Research, Rankings and 4,794,388,243 New Article Ideas (Part One)

byParthaB

4.2K followers

Updated 4 years ago

You come up with a concept.

You head over to Jaaxy.

You plug in your seed keyword.

Jaaxy spits out a stream of results.

You check the parameters we’re “supposed” to check.

• Traffic - <10
• Average - <10
• QSR - 300
• KQI - Poor
• SEO - 32

Dammit… back to the drawing board.

You go through this same process 7,329 times until you finally find a “decent keyword”.

Okay, it took you 3 seasons of the year, coming in-and-out of lockdown 7 times, you’ve got married, had kids, and become a grandparent in the time it took you to find that ONE keyword.

But none of that matters now.

You’ve found a keyword that “fits” in with everything.

So, you’re gonna write that article.

You write the article.

You don’t like it.

You delete it and start over again.

Eventually, you decide it’s as near to “perfect” as it’s going to be.

You do all your fancy stuff with images, videos, internal & external links, your meta title, meta description, and 100/100 your All-in-SEO.

You PIN it, Facebook it, Twitter it, and Instagram the hell out of it.

Basically, you pimp your article!!

Aahhh, Satisfaction.

You wait a couple of days, a week, a month, 3 seasons, 7 lockdowns…

The article was indexed ages ago, but as for rankings, as for traffic, hmm, not so much.

Jaaxy, you lied to me.

You told me that there were only 16 other competing websites.

You told me that the SEO was “GOOD”.

You promised me traffic.

In 5 months the only people who have checked out my perfectly optimized article are my girlfriend’s mum, and my next door neighbours’ pet iguana.

Life is so unfair.

So, what’s going on here?

Are Keyword Tools REALLY That Clever?

DISCLAIMER: In no way am I saying that Jaaxy and other keyword tools aren’t valuable. In fact, if you’re someone who is fairly new to internet marketing, I highly recommend using them.

DISCLAIMER No.2: This is a fairly detailed blog post. Approximately 9 minutes out of your day. I leave the decision to read it entirely up to you.

Two of the main factors that we look at when using Jaaxy are QSR and Traffic.

So, let’s look at these a little closer.

QSR stands for “Quoted Search Results”.

Basically, the number of competing websites/articles in Google that are ranking for that exact keyword in quotation marks - “keyword”.

But, no-one searches for anything using quotation marks, do they?

The real reason for the quotation marks is so you know your competition. Those who have written and ranked an article using the exact same keyword as you, with the words in the exact same order.

However, keyword research also requires common sense and the human element.

You may find that Jaaxy tells you that a keyword only has a QSR of 16.

So, there’s only 16 competing websites using that EXACT keyword phrase with the words in that EXACT order.

Sounds great.

However, the “common sense” and “human element” comes into play now.

You should check the first page of Google to see WHICH websites are ranking.

Depending on your niche, the 16 websites ranking could be made up from:

• Healthine
• MayoClinic
• WebMD
• Neil Patel
• Backlinko
• Entrepreneur.com
• Wikipedia
• Bodybuilding.com
• CNN
• .edu websites
• .gov websites

You get the picture.

These are all AUTHORITY websites.

Authority Websites

Let’s take Healthline as an example.

A website that has been running for over 20 years.

A website that has over 50 EXPERT writers producing content.

A website that probably publishes 40-50 articles A DAY.

A website that has over 1,000,000 other websites linking back to it.

Is little old Gertrude from Toronto, who’s had a website for 2 months, and publishes 4 articles a week, really going to be viewed as a higher authority than Healthline?

So, even though QSR tells you your competition is “only” 16, you’re best off knowing WHO those 16 are.

Now, I’m not saying Gertrude can’t and won’t outrank the Big Guns, but it’s pretty unlikely.

She will have to write that article, and wait for that article to slowly rise through the ranks, until it is viewed by Google as being written by someone who is more of an expert, has more authority, and more trustworthiness than Healthline.

Or simply that the article is BETTER than Healthline’s article.

Poor old Gertrude may have to wait another 6 months, a year, 4 years, or even longer to be considered all of these things.

So, always check page one of Google to see who your actual competition is.

There’s a saying that’s been doing the rounds in SEO circles for years now:

“The Best Place to Hide a Dead Body is on Page 2 of Google”.

Basically, being ranked position 11-20 sounds great in principle, but no-one ever goes there.

Truthfully, prior to starting your online marketing journey, how often did you read an article outside the top few results when Googling something?

Look For “Non-Authority”

What you specifically want to see on page one of Google is “non-authority” sites.

A thing of beauty is to see Page One inundated with community-based websites and forums.

Sites like Quora, Reddit, or specific industry-related forums.

Now these sites may typically have a lot of content, they may even have been around for decades, but the “answers” to the keyword search queries are generally no more than a paragraph or two.

Something that I love to do when I find Page One of Google packed with forums is to take one or two points from each forum.

These points then become my subheadings.

I then expand on these points in far more detail.

Suddenly, there is far more information in my one article than a searcher will find by visiting 6 or 7 separate forum articles/paragraphs on page one of Google.

Who’s Google going to rank higher now?

Oh yes, that’ll be me.

Traffic Figures

Next, we have Jaaxy and other keyword tools’ traffic figures.

Do they REALLY know how much traffic a certain keyword is getting?

Hmm, they don’t know!!

They’re guessing.

They’re providing an estimate based on knowledge and experience.

The only “person” that truly knows how many searches a term is receiving on Google is Google itself.

Everything and everyone else is merely estimating.

Here’s an analogy:

You approach a woman and you ask her to tell you everything her husband of 25 years was thinking about yesterday.

Based on her 25 years of knowledge and experience of her husband she can take a pretty good guess.

In many cases, her guess will be 95% accurate.

But she doesn’t truly know every single thought that went through her husband’s mind yesterday.

There’s only one way to get that information - you go to the source.

You ask the husband.

Let’s Go to The Source - Let’s Ask Google

I had a quick check on Internet Live Stats prior to writing this article and it informed me that 4,794,388,243 searches had been made on Google in the last 24 hours.

Each one of those 4,794,388,243 searches is a potential keyword phrase.

Each one is a potential article you could write.

Each one has the potential to rank or not to rank.

Each one of those searches can bring you a shed load of traffic or absolutely none.

However, the article ideas you could come up with are mind-boggling.

Google Tells You Everything You Need to Know

There’s definitely no chicken and egg argument when it comes to Google and keyword tools.

Google definitely came before the keyword tool.

Google has matured over a number of years.

She is no longer a child or a stroppy teenager.

Google will be 23 this year.

So, she is currently thinking about her thesis for her Master’s.

Therefore, Google is pretty clever.

So much so, that at age 22 years, 5 months, and 26 days, Google now tells you what people are ACTUALLY searching for online.

Going back to Jaaxy for one moment.

One of my favourite things about Jaaxy is the alphabet soup tool.

This basically takes a lot of information from Google and puts it all in one place.

The alphabet soup method is simply putting your seed keyword into the Google search bar and then typing a, b, c, d, all the way through to z - before, in the middle, or after your keyword phrase.

Google will then make suggestions based on the letters you have input.

This is known as Google Autosuggest.

The suggestions that Google comes up with are not simply plucked out of thin air.

NO.

The suggestions are made based on what people have ACTUALLY been typing into Google’s search bar.

Once again, some common sense and the human element needs to be used here.

When Google gives you a suggested phrase, once again check out page one of the results.

If it’s full of authority websites, it could be advisable to move on.

However, you should still study page one before you decide to move on.

After the first few search results on page one, Google provides a “People Also Ask” section.

You click on these results and you get more and more and more results.

The more you click, the more results will appear.

Once again, Google is suggesting the “People Also Ask” section because, yep, you’ve guessed it, real people are actually asking these questions on Google.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you'll see the “related searches” section.

Yet again, Google is actually TELLING YOU what searches real people are making on their search engine.

So, you can check out all the “people also ask” and “related searches” and see who’s ranking on page one.

As for traffic, well you have no real idea here of what traffic to expect.

But remember, Jaaxy and other keyword tools are only guessing/estimating.

Every Word is a Keyword

Case in point, I have many <10 search keywords (according to Jaaxy) that I have written articles on that receive 1,000s of visitors every month.

And I can guarantee that I’m not the only one.

Then again, I also have articles that rank well for certain keyword phrases, Jaaxy tells me these are high traffic keywords, but in reality, nope, not so much.

Another point to remember is that even though you write an article around ONE keyword phrase, you can actually rank for 10s, 100s, perhaps even 1,000s of different keywords with that ONE article.

Every single word of an article is a keyword.

A 2,000-word article has the “potential” to rank for 2,000 (maybe more) different keywords.

Case in point: I once wrote an article around sleep deprivation.

I made reference in the article to Bruce Lee.

Only one paragraph made any mention of Bruce Lee.

And I used a concept of Bruce’s as an analogy.

That article now receives approximately 300 visitors a month from people searching for information about Bruce Lee (this doesn’t include the traffic I get from other keywords).

So, basically I have 300 angry martial arts fans turning up to my article every month to be greeted by a discussion about sleep deprivation.

Not Happy!

Sometimes you just can’t win.

Do The "Weirdo Test"

When it comes to the phrases you find on Google using the alphabet soup method, “people also ask”, and “related searches” this really does require some common sense.

I like to do what I call the “weirdo test”.

If Google comes up with a phrase or a question, I then gauge what I think the reaction would be if I asked that very same question while sat in a room with 10 other people.

If they all look at me like I’m some kinda weirdo, it’s time to move on and find something else.

You probably won't get a great deal of traffic from that article.

If I get a few nods in agreement, and some “oohs” and “aahs”, it’s likely I’m onto a winner.

I don’t worry about “potential” traffic, I just write the article.

If it makes sense, if Google tells you that people are actually asking these questions, if page one isn’t littered with authority sites - WRITE THE ARTICLE.

Final Thoughts

Okay, let’s bring part one to a close.

In part two I’ll show how to use your portion of Google’s 4,794,388,243 daily searches to find some great keywords.

I’ll explain how to write an article by leveraging the information of authority sites on Page One of Google, thus giving you the most original and unique article of EVERYONE.

Plus, Alphabet Soup it’s time to move over, there’s a new sheriff in town.

Alphabet soup makes use of the 26 letters in the alphabet.

In part two I’ll introduce you to “Partha’s Potion”.

This is 49 words and phrases that you can use instead of alphabet soup to skyrocket your research and article ideas.

As for when to publish part two - you decide - today, tomorrow, next week, NEVER.

HERE'S PART TWO

If you made it this far, good on you.

I'm Sorry.

Thank you for reading

Partha