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Before I went full-time with my niche sites , I worked full-time at an SEO and web design agency. While the majority of the job consisted of building links, I learned some really valuable things about on-site SEO that I still use for every one of my sites today.
I now consider on-site SEO as one of my biggest strengths because I’m able to rank for so many different keywords with my articles that other people might not even think about when they set up their pages.
I’ve said this many times before. To get to a full-time income with Adsense, you need a lot of traffic. Building a few sites based around a handful of 1000 searches/month keywords WILL NOT get you there. You need to target big keywords in big niches that have the potential of crossing 100,000 visitors per month.
Once you cross 100,000 visitors per month, it starts to become a really serious income.
But it’s tough to find keywords these days that get 100,000+ visitors per month. There aren’t that many single keywords that get so many searches that are targeted at the same time.
The mistake I see with a lot of people is that they’ll target one keyword with their page. When I create a new page targeting a keyword, I have a list of about 5 to 10 variations that I target as well.
These are similarly phrased searches that should naturally rank well alongside the main keywords as long as I target them properly. While a single keyword that gets 100,000 searches per month might be hard to find, it’s easy to combine similar phrases together to make your articles rank for EVERYTHING.
Here’s how.
Setting it all up
This is a little difficult to explain blindly so I’ll take you through an example.
Let’s say we wanted to write a post about kitchen renovations.
Instead of just jumping in and writing an article about kitchen renovations, I’m going to do some content planning based on keyword research.
I originally had kitchen renovation tips in mind as the keyword when I first thought of the niche.
First, let’s see what Google Keyword Planner brings back to see if that’s the best option.
Lower than I thought. Let’s see what else is available.
Now that’s more like it. Let’s shift to our focus to these bigger keywords.
You can also use a tool like Keyword Snatcher to find even more undiscovered keywords in your niches.
Another reasons why it’s so important to do your keyword research even if it’s a broad topic search.
Here are the keywords above listed in order of search volume:
Kitchen designs – 90,500
Kitchen ideas – 49,500
Small kitchen design – 33,100
Kitchen design ideas – 27,100
Kitchen Remodel – 14,800
Kitchen remodelling – 9,900
Kitchen remodel ideas – 9,900
Kitchen remodel cost – 6,600
A lot of people might look at that and say kitchen designs is the highest searched keyword so let’s target that one.
But we’re going to do it differently.
The days of creating micro pages around each keyword is over. What we want today is to fill our page with relevant and related topics around our keyword, essentially creating a giant resourceful page rather than a bunch of thin different ones.
We’re going to target everything. Instead of targeting our article for 90,500 searches per month, we’re going to combine everything and create our page to potentially target 242,000.
Combined with long tail traffic, this article has the potential to drive massive traffic to our site.
Breaking it down even further
We’re going to go one step further.
Another great place to check for popular searches that may not be returned in Keyword Planner is the Related Searches Suggestions.
These can be found at the bottom of the search results page on Google after you make a search.
Let’s search for a few keywords and see what it brings back.
Try it for a few different searches to look at various different results.
Already we have a bunch of ideas for our new page.
Okay, so looking at that, there are some keywords we might want to include:
Pictures, Photos, On a budget, counter tops, cabinets, update, before and after, condos
Proper Set Up
The first thing I do is look at how relatable they are. This will take some judgement on your own to figure out.
From the top list, they are all combinable except for the last one “kitchen remodel cost” which I think we can turn into an article of its own. Designs, ideas and the root keywords can be combined quite nicely because they are all based around the same topic.
So taking out cost, let’s format our title first:
Small Kitchen Design & Remodelling Ideas
We’re doing this first (without looking at the Related Searches Suggestions) because they are the biggest keywords that we want to rank for.
Using the list of related searches
Now that we have a set title based on the big search keywords, let’s look at the Related Searches Suggestions.
Again, after checking which ones are combinable, I think pictures, photos, before and after can be used for a different post dedicated solely to images of before and after shots.
So we’ll leave those out.
But we can consider the other ones: cabinets, countertops, on a budget.
Let’s revise our title again to incorporate these in:
Old
Small Kitchen Design & Remodelling Ideas
New
Small Kitchen Design & Remodelling Ideas (On A Budget)
I decided not to add cabinets or countertops into the title because our article isn’t focused solely on those subjects. This is an article about kitchen design and remodelling ideas, not cabinets and countertops.
We’ll just target those keywords within our content.
Target the smaller keywords with your meta description
Lets target even more keywords with our meta description.
Design a beautiful new kitchen at a low cost, for people on a budget. Remodelling and decoration ideas for lighting, cabinets, countertops, and more.
Perfect.
Formatting URL
I like to keep URL’s short and simple. The days of stuffing your URL with keywords are long gone so I try to avoid that.
For our URL we’ll use:
www.domain.com/kitchen-design-ideas
Here’s what our search result should look like now
Looking good.
Different H1 and Title
One little trick I like to do is to make the H1 different from the Title to target even more keywords.
So our title is what will show up in Google’s search results.
The H1 is our main title tag on the page itself.
I’m sure everyone knows this already, but I’ll say it again: Use only 1 H1 tag.
I like to keep the title and H1 different to target more variations of the keywords we’re targeting.
Our Title:
Small Kitchen Design & Remodelling Ideas (On A Budget)
Our H1 Tag:
Cost-Effective Kitchen Design and Remodelling Ideas for Small And Large Homes
Not completely different, just using a slight variation of some of the keywords.
Yoast for WordPress
There are a few different SEO plugins out there, the biggest ones being All-In-One SEO and Yoast.
I choose to use Yoast because it’s just been what I’ve been using from the beginning.
It allows you to create custom titles and descriptions like this. All you have to do is fill them in.
For the H1, it will be whatever you put in here:
If you use WordPress, but aren’t using an SEO plugin, I strongly suggest you install Yoast or All-In-One to be able to easily control these kinds of things.
Conclusion
As you can see, a LOT of planning and preparation goes into an article before writing it. Doing it this way, you can get so much more out of your content once they begin to rank.
This article alone, once it’s up and ranking, should drive at least 200,000 visitors per month easily. And that’s not even counting the long-tail traffic which can get pretty huge.
Of course, writing an awesome piece of content and getting links is the next part in order to achieve this, but this is the way I prepare an article for massive search traffic before I even begin the content creation process.
chris lee
SEO Expert