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In today’s Q&A, we are talking about how we really feel about SEO and ranking keywords on Google.
We share some important lessons we’ve learned about being successful in your niche – Hint: it doesn’t have much to do with Google!
Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you!
Click here to ask your question!
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- USHistoryTeachers.com
- Our Keyword Research Video Tutorial
- Have a Question? Ask it here!
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online.
Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to today’s Q&A mini podcast with S&J. We have a question today from Greg Robinson and it says:
“I’m in a competitive niche. How can I start ranking in the Google search results for my target keyword?”
All right, Greg. I’m going to let you have it. Anyone who listens to this podcast very often knows that I’m not a big fan of search engine optimization. It’s not that I think it’s completely irrelevant but Google has gotten a lot smarter and actually, all of the search engines.
The most important thing to remember is that you need to write for human beings not computers and search engines. Just keep that in mind as you’re writing your website content or anything that has to do with your keywords. Now Shane knows a lot more about keywords and things like that than I do so I’m going to turn this one over to him.
SHANE: Like Jocelyn said, you can’t gain Google. So no matter how good you think you can trick the system and write your copy to end up on the front page of Google, if people click it and come to your website and it’s robot speak, then you’re probably not going to keep those people and turn them into customers anyway.
There’s really no sense in getting caught up over ranking for an exact target keyword. The days of the exact matched domain where there’s one keyword that you’re really trying to focus on and if you could just rank for that one
keyword, “It’s over, I’ve got it. I win,” that’s pretty much gone. That’s over with but you really need to just focus on is writing a lot of content, writing the best content that you can and you’re going to start ranking for more and more keywords in the search results. It’s not about getting that one keyword, it’s about writing so much content that you have a lot of chances to rank in the top 10 for a lot of different things on Google.
For example, we have a new website. It’s called USHistoryTeachers.com and it’s set up to provide lesson plans and study guides and tests, things like that for History teachers to use in their classroom. Now, the “keyword” would be US History teachers. That’s who I’m targeting that’s who I want to come to the site, that’s kind of the word I guess that I wanted to focus on on that website, but 99% of the traffic, the keywords that come up in Google, when someone searches for something and it shows up in those results, 99% of the time, it is not US History teachers.
It’s something else like World War II lesson plan, or civil war battles, or something like that. It just depends on what they are looking for at that time and I have hundreds and hundreds of posts on this website and every time in words and in sentence on your webpage, when you’ve got like two words together or three words together, those are all keyword phrases.
Google knows the combinations of words in your website so the more you write, the more naturally you write, then Google is going to start ranking you for tons and tons of keywords and you don’t have to focus on that one perfect specific thing to kind of win the day.
JOCELYN: So at the end of the day, while it’s not important to try to use SEO strategies to get on the first page of Google, it is important to speak the same language that people who coming who are coming to your website are using.
SHANE: So instead of looking at just one keyword, you’re target keyword, that’s not exactly how it should work. You need to look at a bunch of different things in your niche. Go search for all those keyword ideas, like when you go to the Google Ad Words keyword planner and you find that one keyword, you think, “Oh, this is what I want to base my whole business on.”
Look at the related words, the dozens and dozens of words that people search for that are similar to that term and start writing blog posts about all of those things so that you give yourself a good chance to be ranked for a bunch of different keywords that people are actually looking for in your niche and you don’t just focus all of your attention on trying to trick Google into ranking you if it’s really good keyword.
You’re much better off trying to rank in the top 10 for 500 smaller keywords over different blog posts than you are to try so hard to get this one big keyword and kind of put all your eggs in one basket. So keyword research is a thing that’s out there. A lot of people talk about SEO and things like that in the wrong way.
It doesn’t work the way it used to. Finding that one keyword and ranking for it is not going to make or break your business. You’ve got to go out there. You’ve got to speak the language that your customers are speaking. You have to talk naturally, write articles for humans, and focus on getting as much content out there as possible so you can rank for a lot of different keywords. That’s how you’re going to start getting more traffic from the search engines.
JOCELYN: If all of those keywords stuff seems a little bit overwhelming to you, Shane made a video that explains how we do keyword research over here at Flipped Lifestyle, and by we, I mean Shane. You could find that over at FlippedLifestyle.com/QA30 in today’s show notes.
SHANE: All right guys. That’s all the time we have today. Tune in in a couple of days and we will have another question from an audience member. Until then, we will catch you all on the flipside. Thanks for listening.
JOCELYN: See yah.
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