AP 0025: What Are “Profitable Keywords?” How Do You Find Them and What Do You Do with Them?

AskPat 25 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 25 of AskPat. I'm so happy you're here today. Here, I will help you answer your online business questions. I do this five days a week. I love, love, love doing this show.

And as always, at the top of the show, when I mention a resource for you, and this resource is a tool called Long Tail Pro. It's a desktop tool that you can use to help you find profitable keywords which is what our question and answer session today is all about. My affiliate link for Long Tail Pro is AskPat.com/longtailpro. Now there are ways to do that research for free, and we'll talk about those things in today's question and answer, but it's helped save me so much time. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

Anyway, let's get to today's question from Yanne.

Yanne: Hi Pat, my name is Yanne. I own a blog called FightingAbroad.com, and my question has to do with profitable key words. This is a term that I've heard you and some of your guests and some of the key players in this industry talk about. What do you guys mean when you say profitable keywords? Finding profitable keywords. Researching profitable keywords and building a niche site around profitable keywords. I understand the keyword concept, I'm just not sure exactly what you mean when you attach profitable before it. If you guys could shed a little light, I'd be greatly appreciative and thanks so much for all the hard work you guys do. It's been an inspiration. Thank you.

Pat Flynn: Yanne, thank you so much for your question. Now a profitable keyword sort of has two prerequisites, I guess you could say, or two rules, I guess, in order for it to be a profitable keyword. The first one is that keyword has to be searched for a decent number of times. Some keywords aren't searched for very often, and some keywords are searched for a whole lot. A great keyword is one that is being searched for quite a bit. There's tools like Google Keyword Planner, which you can get through Google AdWords, or there's SEMrush.com. You go there. You type in a specific keyword. It will tell you how many times its been searched for every month. There are other premium tools like Long Tail Pro, which I shared earlier which sort of make this process a lot easier. You can search through more of them, filter them. Keyword research is sort of like panning for gold. You sort of just take a whole mound of dirt and you put it in this pan. You shake it around. You put water in it. Over time, the gold will sort of come to the top of there is any gold in there. That's what tools like Long Tail Pro do. It's sort of a souped-up pan for panning gold, I guess you could say.

Now you might be wondering well, okay, what's a good number? Give me a specific number, Pat. I want to give you one because I know it would be crazy if I was like, “Oh, you need a decent amount of searches a month.” I would say that, in order to really pay attention to a keyword and actually devote effort into ranking for a specific keyword, you want it to be searched for at least 100 times a day. So, if your monthly search volume for a specific keyword is less than 3,000, for example, when you enter that keyword into one of these tools, it might not be a keyword worth devoting too much time into. Of course there are exceptions to the rules, and if you're at a point where you have a site that you're ranking a lot of keywords for anyway and you find another one, you might as well spend time doing that. But to really get to a point where you should be putting some effort into a specific keyword, 100 searches a day is a decent amount to start with.

Now, remember I mention there are two requirements. That was the first one. Being searched for a decent amount of times. In order to become a profitable keyword, you need the second thing. That is the keyword needs to be a money keyword, meaning that the people who find you through these keywords are people looking to potentially purchase something. You can tell, sometimes, just based on the keyword itself. For example, a keyword like “free baked potato recipe,” that's not a money keyword. People aren't typing that into Google hoping to pay for something later or potentially going to pay something later. For one, it's a recipe for baked potato, and there's a million of them online. Also, the word “free” just . . . obviously, people are going in there because they want it for free. So that's not a money keyword.

A keyword like “retirement planning book” or “retirement planning course.” Check out my buddy Todd Tresidder from FinancialMentor.com who talks about all those types of things. Those types of keywords are money keywords because people are looking for information or a course and they want to pay for the right and best information. Obviously, they are willing to pay for it if they're searching out there or if they're more potentially likely to. Now, there's other ways to tell if a keyword is a money keyword in this case. You could use certain tools to see how much advertisers are paying for those keywords. The cost per click, or CPC. What happens is advertisers will pay money to get in front of people based on certain keywords that they type in. They pay a cost per click or a certain amount of dollars every time someone clicks on those ads to have that person land on their website. If you type in a keyword into Google and there are advertisers you find on the top row or sort of the right hand side bar, that's a good sign that it's a money keyword because advertisers wouldn't be spending money to get nothing back in return. They're investing ad money to get customers later, or there's some type of monetization down the road. So that's a profitable keyword searched for often, and it's a money keyword. There's a buyer or customer or someone who may eventually pay money for something related to it on the other end.

A great profitable keyword or great profitable keyword opportunity is one that meets all those requirements and in addition to that doesn't have very much competition in the search engines. That means, for example, if you look up a keyword, it meets all the requirements we just talked about, and in the top ten search results in Google for that keyword there doesn't seem to be any good content about it or helpful information, and you feel you could provide something better, well then, that's a great profitable keyword opportunity. So what do you do with a great profitable keyword opportunity? Well, there's a number of things you can do. One thing I did was I created a website, a niche site actually, in the security guard training niche. I found a keyword that met those requirements. It had a number of searches per month. I think at that point it was 6,400 searches per month, when I found that keyword using a tool like Long Tail Pro. Then it also was a money keyword because advertisers were paying up to two to three dollars per click to be put in front of people who were typing in that keyword. Also, the competition in the top 10 at Google for the keyword “security guard training,” just . . . there was none. So I found that opportunity, again, using a tool like Long Tail Pro. And I went in, I built the site, and this is the Niche Site Duel case study number one, which actually happened in 2010. To this day, that site is the number one in Google for “security guard training” and is still generating between $1,000 to 2,000 a month for one to two hours of work per month. It's done really well.

Now, another you could do is use that keyword that you find as inspiration for a bigger site. For example, when I found a keyword that had all those requirements which was food trucks for sale, I dug deeper into the food truck industry and found that there were no resources helping food truck owners. Not only did I have the opportunity to create a site about food trucks for sale, I mean that was the keyword, I found that there was no sites out there serving the food truck industry in general. That's where I created, and that's what FoodTruckr.com came from. You can find the sort of journey of where that keyword came from, how I found it, all the numbers. You can find that at NicheSiteDuel.com. At the top, there's an Updates button, gives you all the articles written, all the reports about all that. That site is still going. It hasn't made money yet, but I'm still in the very beginning of that process and journey.

You can also use these profitable keyword opportunities that you find to create blog posts that address those specific things. Of course, if it's related to your niche, and you find that there's a demand, the demand being people searching for that keyword in Google, then you should be writing content about that. That is where the competition actually doesn't play that much of a role in your decision to do that because whether the competition is stiff or it's not, you should be writing something about whatever your target audience is looking for information about, if you haven't done it already. So that's how you can use profitable keywords. Of course, if you write great content, it could get shared and could potentially earn customers or new subscribers down the road as a result of creating that content for them.

Yanne, I hope that answers your question. Thank you so much. An AskPat t-shirt is going to be headed your way very soon. You'll get an email from me if you haven't gotten one already asking for your information. If you have a question, the listener, head on over to AskPat.com. You can use the microphone on your computer to ask the voicemail question. It might get featured here on the show, and that would be awesome.

Lastly, I want to re-mention the resource of the day which is AskPat.com/longtailpro. That's the tool I use to filter through thousands of keywords in just minutes to find those golden keywords.

Lastly, I want to leave you with a quote from Winston Churchill. He said, “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

If you're in the middle of keyword research, I think that's the perfect quote because you're not going to find these golden keywords overnight. You might get lucky but it is a process. It's frustrating, but it's also fun, too, so as long as you have fun with it and know something amazing is on the other end when you find those golden profitable keywords, it's going to be awesome.

Thanks so much. See you in the next episode. Peace.