good bit but that's a lot of stuff i'm getting right here google also going to be the same thing it's going to use up a fair amount of credits i'm going to type in personal finance it's going to use one credit for this and then this widget over here that keywords everywhere populates is also going to use up the credits for these and it'll actually prompt you this is so helpful this is by the way you want to make sure to turn this off when you're not using it so you don't accidentally use up credits if you're googling something but luckily they thought about this and this automatically uses up just one keyword just one when i search for something right here you see it only used up one keyword and it prompts me load metrics uses 36 credits load metrics uses eight credits i'm just go ahead and use those boom i used up eight credits not a big deal you can see how these might actually last a pretty good while last a long while and i love love love that they were honestly kind enough to not do it on autopilot and just ask you if you want to load metrics that's thank you thank you keywords everywhere i love you guys so one more thing i'll say is that when you go to like youtube and search in something here it only uses up one as well personal finance i'm gonna hit search right here it just used up that one and that is it i just wanna let you know it's paid not free but it's so cheap and affordable this is one of those tools it's not the be all end-all this search volume is not super accurate this isn't precisely the amount of people that are searching for these keywords but it's just a handy tool for estimating and trying to build out a topic strategy which we'll talk about in the next video i would recommend splurging the 10 bucks there you go after this next lesson a couple lessons from now i'm also going to throw in a little bit short video on how you could best use a seven dollar trial to href so you get seven days for seven dollars and that could actually be enough to last you in a year or six months or three months seven bucks i'm going to show you how i would best utilize that few videos after the next video which is on keyword research enjoy okay everybody it's time to go through keyword research finding keywords that then you can turn into blog post target different search phrases search queries and google we call those keywords right i'm gonna go through two things on this video uh two methods really like an easy way and a hard way or actually not a hard way a freeway and a cheap way very yes you can do the seven day uh it's not a free trial seven day seven dollar trial and you can have more than enough keywords to last you for a year or two probably seriously for seven bucks uh we're gonna go through those i'm gonna start with this free version now i want to tell you right off the bat keywords don't matter quite as much as you think yes they're still important but only to the extent that you kind of know what you want to be ranking for generally speaking uh we'll talk about this later when we talk about on-page seo but keyword stuff long tail keywords long tail keywords meaning like four five plus words like how to start a blog for single moms if you went to google and up with stuff that just says how to start a blog for example so again we're not going to worry about long tail stuff we're going to we're going to find these medium keywords because that's what's most important for actually beginners and advanced bloggers alike medium to larger keywords with your cornerstone content we'll talk about that in just a second that's the strategy that we're going for here not like tons and millions of articles on like these long tail searches we don't care about that anymore medium keywords two five words are sort of the bigger ones and then maybe like three to six would be like some of the longer tail keywords right so let's go through the cccap method copy your competitors categories if you don't have them already if you already have your categories set up your general topics you can ignore that and then use google solve keywords anywhere and answer the public this is a deadly free combination of stuff right here we'll go through a reps in a minute but um oh i forgot uh keywords everywhere wait i saw it keywords everywhere so this is a free freeze and beer chrome extension looks like it also has a firefox extension that's pretty cool didn't know that who uses firefox not me so what you do is install this they'll email you an api key that you'll copy to the settings right here i'm gonna click this keywords everywhere i have it on you can also turn it off uh i'll probably turn it off whenever you're not using it of course you'll enter in your api key that they email you in the settings and then you're good to go whenever you search google or go to answerthepub.com which we'll also take a look at it will show you search volume how cool is that how cool is that now i'll tell you right off the bat this is not completely accurate nor is any other tool that shows you search volume keyword google first of all i'm not going to recommend this in this video yes it is free to use still i believe but i'm just not going to recommend this you can see this right here this is keywords anywhere i search that it says 246 000 a month search for keyword planner that may or may not be accurate looking for here's like a general idea so let's go back to my strategy copy your competitors keywords uh if you haven't done this already you can i want to just open like a new spreadsheet here uh new spreadsheet let's do parenting uh as an example here right parenting up in here i'm gonna go i have keywords installed keywords anywhere everywhere excuse me not anywhere uh installed already so parenting what i'm going to do again i'm going to pretend that i already have some subtopics but you could go google your competitors their categories and their subcategories and trying to come up with like your own let's say like um toys or uh fun activities for parenting um let's talk about mom self care i'm just kind of making this up uh discipline discipline guides and i don't know family vacations i'm just making this up uh okay so i just made those up on the spot let's say i kind of already had that what i do first is go to favorite by far um even better than like doing google search which we'll do in just a second you'll go here it's free for a limited number of searches a day it's like three or four searches you could do a day all you need is one really uh data i don't really like these visualizations like what is this i don't exactly know what that is i click over to data and look at all this look at all these blog posts these are just nothing but blog posts for the most part can parenting be easy question mark that could be a blog post now keywords everywhere barely see them they're kind of like small here um it shows their search volume now it's very very very not accurate but you can get a general idea like a bunch of these just say zero month it's probably because it doesn't even have any data recorded yet if i go down here this okay it highlighted this one 4400 a month parenting forums so that could be a blog post that's a good keyword to target right there um the top 10 parenting forums you need to be a part of in 2019 that's a good blog post parenting is 1800 searches per month roughly that's pretty cool and you can also see some other ones like 260 a month uh 170 you can also uh change your settings and keywords anywhere by the way to only highlight different amounts like i have it set to a thousand plus i think but you can do 500 plus and then it would highlight maybe some of these other ones parenting is hard quotes parenting canada magazine um parenting classes near me that one's gonna be a little bit tough that's not necessarily like a blogging keyword parenting toddlers of course the ultimate guide to parenting toddlers google that's you know a pretty decent amount of searches parenting with love and logic that must be like the name of a book or something parenting with depression what i would do if i were serious about this i would just start copying and pasting what i think i would want to write about and then maybe i would put the uh searches per month in here keywords and then searches per month or something like that and let's come back over here let's just grab one parenting with anxiety i don't know if i copied too much there oops i did um paste okay well whatever you get the point parenting with anxiety and that has like 1300 a month right you can also show quote unquote competition it's been in 1300 i don't know why this is like crazy formatting here but in general i would do this for a bunch and right there on that like one page you saw a ton of different stuff a ton of different stuff uh it's not all going to be high search but there's a lot of that comparisons we'll check this out too data parenting order i don't know what that means like the 80s these are some funny stuff there's lots of like blog post ideas sprinkled in here parenting and education parenting and mental health parenting in social media parenting advice parenting apps parenting articles like these are all like great subcategories for my blog perhaps that's roughly 2k a month right there so paste that in there 2k uh the best parenting apps right parenting books parenting blogs uh okay well that's cool what if i wanted to go to um parenting discipline i just want to do that let's go use google this time discipline guides i don't have to hit enter i can just like see that stuff come up um all right let's go back this is interesting discipline this one definition discipline team let's just type this in 720 a month discipline parenting let's just do this and then see let's go down here does it show it does show search volume positive discipline that might be an interesting keyword right there uh parenting styles 33 000 styles why don't we just do that one that one sounds good parenting styles the ultimate guide to parenting styles ultimate guide ultimate guide ultimate guide that was like 31k a month or something like that that's pretty crazy right and keywords everywhere related keywords parenting styles said it right there positive discipline people also search for abusive parenting signs 1300 a month and some other nice little keywords right here now again and by the way you can also export this to csv that's super handy um these are not like that's not what matters what matters is more people search for parenting styles than do positive discipline than do child discipline methods then it's like the ranking right just the relative volume of searches just really really basic stuff don't count on it as a goal just in general parenting 49 000 a month to search for parenting magazine parenting tips to parenting tips uh you can literally just keep searching in google for stuff like this using keywords everywhere and get really good ideas good parenting quotes qualities of good parents a thousand searches a month like a gold mine right here um one more thing and then we'll move to a refs first of all you can't type in solve.com like this i don't know why it doesn't go to the correct address what i recommend is going to google and searching for solve with two o's and then click on this i don't know exactly why but solve is the same thing as uh kind of like google suggestions these right here that pop up you can actually see a lot more of them at once so if i typed in parenting and parenting styles classes quotes it shows you the rough volume per month uh parenting books parenting memes parenting with love and logic um some other stuff down here by the way these are showing results from looks like youtube bing who but these keywords everywhere are i'm pretty sure just google related this isn't showing how many people search on yahoo a month for parenting styles you can see it's the same exact number right there so this is my overall recommendation for you to do keyword categories down by either the methods we've already talked about or go copy your competitors categories and like see which one's best fit like what you want to write about and all the posts you're going to do like see what categories those fall under five to ten maybe and then if you want to make like two or three if you have them for each of those and usually those subcategories or maybe even the categories themselves will be your cornerstone pieces the blog post that you can do i don't know like less than 10 of a year maybe like four or five a year i don't know like the bigger post the more thorough the more comprehensive the more unique as in you you're putting your own twist spending a lot of time and effort on those articles to target those bigger keywords oftentimes those end up being your subcategories or your categories pretty cool you can literally just use this approach open up answer the public solve google just start typing away use keywords everywhere to get a rough estimate of how many searches are going on and that's it that is like the best free thing i could ever imagine right conclude by using uh a-refs okay you can sign up i said free trial it's actually a seven dollar trial it cost seven dollars they just didn't want a free trial uh and you can knock this out in bulk it costs a hundred dollars a month roughly um actually i don't but it's roughly 100 bucks but you do not need to actually do that you can start a seven-day trial and as long as you know what you're going to be doing you can get a year's worth of keywords out of seven days you can do it in an hour really but uh in general is you're gonna grab five to ten of your competitors quote unquote right you're gonna see best parenting blogs or if you don't know who your competitors are you're gonna open up a bunch of these like you can see i've already clicked here 25 must follow parenting blocks and i would just run them through your arrefs trial let me show you how to do that i'm going to log in here and it's going to pull up some stuff might go to site explorer you're going to enter in your competitors and you're going to see what they're ranking for straight up you'll be able to see their top pages and all the keywords they rank for there and by the way their search volume when you see keywords and a-wraps is generally probably a lot better than keywords everywhere but it's still estimate just don't think of it as a gold standard so what i would do i'll come over here just open up toddlerapproved.com now some of these are not going to be like seoed so to speak like these websites don't necessarily rank for you're going to have to find some that do you're going to have to probably find uh 10 to 20 different quote unquote competitor blogs or similar blogs in your niche to find like three or four that are like really seo like for example they have a really high dollar approved it's probably an old website but they only get like 5 000 views a month from search which is not a lot for something of this domain uh what we can do is look at their keywords from here their top pages both of those reports where you can find keywords or if it's like ah they don't really get a whole lot of keywords like 18k is not a lot of keywords for a site this large so i might go to competing domains and see if i can find some of their competitors who have a lot just wait for it to load here okay busytoddler.com teaching two and three-year-olds.com etc right so keywords unique to competitors some of these have red ted art i'm not sure what that is happy hooligans this 4 000 keywords so maybe we do this one now click this little drop down box so they got like 167 000 backlinks 122 organic traffic a month so let's go check them out you can just do this i'm like you see i only got like one parenting blog and now i'm like already onto like the next one just using a-refs so let's say i wanted to target this one this one has like a really high domain rating as well like literally 69 um organic traffic roughly 122 000 a month that's great or that's much better than the other one at least so here's what i do i don't really care about any of this other stuff other than organic keywords and top pages let's start with organic keywords so this shows the largest keywords that they get traffic for you can see it's sorted by traffic right now you this should be pretty self-explanatory how to sort via keyword volume this is keyword difficulty it's just a little arbitrary but it gives you a difficult it might be to rank in the top 10 of google for this search term and then how much traffic they're likely getting just from this keyword their position and what url it is so this url from happy hooligans three ingredients delicious vanilla cream sounds pretty good right now uh they are number one in google and they get roughly 1900 uh views clicks traffic from this keyword keyword difficulty is 16.

That's not too bad and people are roughly searching for it like 7000 google cool that's what that means now here's the cool part here's all of what they rank for you can see a bunch of these like this post is repeating uh often right snow comb how to make snow cream snow cream snow cream snow ice cream snow cream rest if you wanted you could go to top pages i'm going to open up a new tab because we're going to come back here shut these down okay and now this is not going to show you the keywords this is going to show you their top pages this one page that we just saw snow ice cream 1400 different keywords 1450. you can actually click this and see them they're the larger ones here's their position here's their volume snow cream right and the keyword difficulty these are all like right in the same uh little arena right here and the traffic that they get roughly right close that up cool they get 8 000 views a month just from that one post and google that's the top keyword you can see right there so let's go back to the other post here's what i would do if i were you i would find four or five blogs to get traffic and let's say you don't care anything about snow ice cream it doesn't matter they have some other stuff that they rank for down here what i might do is this sort or filter rather filter sort or filter by the way you can just export this if you want just and then keep it for after your trial ends you can come back and like search for keywords you could sort based on keyword difficulty uh you can search based on volume i mean sort based on volume et cetera what i might do though is filter by traffic volume let's say i want a minimum of 500 searches a month else i don't even want to like consider it it's not worth it to me so i would just filter a minimum of 500 i'll say i sorted by keyword difficulty so this is all the keyword difficulty zeros that's a thousand a month what is this popsicle stick that's a keyword difficulty of zero i'm not sure that's correct 8400 that seems crazy to me uh but what you could do is put on a max keyword difficulty of like 30.

there we go and so now words that this blog ranks for that has more than 500 searches a month less than 30 keyword difficulty and let's just uh sort by volume right now slime recipe my apron tomato soup food stuff i'm talking about parenting i don't know why i'm getting mostly food stuff right here so i might move on to a different blog quite frankly um let's go to parenting tips we're going to be how about this one aha parenting they're ranking on the first page of for parenting to parenting tools no parenting tips and so this might actually be a great domain i'm just going to copy this aha parenting might be a great domain to search for it here i'm just going to paste it in i'm going to click search we're going to see what happens take a second cool so organic keywords they are okay i was wondering like wait what's wrong i'm gonna sort by traffic right here sort by traffic actually i guess we should check out their overview kind of what they got going on right like how much shirts you're getting organic traffic referring domains 42k i mean that's not that great that's not really what i was hoping for hoping for one of these parenting blogs is like really into different stuff so parenting strong-willed child this is more the keywords that i would target as a parenting blog right so here's what i'd probably do i'd probably just export this as is quite frankly just so i have everything you can always come back and sort via excel or numbers or google sheets if you want to but you can also do it right here 500 keyword difficulty of see parent positive parenting's keyword difficulty of 45 that's actually a lot stronger or a lot harder rather let's do like 35 max and then i'll start writing quite frankly i might go by the traffic strong-willed child i'd write that down how to get kids to learn i'd write that down you don't have to write it down you can also just export and put it in a spreadsheet if you want to or something like that and yeah that's what i would do i then go to competing domain and i would get another one and another one and another one i would literally export as many of these reports as i possibly could into a csv file i think it's probably what you'll download it as and then i would save it for later you can that's more than enough keyword for ever probably actually but at least several several months if not a year right so look at some of these raisingchildren.net.eu mother.li that looks like a big one focus on the family i think i've heard of that mother.lee this is going a little bit long i apologize but i thought it might be cool to show you some of these so 350 000 okay let's just look at them this looks good domain stop content organic keywords um yeah just go to organic keywords this is motherly uh all right i don't androgynous names gender neutral names top baby names american names uh they've got a lot of these uh best baby swing um some good parenting stuff there so i'd probably do the same thing let's just do a thousand and then keyword difficulty it's like narrow down even more like 20 or like 15 max of 15.

isn't that cool i think that's pretty cool uh lots of keywords i'm going to leave at that for this video any more than that would be i think quote-unquote advanced i think this is more than enough for people to start you can do this for seven bucks or you could use keywords anywhere or everywhere excuse me keywords everywhere as well as google and answer the public and solve you just get a plethora of ideas of stuff you want to write about and really rough estimates of how much search is going on every month like name berry i don't know exactly what that is that must be a brand thing best baby swing 4 700 a month and that's like nothing by the way if you compare this like digital marketing keywords like how to start a blog that difficulty is like 89 or 79 or something like it's just these are a lot easier than i would have thought actually now that i'm looking at these um so that's it and hit me up with slack if you have any questions all right in this video we're going to walk through how you can best utilize ahrefs a seven day free trial it costs seven dollars a seven day seven dollar trial so when you first go to ahrefs and you sign up oops and go here that's not what you'll see you'll see this you'll make sure to choose the standard plan if you're going to cancel at the end of seven days anyways you're not going to do the monthly thing just be sure to choose standard so you can get all the tools you put in your email address you sign up you pay the seven dollars and the first thing you're going to be prompted to do is set up your site but before we even go through that before we even go through that i want you to organize a few of your competitors first what i really mean by competitors is people in your niche who also blog about your topic who might be ranking in google fairly well so not necessarily your direct competitors but people whose keywords you can steal or borrow or you can analyze in ahrefs so what i'm going to do really quick i'm going to walk through the whole process i'm just going to go to google i'm going to do this for personal finance brands just because i'm just going to type in personal finance and let's see who's coming up here nerd wallets cnbc obviously forbes and stuff like that the balance simple dollar i'm going to open these up personal fans the balance i just knew these off the top of my head but you could really open up and try to figure out which ones are more blogs which ones might be ranking for different things another one i would suggest is blah blah blah blogs or there we go like that you can see it brings up a few here the 25 best personal finance blogs to read let's just open up one of these and you can write out as many competitors as you want i would choose about 10 only because not all of them are going to be doing massive seo and it's not going to yield a lot of data but some clearly will be doing seo and you'll probably end up with like three to five of those three to five is really all you need to get started and get your seven dollars worth easily easily simple dollar we already opened mr monday mustache will open that one jd roth it get rich slowly budgets are sexy physicians on fire good financial sense we'll see what these ranking for a few of these esi money the money mix financial samurai making sense of sense michelle schroeder your money geek frugal rules money crashers money crashers i think does a lot of seo if i remember correctly i'm just opening up random stuff here there we go that's more than enough i'll open up one more just because they're friends of mine okay so i got like ten ish five seven something like that competitors now what do i do here's the checklist get those first then go set up your seven day trial the first thing you're going to be prompted to do is set up your site and it's going to look a lot like this create a project create a site i'm not sure what it'll say exactly i think it'll look like this so so the you'll just put in your site quite frankly make sure to choose http and https uh it'll oh ahrefsbot is already doing my stuff look at that i'm just gonna you write in a project name i'm just gonna call it online impact that looks really good um everything looks good it did a little check just to make sure the domain's up and running and then i'm going to hit continue verify ownership prove that your website is crawling much faster in sight audits you may skip this step i'd suggest skipping this step unless you really know what you're doing with site audit stuff it's going to take a long time to go through this if you have a lot of time in your one week by all means go read about that on the hrs blog i'm not going to talk about it here because it takes a massive amount of time and yeah you can just fix broken links on your site keep your structure kind of clean and you'll probably be okay for the most part but you could do this i'm just going to hit continue there we go schedule site audits again i would probably not do this right now um you're welcome to actually if it's free you might as well i would not worry about doing the weekly stuff and setting the frequency or whatever i would just do continue run first crawl now continue so i'm actually just going to do that and now you get to the the two favorite tabs competitors and rank tracking so rank tracking is really just if you already have content or you're going to be producing content in the seven days which doesn't seem likely you already have content that you want to be ranking for keywords for instance i already know that i want to be ranking for um how to monetize a blog how to start a blog elementor tutorial these are just a few that i have seo category pages it's a different stuff that i already have that i know i want to be ranking that's what this is this isn't generating new keywords this is following and tracking the keywords that you already know you should be ranking for or you want to rank for from existing content got that existing content put in those keywords here as many as you can remember this is not super helpful uh for the seven day trial but it could be useful and it's also gonna like yours are gonna pull more than mine online impact doesn't do seo so hopefully you'll see some keywords your website ranks for in here and you'll just like hit the plus sign to add them to your little list to track that's all so go here click i don't even know what this stuff is click all the keywords you kind of want to track and then hit continue and it's also going to pull up your competitors now this is where we get kind of fun here you can see again this is a bad example because online impact doesn't do seo but hopefully you will see a bunch of other blogs in your niche here and you'll just like click in these plus signs i don't really know this is like silly right here i'll just put those in add competitor this is where i go like i'd go back and choose their home page the simple dollar let's add that one in i'm like get rid of these oh nerd wallets again i'm just going to do the home page i'm going to try and do the homepage add project delete that and let's do like two more nerd wallet let's do mr money mustache and let's do like let's do well let's just put it in it doesn't matter it's quick right money crashers i know those guys uh okay so we got five oh that's all it lets you do for now okay cool i'm gonna hit finish all right so moving down the checklist now you have your site set up you're going to see a few different things forgive me for all this other stuff online impact come in here you can go into your dashboard and this is what you shall see pretty cool right you're up you're running now what do i do how do i get the juicy keywords and seo strategy now okay two or three things this is really it right here i want you to find the low hanging fruit for seo first which is going to be analyzing your current pages and then i want you to start using site explorer for all those competitor domains that you did and maybe at the very end i'll do another little thing on finding backlink opportunities but it's more advanced and it's gonna require outreach anyways and i wouldn't suggest doing it in your week trial but the first thing you do is go look at your site's pages top pages and see which ones are ranking uh not rank one but like somewhere up there so actually for this exercise just let me go to do you even blog since there's actually data there forgive me so do you win blog i'll come in here and i'm gonna go to top pages you'll see over here on the left side top pages let me move my image out of the way over here cool top pages cool so what are we looking at here these are pages of mine that are currently ranking in google super fancy fancy and i want to find a low hanging fruit as in where am i ranking on these posts what's the search volume could i improve it easily let me give you an example this post right let's just find another one right here okay simple pin media that is my friend kate's company this would not be a good keyword for me to target because that's her company it's not useful for me but in general pretend this was something useful i'm rank 11 in google that's top of page two ish and there are 800 searches a month i could go back to this one post optimize it a little bit for this keyword that is showing right here this is the keywords this is my post and i would try and get that on rank one okay what about this tim ferriss blog i'm also on the top of page 2.

there are 3 400 searches a month could i go back and update this old post to try and make it rank higher could i generate some backlinks and reach out to some friends of mine in my niche or try and get a media mention or something with this post to try and build that up that's low hanging fruit this is already ranking it's just not on page one let me show you one more tip trying to find your low hanging fruit here you can use these filters volume let's say i don't want to even mess with any volume that is less than like 300 searches a month so i'm going to put a minimum of 300 searches a month click apply and when i'm searching for my low hanging fruit i don't care about anything in the top three and i don't care about anything on like page four or five of google just like page two of google so i'm gonna put in rank let's go like five rank five and google to rank like 25 that's like page three somewhere in there i'm gonna hit apply and look at this that's pretty cool right this is my low hanging fruit what i would do at this point quite frankly is just click this button right here export and it would come back to it later you don't have to implement everything in this seven day free trial but just getting the data is what you're after so i now have posts of mine that are ranking in google in the middle of page one up to middle of page three with search volumes more than 300 a month minimum right so i would want to go back through these posts and see if i could update them blue rocket seo blog income reports i'm on here fincon 2019.

Most of these are not helpful for my blog because they're other people's brands but in general it could be wordpress gutenberg tutorial again on rank six if i went back and improved this a little bit i could be rank one maybe i don't know who knows low hanging fruit i would click export i would usually just do uh the quick export for all of these things it's going to allow me to download it immediately versus a thousand rows full export for this it's not that much different because there's only 24 rows i hit start export it's going to give me like some notifications up here or quick export was just immediate downloads i'm going to save it it's always going to be a csv file and then hit save boom there's my low hanging fruit pretty cool right let me move my face out of the way there we go okay let me plug my computer in i'll be right back and i'm back that was probably instantaneous for you but i got my computer plugged in so low hanging fruit i have my top pages here and stuff that i might get approved to try and rank quickly what's next the competitors right the competitors a few things you can do here let me do this and what we're doing basically by the way is trying to figure out some of their top pages to get ideas for our own content as well as keywords top pages top keywords and we're going to try and export that stuff so there are a few different things a few different ways you could do this one i'm under site explorer by the way looking at my own stuff i could go to competing domains competing pages and content gap i actually do not suggest using content gap i don't like this feature it's very difficult to sort through the data what it's supposed to do is analyze your blog as well as competitors blogs and show you keywords that they rank for that you do not it doesn't really i mean it works but it's really hard to decipher what i like better is simply plugging in your different competitors in site explorer and then examining their top pages and then keywords to get ideas for your own so let's do that right now you can do that from any page uh in here so let's just go with the balance let's go with the balance the balance the balance.com can we do that there we go the balance and come in here i am going to like copy and paste that in you don't even need to worry about filtering out the https it's going to do that by itself i'm going to click the search thing and click back on overview there we go all right here's the balance they have a 36 million dollars worth of traffic that's insane right now they rank for 4 million keywords it's a big site i don't know if this is exactly what i would do but this is a good example to start so the first thing i would do is go to top pages top pages top pages top pages and i would just look this is where i'm just gonna like maybe i would export some of these maybe not what i would be doing is figuring out okay what are they writing on this is a really bad example because they're they have all sorts of stuff that's not related to personal finance which is what i really typed in but hopefully you can kind of you can take a look at their top keywords the volume of that keyword and kind of where they are ranking another thing you can do this is really cool it shows how many backlinks they have by the way how many different referring domains see there's only one referring domain to this like little fed loan thing right here which is kind of weird that's kind of funny that they're ranking two for a million search volume keyword anyways neither here nor there you can click on the keywords drop down i wouldn't really worry about traffic and value for the most part you can click on this and see all the keywords that this post ranks for and and and it's going to show you keyword difficulty so you can discover keywords right here and we can do it a second i'll show you how to do it in the keywords section the backlinks and or excuse me organic keywords section but you can also see it right down here from the drop down let's do another one maybe not so much okay so jeff rose this is jeff rose i'll type him in here see his top pages again you can also use some of the same filters here by the way it's pretty cool oh here we go good good financial sense ah this is cool so here are jeff's top pages making money quick ways to make money home value how to get free money survey junker buy or lease the car best investments all right i got some personal finance data here um it's pretty cool it's pretty cool i would copy down any topics i might come over here and make like a topics sort of thing i would also probably like put my competitors in here that's what i was originally gonna do before i just started opening them up in new tabs topics i might down might write down like um what were some of the other ones here like max 401k contribution max 41k contribution you can do this a little manually if you want to kind of focus it on topics and we're going to export some keywords doing this as well so this is where i would just go through and get ideas of why or how is jeff getting traffic how is my competitor jeff goodfinancialsense.com getting traffic this is how he's getting traffic these are his top posts right here and if you want to save it for later boom export i would highly recommend doing as many exports as you can you do not have unlimited with a seven day free trial but you have a pretty good amount i would generally always do quick export i don't think you need this full export i don't think you need i don't think and if you need to whittle it down you can use these filters again that's pretty cool right keyword difficulty up to 30.

Let's see what happens type that in [Music] it may not do a whole lot for the top post because these keywords are going to be there's a lot of like low keyword difficulty things right here you can see all the keywords that this post is ranking for i wouldn't really mess with that what you could is filter out traffic if you wanted to only see the top trafficked posts which that's pretty much what this first page is and word and keyword that's pretty cool you can search for only stuff related to um investing only show keywords with oh that's word counts uh here are the keywords you can include any keywords exclude any keywords like i don't care about uh in i don't care about 401k let's see how that works put that in there hopefully it'll like filter out this one right here yep it did i don't want to see anything on investing i don't want to see anything on budgeting that stuff's not useless to me you can filter out keywords that you're not interested in or you could say oh i just really want to see like invest let's say investing just type in investing and see okay so he's got some investing posts here that rank pretty well some good volume i might export this i just export okay there's my investing keywords right there that jeff uses yada yada okay let's move on into let's use a different competitor as well let's go with steve from think save retire plug him in here hit search and instead of looking at his top pages i would recommend doing this for all your competitors by the way that you wrote down just come in here hater's gonna hate uh steve's got some rank thing there but he's not getting any traffic it's because yeah i don't know anyways organic keywords there's another thing you can do here are all of steve's organic keywords now this is in kind of a random order at the moment this is where you absolutely need to do filters so let's say you're a brand new blog you can't rank for these super competitive keywords but you might want to look at some of the the longer tail keywords or something here's what you could do several things actually keyword difficulty is generally where i would start i would do anything under like and this is up to you definitely anything under like 60 or 70 probably for new i'd say new blogs meaning like in the first two years i might even do like 20 and see what comes up 30.

Let's try like 40. keyword difficulty under 40. that's what i'm looking at right here okay so that whittled it down to 10 000 keywords not sure what we were at before we were okay well it's not much let's do like 27 that's right 27 down a little bit okay what about search volume we don't care about these right here that are like uh only a couple hundred searches like let's put in like a minimum of 200 search volume a month let's see if that whittles it down okay that whittled down a lot now i'm down to like 1400 keywords right here that steve is ranking for and let's say like i want to exclude steve because i don't want to see about steve's brand names like i don't care about these keywords dude to do okay that's not too much right there um you can add multiple words or phrases separated by commas let's do that steve adcock i believe that's his last name i don't want to rank for like his name or whatever so i'll like exclude that stuff and uh there you go i also don't want to rank for think save retire so i put that in there think save retire do that um yeah there we go so i got like a bunch of different i don't want a career fu money living on the road corporate america i don't want a job let's say like i just want to see like investing again oh i misspelled that investing i just want to see like his investing keywords you know like i'm not sure what's going on here it's not showing me any oh not a whole lot okay what about budget okay a few ideas here best uncle gifts keyword difficulties like super low on these pretty cool let's do one more and then i'll call this video quits by the way again i would export it export it save it all you can throw it into one big document later if you want to or you can have like lots and lots of csv files or excel files or whatever but i would just export it export and export it during your seven day free trial just to make sure you have access to it later you can filter through this data later by the way you don't have to do this right here you can actually do that in excel if you know how to use filters in excel you could do that there but the point is just to get the data that ahrefs has during your seven day free trial get the data family of five grocery budget blah blah blah blah blah lots of small keywords here let's do one more um the balance the balance balance let's do a dollar sprout i think i plugged them in here really quick just take a look here again i don't want the word the exact word like dollar sprout dollar sprout and i might do keyword difficulty max of 30 and keywords traffic from like 300.

look at all this stuff some random like birthday freebies online jobs for teens some really crazy stuff in here that's interesting but there you go if you just wanted budgeting you could again just type it in there budget see if anything comes up nope invest see if anything comes up best investment apps 10 000 searches a month keyword difficulty 25 that's on the high end of our little spectrum there are eight on google yeah that'd be a pretty difficult keyword or not super difficult but pretty difficult so we can steal that the point of this is to just grab as much data as you can in the seven day time frame that you can use later to filter through and get keyword ideas topic ideas and the main way you're going to do that is by throwing in your competitors sites it's so easy this way i really don't understand why anybody would do it any differently i think this is the way to go to generating just a massive amount of data that you can filter through later you can pick and choose which topics you want to focus on etc but just get the data get the data do searches like this dollar sprouts get rid of investing here there you go investing books they have a lot of stuff there and just do the export i generally just do a thousand rows full exports not possible because of the plan i'm on that's 14 000.

i might do a little bit more filtering if that's the case then i would definitely do like i don't want the huge ones and traffic like i don't want the like 100 things so i'll put like 100 just trying to get the search volume down as much as possible okay now it's only 505. i could totally like export that cool there you go that is pretty much all i got one more advanced tip if you want to one thing you can do is take a look at your competitors top pages and see who is linking back to them backlinks you can analyze backlinks through this tool referring domains referring domains referring domains look at all these right here you can also just go to backlinks up here new referring domains i'll probably just do backlinks what i would do here is probably try and filter again um you could do a bunch of different stuff here you can use one link per domain meaning some of these sites might link to dollar sprout a whole lot i just want to see one of those so click this button or group similar is actually pretty fun like they have a few links here you saw there were three or four populating link type only do follow if you want to you can see their educational backlinks you can see uh just all sorts of different stuff in here word or phrase include you can just kind of see like okay myth versus reality i don't know what this stuff is but you could open these up and maybe reach out to them if need be like could you do that could you if you find any roundup posts in here could you reach out to these people and say hey could you include my blog as well it might be a backlink opportunity like that again this is a little bit more advanced stuff but it could be useful i'm going to do just do follows right here platform i don't think this really matters traffic no i wouldn't do that stuff so you could do roundup you could just choose like uh or best roundup or best and see if anything like pops up um searching and searching and searching yeah we shall see best side hustle ideas best money blogs uh 14 entrepreneurs the 50 best personal finance blog you should read um like maybe you could reach out to some of these things and try and get on them like these seem to be sort of roundup posts like could you find a broken league on this one and you know pitch your own blog in there send them an email backlink opportunities it can be used for this purpose as well that's my point overall i want to sum up get some competitors first you can do some googling or you can just write them in there try and get like at least 10 so you can kind of filter out like okay only five of these actually practice seo and therefore have a lot of keywords and stuff to look at and then i would set up your site like we did at the very top i would find your top pages specifically those on like page two google maybe for like decent search volume that you might go and update make better get a backlink or two two and be on page one low hanging traffic opportunities and then i would do a little bit of competitive research like we have just plugging it into site explorer and glancing at their top pages organic keywords maybe backlinks if you really want to go that route but just exporting the data getting that data try to export a ton of keywords and top pages that's it all right let's talk about what to do keywords you might want to target you got some topics you want to write about etc how do i produce content that'll rank in google it's the question that ages no one has the exact answer because no one knows google's algorithms except for google of course but i'm going to give you basics this is beginner seo 101 but quite frankly it's kind of all you need to know too it's just really hard right two broad things and then we'll get into some basic on-page seo number one would be to satisfy the user intent of we already talked about user intent we already talked about what google wants google wants to give its users what they are looking for so in order to do that with your blog post you have to understand what they are looking for sometimes it's really easy sometimes it's a little bit more difficult we're gonna talk about people and then semi-related do the research please like if you're targeting seo keywords especially if you're trying to be competitive i'm not talking about just normal blogging every day oh i have this idea i kind of want to blog about it that's great if your keywords you need to do research a quick serp check is what i'm going to like to call it search engine results page check like open up some posts and see what those are writing about right we're going to do this first walk through step by step and then we'll get into the on-page stuff for parenting keywords i kind of i like typing in like parenting blogs i already did this once parenting blogs what if i wanted to rank for this what if i wanted to rank for parenting blogs if i have keywords anywhere turned on which i don't turned it on that's um i had to refresh sorry parenting blogs 4 400 people a month search for that that's pretty awesome right that's a great keyword also got lots of these right here it's amazing working funny mom blogs funny parenting blogs uh lots of good stuff there but in general 4 400 a month parenting blogs that is what i want to target okay got it good so i'm gonna do a little bit of research i'm gonna look see here what do these have in common i might even open some of these up right off the bat i can see that there's numbers and almost every one of these the best parenting blogs 60 parenting blogs top 51 parenting blogs 22 mom blogs that will inspire 25 must follow parenting blog a list people that are searching for parenting blogs i'm determining user intent right here by the way are clearly searching for like which parenting blogs to follow and read i need some ideas of parenting blogs to follow so that's what open these up right here i've already done this for some other lectures but i'm going to begin open up these that already opened that i did i open that one twice oops let's go to some of these other ones this one's interesting aha parenting blog that was not a list the truth about parenting blogs every it's still the same user intent it just doesn't have a number in the title um best parenting blogs for 2018 even though it's already 2019 60 best okay i'm just going to browse through here i'm doing my content research i might even open up a new spreadsheet for each little post i'm going to show you my spreadsheet tracker seo seo tracker i have this uh this is actually a new one it's not gonna have a whole lot of stuff here um or things to write about so i've only done one post in this new tracker uh i should bring up the old one i don't know where it is uh basically i do this this is my research before i write anything on a blog post for seo i just do a little bit of research like what am i targeting what's the user intent i write down some ideas for bullet points or different h2 tags um i make some title ideas like i write down some headlines just do a little bit of research right so i might actually do this for parenting blogs as well i'll go through these one by one so i don't actually know how to close that pop-up on that site so i'm gonna like just ignore this one that's what they get so 22 most parenting must follow parenting blogs there's an intro there's an image there's just a bunch of links in here some of the best posts i'm seeing right might you want me you might want to check out these posts that must be very she's doing that for every uh okay that's annoying um more lists uh some facebook follow buttons uh embeds more lists more lists more or less it's just lists lots of ways to follow them on facebook and some of the blog posts that they write um all right so literally i don't see much else on that just it's just a big list and then comments okay what about this one aha parenting blog this is the one that wasn't a list i don't know why exactly that's ranking but that's interesting that right move on to this one the truth about parents parenting blogs everyone should read there is literally no images in this post and it's actually pretty short it's just the links and a few of their top posts so i'm noticing right off the bat there's a trend already blogs obviously and then some of their best posts which is interesting so i might actually do that same thing with this one looks like uh yep a nice little share button there good for y'all best parenting blog and no particular order a great little funny gift uh okay so links my favorite post okay this is like really really obvious and there's no images on this one which i find interesting but it's just the same thing a couple of favorites i love this formatting though you can tell they're formatted very same they've got some bullet points that makes it very easy to skim through this is no wonder it's like performing pretty well um this one i'm just going to briefly browse through here research this is important that's my point researching what the top 10 results in google are doing will give you a great insight you should produce content-wise it's incredibly important not and not many people do this which is a little silly um so this one has actually different headlines if i had to go to inspect it looks like an h2 or h3 tag these are actually h3 tags right here formatting their headlines for this post i'm always curious about that sort of stuff so just a lot these are kind of categorized it looks like funniest parenting is this uh this looks like it's formatted a little bit differently that's an h3 more parenting resources oh here we go sites for education so they split theirs up into these are h2 tags so the list of parenting blogs are h3s and they've actually categorized the blogs this is for education and learning um or is another one not best parenting websites for information like they kind of split it up a little bit differently okay cool so now i have a good idea i'm gonna do a listicle post i'm gonna list off a bunch of the best parenting blogs and i know the user intent right that's important maybe i also recognize that they some of their top performing content the best content of those parenting blogs uh that's actually cool and then i liked the idea of linking to their facebook page i don't like the facebook embed thing that was on that one post uh but i like that idea like follow them here that's actually pretty cool uh formatting it the same for every blog that i recommend so people can skim a little bit easier that's really cool so i'm going to do that too i'm not actually going to write this entire post in this video by the way but i just want to show you the research is indeed important i have a great idea of what i'm going to do now on page seo yoast you probably already have yoast but if you don't just go install it it's fantastic it just is the free version is more than enough i have premium because i love love love the redirects and some of this other fancy stuff which i can show you down here uh it's like night time it's really great but honestly the free version is equally great so yoast is an amazing plugin for on-page seo i have a new post here um i have gutenberg so yours might look different than this but in general here is my yo focus key phrase what was it parenting blogs focus key phrase parenting blogs i'm going to type this in here you can also type in synonyms like if i want to do best parenting blogs or something like that and i want to go back to my notes right now basic on-page seo we're going to walk through this in just a second but i just thought i'd show it to you right here follow yoast you don't have to do it every single light they're they're green lights by the way like a green light yellow light red light you don't have to get every single light to be green it's just fine but it can be really useful for the basic stuff again i typed out roughly right here like put keywords in your title roughly speaking it doesn't matter as much as you think it does it doesn't have to be exact in fact if it's something exact it might not actually friendly and google can tell right so just be general generally following ghosts excuse me key words towards the beginning of the post it doesn't have to be in the very first sentence yoast often does that key phrase in title key phrase and blah blah blah it doesn't have to be generally speaking what's more important than any of this stuff down here basic on-page seo is just this nailing good content that satisfies user intent is far more important but since uh i'm gonna assume that we're all seo here i do want to go through some of these right here use lots of images i mean just break up text and just are incredibly effective when relevant and useful if it's not relevant useful don't include it but try and use images to break stuff up use graphs anything even stock photography if it's relevant and humor that keeps people on the page right i have this down here keep people on your page google calls it dwell time that means how long do they spend on your blog post google tracks the sort of stuff it's kind of crazy but it's just keep your blog posts engaging images do that videos do that using uh formatted headers and stuff like that like headings h2 tags h3s to enhance readability right the ability to skim the blog post to re uh increases engagement which google cares about that's how you rank producing good content this is what good content means right keep your intros delicious like kind of keeping people scrolling down the page use lots of line breaks no huge walls of text this gets users scrolling down the page right longer content generally performs better in google it just does don't just add words for the sake of adding words don't just type an extra 250 words but just be thorough in answering user intent that's what i mean by long content it really just means content answer the question answer the keyword that is by far more important than any of these leo screen lights by themselves right right so really quick let's just go through here and then i want to conclude talking about arrests uh for seven bucks but just for a minute say um parenting blogs parenting blogs uh the top 10 as voted on by 250 moms great title and so you'll see something change down here i have key phrase in title the exact match of the key phrase appears at the beginning of the seo title cool this will actually tell you like what to do a lot of these right here again please don't take all these like super literally like i have to green lights this is just a suggestion uh and so an intro i want to use lots of line breaks and maybe even add an intro i might mention the words parenting blogs somewhere in the first couple sentences it doesn't have to be the first one but that's actually pretty easy looking some of the best parenting blogs to follow in 2019 look no further mom or dad question mark you see how i'm like not including huge huge paragraphs i'm just like lying your entire blog post doesn't have to be like that but it really helps for intros just to get people scrolling down the page just a little bit right and you'll see i also got another green light right here key phrase and a direct in introduction but now i have all these red lights oh no what do i do here seo title width is wider than the viewable limit that means this is a little bit too long basically text link and by the way you can click these links to learn more it says add in some images so this is only 18 words long that's way too short i need a description a meta title and stuff like that i need to add some internal links as in link to other blogs or other pages on my blog other blog posts of mine on my site that's an internal link outbound links no outbound links appear on the page please add some right go through and do these one by one i'm not going to cover it in this video but i would work on this also you notice what i did right here i also included the word best right here best parenting blogs just uh you know giving a little uh ranking for different keywords going to be the big target but best parenting blogs might also be searched for a lot so i included that in there as well right um so one more thing on yoast that you really need to know i'm not going to finish the rest of this blog post but i could add a bunch of stuff add in some images obviously the other blogs that i'm going to be doing and add in another links to some of my other posts that i've written on my site if it's relevant and yeah these will mostly be green or yellow by the time i'm done it doesn't have to be perfect doesn't have to be well this is a very but in general like that's what it'd be like one more thing right let's close down this this focus key phrase all right readability uh snippet preview this is important this is where you customize what appears in google search it right here it's kind of silly there's your title by default you can actually it says like title page separator site title so this is what it looks like in google search results right now i could actually delete these like if i didn't want do you even blog at the end of it right here site title and then it goes down so now this is green you see when i add in a bunch of other stuff another sentence or two now it's like red it's like that's too long there's too many words or whatever so i actually just do like this right and you can actually delete this if you want if you will um parenting blogs the top ten blah blah is voted on by 250 moms cool meta description i'm going to specify something right here looking for the best parenting blogs to follow 2019 we asked 250 mom and dads who they uh maybe not do all caps who they followed and these are the blogs they recommend it's green that's giving me it's a good like little length right here i've got my keyword in here i've also got best parenting blogs i'm gonna close that and that'll actually uh show up in here by the way now i got my uh key phrase and meta description right i'm looking good i might actually maybe i should actually just do this pose this is great an extra 4 000 searches a month it's a good keyword right so that's concludes my thing on on page seo so that's pretty cool right um not actually for producing content that's more advanced i'm going to use that for your video you probably already watched the keyword research video but in general this is how you shape your content to perform in seo really quick let's go summary wise i don't want to leave you hanging the most important thing beforehand and know that your content is satisfying user intent first you gotta know what user intent is you do that by going to google and you start searching for stuff google um best parenting blogs open these up see what's here lots of list posts lots of numbers and their titles etc cool i kind of get an idea i do even more by going through each of those pieces of content that i opened like the first page the first two pages even go about this one maybe maybe and just browse through see what's going on see what their formats are see what google is already ranking got it doing research lots of images on this one that's awesome is there links okay they're linking links okay for the mom seeking i like that they kind of have these categories for the mom of kids close in age it's pretty cool right i'm gonna inspect this just because i'm curious now uh h1 oh this is a terrible seo blog post look at that this is an h1 tag that should not be an h1 tag h1 tag per blog post you can have multiple h shoots multiple h3s if you actually put that into yoast if i had this is a headline it actually won't let me do it because i have gutenberg and i can't do an h1 tag i can only do or h4 but you should never have more than one h1 tag per post so you could beat these people you could beat these people right um sorry so after you do that right you go through and you check it you check out what the other blogs are doing write your post you make it good i would actually suggest writing the entire post first right twice as much as you think is necessary and then you can come back and edit and then do some basic on-page seo stuff follow yoast it doesn't have to be 100 green lights it doesn't good content and make it readable lots of images lots of h2 tags some headers that'll break up your text uh link to handy resources both on your blog and other people's blogs be thorough right basic stuff but it's all you need to know simple but difficult that is how you shape content for seo that's all i got do the research beforehand and know how to satisfy that user intent and then try and produce the best content possible using some designs that's it and make sure you have your meta description uh appropriately figured out that's it

Watch this as video on Youtube

Hire an SEO Expert and get your job done.