Step #8: Search Engine Optimization
Now is when the rubber hits the road, this is what will make or break your site. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about building content that is aligned for the search engine to rank and gain you traffic from visitors to search engines.
This is the part that ends up causing new affiliate marketers to end up quitting as they write content or purchase content that won't ever rank. While this seems silly not knowing how keywords work and how to use them will doom you to failure unless you are very lucky.
Many are very interested in building their niche site but don't necessarily know what this whole process looks like. You need to learn keyword research, or how to find search viable phrases, as this will get you the chance to be ranked.
What is the Search Engine Results Page?
This is when you search on Google for example, that page of results that show when you perform a search with the "top results". This is where you intend to rank your content, outside of page one your overall click rate drops significantly.
The first result in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) will typically get close to a third of all the search traffic on the query, so your end-all-be-all goal is to reach position 1 to gather all these clicks you possibly can.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword Research is what you do to find search phrases actual people search for or that Google and other search engines identify. The power in this is that you can rank for these and know that people search for them.
What happens to most new site builders is that they write content about things they are interested in or find to be "neat" or "cool". The problem with this is that if no one is searching for this then you will never get traction on your niche site.
When you start your niche site you will have a world of opportunities to write about, what you need to focus on is finding low competition keywords. These are longer sets of words, think like "what color is the horizon logo" instead of "horizon logo".
These are called "long tailed keywords" and there is an infinite amount of them you can write about on almost any topic. You will be more limited by your own thoughts than by options, this is why you can invest in a tool to help research (
listed below)
How Do You Properly Identify Targets for Content?
This comes in many flavors and has many answers but for you as a new niche site creator you will want to look for some keys to allow yourself the chance to rank on page one.
The first major thing you want to see is forums, things like phpbb, quora, reddit, and similar websites are actually quite simple to beat with a well written piece of content.
The next thing to understand is that if you see sites like Healthline, Microsoft, you know big names that are all over the SERPs than at the start this isn't worth writing as you stand very little chance at ranking at a important placement.
Another thing to focus on as a new niche site is on your keyword does Google show a "Rich Snippet" at the top of the results page. These will be paragraphs as an answer, lists, or other content.
If this is a answer paragraph read it to see if it is on point and really matches the answer to the question. If not then you want to make sure in your content you write a direct answer to that query.
Should this show a list then you can learn that, in this case, Google expects the answer to be in a list or listicle format and if your post doesn't follow this it will be hard to steal the snippet spot and the traffic.
How to Research Keywords and Rank Effectively
There is so many methods on how you can search for keywords but the simplest way to start is just by looking at Google and what they "autocomplete" for you.
Since Google is trying to help you finish your phrase this means enough people have typed it that its Google brain is trying to guess your search before you can finish it, this is a sign that there is positive traffic on the search.
Next would be through the tools which can yield good results, there are free options that can give you some details and then tools that you pay for which typically streamline multiple sites and processes into one or two steps.
Best Tools to Find Keywords for Your Site:
Content Generation and Issues with Writing Services
If you have the money to invest it can help give you a jumpstart on your website progress. With most rankings in Google taking months to slowly change getting your content up fast can help you trampoline into success if you choose keywords well.
This is a double edged sword as you will fail badly if you don't do your keyword research up front well, I would say if you are learning keyword research it can be beneficial to instead write your first content personally.
Writing services I have used and have had success with: