The Best Keyword Research Method You Will Ever Read

This is a bold claim, but I’m a bold kinda guy and the claim is 100% accurate and true so I have no problem making it.  I’ve told this story to many acquaintances over the past two years and it still rings true today.  I’m sure many of you have spent money on keyword research tools which #1 cost you money and #2 never seem to find you a true gold nugget.  Many of you have spent countless hours using the Google Adwords Keyword tool and again, you may find a piece of silver here or there but very rarely if ever do you find gold.  I won’t call you morons for using these methods because I’ve used them before to.  Until I stumbled into a method that was so simple and always right in front of my eyes but I never realized it.

I own a lot of sites.  Some do good, some do shitty, but one thing that is the same about them all is I have tracking on them.  Some form of traffic be it Google Analytics or something else.  So one day I was looking at the Google Analytics for one of my largest money making sites and I wanted to do some offsite SEO for it so I checked the keywords that were bringing people to my site.  I wanted to take the top 25 of them, check my position in Google, check how hard it would be to move up, and then do the offsite SEO work.  This is actually a good tip if you’re not doing this.

Fast foward 3 seconds, I found a keyword that I had no idea what it was.  I, like Alicia Silverstone, was clueless!  But, it was the 8th ranked keyword in terms of driving traffic to my site over the past 30 days so I was intrigued.  I did a few things next:

• I found out the meaning of the keyword
• I checked my site to see where that keyword was used
• I used the Adwords Keyword tool to check search volume for that keyword
• I searched Google for that keyword to see where my site was ranked and how much competition there was for this keyword

What Did I Learn?

• I learned that this keyword was used on my site (which was a forum) in one thread by one person once.  That’s it.
• I learned that there was 200,000+ exact searches for this keyword per month.
• I learned that my forum thread URL that had this keyword on its page ranked #9 in Google which told me the competition was nonexistent.
• I learned the average CPC for this keyword was only $0.15.

What Did I Do?

I attacked this keyword.  I made 5 seperate sites, each site focused on this keyword in one form or another.  I placed one Adsense box 300×250 (text only) at the top of each site.  I added 5 unique articles that I wrote to each site.  And I did some very light link building.

The cost was $50 spent, 10 hours of my time spent, and the result was 5 mini sites built.  Within a month all five sites were on the first page of Google for this keyword.  I’ve been making $1,500-$4,000 a month consistently from those sites.

I got sidelined there but back to the focus of this article… your current sites will give you the keyword gold nuggets that you so desperately seek.  Get an analytic tracking tool on them and see what keywords are driving people there.  The keywords that you wouldn’t expect to see driving traffic are the ones that you should investigate.  Now this method works much better if you own a forum because of the diversity of keywords used throughout everyones’ posts, but it will work on any site.  And instead of spending hours upon hours doing keyword research this method will show you those gold nuggets in just a few minutes.  And if you don’t have websites or anything you can use…  see if you can contact a forum owner and offer to buy his list of keywords that drive people to the site.  A lot of forum owners may say no, but I’ll bet you’ll find a few who just want your money.