This post is going to look at a very simple way to spend less time on your SEO but make more money from it.
Here goes…
So imagine this…
You’ve got a list of keywords ready that you think are going to be profitable and you’re ready to start developing some content.
Which do you do next?
If you’re a PPC marketer, you put up ads on as many different keywords as you can and see which ones stick. You ditch the least profitable keywords and you leave the most profitable keyword groups running and try to optimize your ads to improve CTR.
If you’re marketing with search traffic however, the game is a little different.
Assume you have two keywords with similar search volume, and you’ve got page one rankings for both of them. The traffic from each of those keywords is going to make you a different amount of money. The traffic from each keyword is going to convert at a different rate.
That means, if you did the same amount of work to get each of those sites to page 1, one of those terms is paying a better return on your time and money than the other.
It’s all very well to go out and wildly try to get rankings for as many terms as you can, but in the end, you’ll find that 80/20 applies.
80 percent of your income will come from 20% of your keywords.
Now if you spend the same amount of effort and money on each keyword, the above is bad news.
But if you focus most of your effort on that 20% of keywords, guess what happens. You spend less time on your SEO overall and you make the same amount, if not MORE income from your effort.
So the big question is “How do you identify those 20% keywords?”
The first and most obvious answer is, you test.
Even if you don’t do PPC you NEED to test your site’s pages and their conversion with paid traffic first.
By running paid traffic to a page, from all your different keywords, you can see within days which are your most profitable keywords.
Yes it might cost you a hundred bucks or two but think how much effort this saves you down the track. You can now spend all your time focusing on keywords that you KNOW are going to yield a high return on effort/investment – that’s called running a REAL business 
Second, if you really have some fundamental problem with running a paid ad campaign, you can simply do some THINKING.
The keywords that will convert best are, surprisingly, the terms that are most RELEVANT to the offer you’re promoting.
There are always keywords that will surprise you but as a general rule, if you’re promoting a colon cleanse product…
The keyword “colon cleanse”
won’t convert as well as “colon cleansing product”
which won’t convert as well as “buy colon cleansing product”
And so on.
So you can try to think it out, and rank your keywords in terms of their likelihood of a high conversion, from most likely to be high converting, to least likely. It’s not perfect but it will help.
And what do you do when you have an idea (or a fact) of what keywords will convert the best?
First you pat yourself on the back for being in the 5% of intelligent search marketers.
Then you go about optimizing your site and building links in order to promote the content you develop on THOSE KEYWORDS FIRST.
If you’ve identified 5 most profitable words, work on them first.
Even if they aren’t the least competitive terms and it’s harder for you to get great rankings, remember these are the terms that you don’t need as much traffic from in order to make sales.
10 visitors from these keywords might be equivalent to 100 visitors from a lower converting keyword – so even if you get less visitors numerically by attacking these terms, the amount of revenue they generate will be higher than the more easily attainable but lower converting keywords further down your list.
Is this all making sense?
By approaching your search engine marketing this way you can save yourself alot of time and money, not to mention frustration.
This is how smart search marketers do it.
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Thanks Andrew.
So are you suggesting we should launch a ppc campaign prior to any SEO Work? And once we have identified the most profitable keywords with ppc we use them to optimize our pages, write articles and so forth..
A couple twists I think are worth exploring.
The first – would it be worth it to test the keywords using one of the cheaper PPC engines? Perhaps use Yahoo or some smaller third party PPC engine rather than the big G? Although it may skew results in some fashion, I think it might also be a better test for “some” keywords or phrases based on potential competition and/or ad layout.
Second – and this is a potentially free option (for the first 5 sites anyway) – is HitTail.com. I’ve had some amazing results using their technology. What it boils down to is more obscure long-tail phrases (although there is also some analysis of top ten phrases). The system tracks traffic where a search engine basically says “Well, there was this search you see, and we really couldn’t find a better match than your site, so we sent the searcher to you.” Then you optimize the phrase and see what happens. Some of the results are amazingly lucrative.
Eric,
Ultimately, yeah, you should. If you can’t, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to be profitable, just means you’re taking more of a risk. Think of the ppc campaign as kind of like an insurance policy.
Andrew
Your system measures things well. Kinda cool that by paying more in the beginning you learn what is valuable and what isn’t.
Nick
Hi Andrew
Awesome post! Am I right in saying you’ve adapted the Pareto Principle in this post? Haha I remember learning about this when I was studying Marketing in my TAFE days.
Jay
I won’t launch a website without first doing a small PPC Campaign.
Here’s why. The Google Keyword Tool is VERY inaccurate. They tend to inflate their numbers so that you will bid on those keywords
I learned my lesson the hard way. Found a great keyword(model number for a high end TV)…Google said it got 6k searches a month. So I built my site, did some SEO, and got it to number 1
No sales and like 5 visitors a day. So I ran a ppc ad for that term. That term gets 5 impressions per day.
I do it a little different than Andrew as I am on a bit of a budget but I’ll throw up an ad for a day just to get an idea of how many searches it gets. I’ll only spend maybe a few dollars but it is worth it in the time it saves me
Thanks Mark for the adwords advice. Being on a budget, that really helps.
Another technique I am going to try, after getting my lists of keywords courtesy of the 1000 Visitors in 30 Days report is to make several pages for each product landuing page and use Google Webmaster Tools to run A/B tests on versions optimized for different related keywords. In the end what really counts is vitors and how they vote with their mouse .. and Google will do this for us, free under eal world condiions … or so I hope, anyway.
I completely agree with you. The 80/20 principle is one of the most powerful business ideas I know. If applied properly, it can make you a fortune.
Hi Andrew,
Nice advice. This is what I’ve been noticing too! The 80/20 principle is something I practice diligently and I think your advice is spot on!
This post sure adds value to the e book I downloaded. Good strategy That I will definitely be using in my ppc compaigns
Thanks Andrew for the great tip! The timing is perfect because I decided a couple of days ago to give paying for traffic a go. I am grateful for any advice because you can spend a lot of money very quickly and get nothing in return. I am trying to put myself in the buyers shoes and think what they would type in if they were searching for this product. To your success, Ken
Your Message Hi Andrew and thanks for the tips. I’ve just started on creating websites and i have heart of the 80/20 theory before. i think it applies to a lot of things.
thanks again
PS enjoying your ebook on the 1000 visitors
Shouldn’t you also check new keywords so you can grow the overall 100% in order to grow the %20 to other possibilities? In other words, won’t sticking with the same 20% make your site stagnant?
Thanks again Andrew.
Really enjoy your tips and advice. Good practical advice – thanks.
Hey Andrew,
Just wanted to let you know I’m new to your blog and really enjoyed your e-book. I’ll be well on my way to my first 1000 visitors soon! Thanks.
This article is a great supplemental article to the book for choosing the best keywords to start with and focus my content creation campaign on.
I really look forward to getting to know you better through your blog. Have a fantastic day.
Thanks Richard, I’m glad you’re enjoying it
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
You may think that I am thick, I am certainly a nervous newcomer to this fascinating business but would it be possible to explain the many collections of letters that we see in almost all communications? I know that SEO means ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ but what about P P Cand C T R? And lots of others, say uou put the description once, in brackets in any article in which you use an abbreviation, it would help idiots like me.
Thanks for all the help I have managed to decipher.
Regards
William
Hello Andrew,
I know lots of people who never got a good ROI using adwords. Many of these people lost money. Because of them I have been slow to start, but your advice makes a lot of sense.
Thank you,
Mark
As ever, Andrew, your advice is first class. I always look forward to your tutorials, because I never fail to learn something from them,
Many thanks and best wishes,
Mike
Hi William
I’m also relatively new and in the beginning all these terms did’nt make any sense to me. The best way to get to know them is to go to a free online dictionary at http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/ and you’ll get an explanation of all the internet terms.
Just save yourself a lot of time, money and frustration and start off with Andrew’s Niche Blogging Institute. He is one of the real guys in IM that you can trust him.
Good luck with your IM journey.
Andrew – you’re post was very welcome. Appreciate the good advice.
Good post Andrew.
Yes the Pareto Principal applies to everything we do it seems.I do find 20% of my key words do provide me with 80% or more of my income.
I was intimidated by the whloe key word thing for years. That’s when I was broke and new online for several years. Everything changed when I started blogging with my 1st blog to see if I liked it..and I did.
That’s 1 year ago and I now started my second professional attraction marketing blog which launched 3 weeks ago.
It’s only professional because I did proper key word research which I learned and still learning from my young partner Vincent Cameron.
Even if you don’t like key word research it must be done since this is how online marketing works properly.
I know I didn’t like that either but it’s true.
Well put and well thought out. I am interested in free or low cost test methods as funds are a major issue.
Even non or not for profit sites want to maximize their traffic. I won’t bore anyone with those simple methods I have thought of myself but I’m convinced their are more and better ways. I can’t believe I’ve thought of everything, not even all the most obvious ways are always obvious to me.
Keep up the good work.
Myke
Hello Andrew thank you again and – great advice you can also be a smart marketer with OCI the MSN commercial intent tool! give you a heads up on which keywords are commercially viable and FR-EE
A “buying” keyword would get a 94% rating of commercial intent. or if you have Keyword Elite 2 it gets you the keywords, searches , competition and a green light if its easy to rank for..
Go a step further- it has an OCI tool to rate viability as well and- it can also tell you exactly how you can rank better than the websites in the ten top slots on the first page of Google for any Given High searched High competition keywords?
If they are optimized with a keyword in the Title, H1 H2 tags? Meta tags, How many links they have coming in and Page rank every SEO stat you need to have.
Phil
If I could just figure out which 20% to do it would be easy to just do that 20%. Thanks for the helpful steps.
Well Andrew,
I am just starting to step out. I hope i can make it work like you said.
I’ve been under the impression all along that internet marketing is not complete without PPC advertising. The need to use a PPC campaign for testing keywords exposes another use for PPC. It really does look like it’s a must-do. Just beware of slap-happy G….e