Welcome to the SEO fast lane for getting higher website rankings, traffic, and profit!
I’m Stephen Hockman, creator of the Keyword Accelerator Playbook and a full-time blogger at SEO Chatter. My journey with SEO and Internet marketing started in 2005. And back then, I was just like any new website owner:
Completely lost about what to publish and stuck in the slow lane with every aspect of my site.
My initial strategy was to pluck ideas out of thin air and write articles I thought people in my niche would be interested to read. I figured, if it was something I was curious about, then others would be (hopefully) searching for that same kind of content on Google and land on my website to get it.
Well, that idea flopped.
Most of the articles I wrote barely got any visitors at all. And the ones that did get some Google search traffic had no noticeable pattern whatsoever.
I was literally shooting in the dark with every piece of content I produced.
But then I stumbled across something that gave me a glimmer of hope to keep pushing forward. It was called Google Adwords. And Adwords was a relatively new product by Google that allowed advertisers to create text-based ads that would appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords. Essentially, these paid ads would show up at the top of the SERPs before the organic search results, which, at the time, were called the famous “10 blue links”.
What was great about Adwords back then was that it let you see the precise monthly search volume for any keyword in Google’s database. (Today, it’s just a broad range.) Plus it was free to use. That meant you could easily find out which topics users were trying to find information about online and the exact number of searches being performed without paying any money to get those insights.
This was an amazing breakthrough for me because I was on a super tight budget, yet could finally start publishing content with somewhat of a keyword strategy. Instead of writing about anything under the sun in my niche, I finally knew what topics I should actually be targeting to get people to my website from Google’s search engine.
But that surge of hope quickly faded.
A lot of the articles I published still didn’t rank high in SERPs. And that was extremely frustrating as a new blogger/niche site builder/affiliate marketer, which is an accurate summary of the complete mash-up of everything I was trying to be at that time.
Some days I was so paralyzed by the horrible state of things that I would avoid writing anything new for weeks on end. But eventually, I would think about that burning desire I had for creating my first website:
To make endless streams of passive income.
It was that flash of inspiration that would kick me into high gear and drive me to publish a large batch of new content that may or may not have ended up ranking in the top 10 blue links on Google. However, even with the Adwords keyword research tool at my disposal, I was still lost on the freeway without knowing where I was going.
It wasn’t until I failed miserably over and over again for several years that things finally clicked. Those failures led me to figure out what my biggest mistakes were.
What I slowly realized was that I was approaching the whole content publishing game in the wrong way. And there was a basic set of rules that the most prolific online publishers were following that made everything a whole lot easier for them to obtain faster success.
What I didn’t know back then was that I was swimming in a red ocean. And where I needed to be was in a blue ocean.
Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, authors of the book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, coined the terms “red oceans” and “blue oceans” to denote the market universe. Basically, red oceans are where companies try to outperform their competition to grab a greater share of the existing market. But in a blue ocean, there’s no competition at all or very little competition in the market, making it much easier to succeed as a business.
That same blue ocean concept applies to SEO and ranking websites in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. A blue ocean is where there’s very little competition in the SERPs for a target keyword and you can often rank your content high without a lot of effort. However, a red ocean has a lot of direct competition in the SERPs and it can become a feeding frenzy among SEOs and website publishers trying to one-up each other to gain the top-ranking positions. And in many cases, it can almost be impossible to break through to the top 10 spots.
Unbeknownst to me, most of the articles I was publishing were targeting red ocean topics. When I found a good keyword in Google Adwords with a high search volume, I got super excited and wrote an article on it. But what I wasn’t aware of at that time was that many of those high search volume keywords were impossible to rank for in the SERPs. The competition for those terms was just too fierce among the other SEO sharks. It was a bloody red ocean where my content had no chance of survival. And trying to compete was both a waste of precious time and resources.
It wasn’t until I found a unique tool called Market Samurai that I understood what was going wrong with my keyword research strategy. Market Samurai was one of the first keyword research tools on the market that provided daily search volume and recent trend data for the keywords in any niche, taking the data directly from Google. This tool also gave you an SEO competition score for each search term and a list of important SEO metrics for the top 10 ranking URLs in the SERPs.
Getting access to Market Samurai was a game-changer for my entire keyword research process. It was the springboard for getting me out of the shark-infested red ocean and into the empty blue ocean where I could finally thrive with my website. Sadly, Market Samurai doesn’t exist anymore but if you had a chance to use it, then you’d understand how most keyword research tools you find today are based on a similar framework.
(Note: I ended up switching to a few other keyword research tools that are much better for analysis which you’ll find out about in the “Recommended Keyword Research Tools” section of this playbook.)
At this point in my SEO journey, I was having much better success with my website. I was doing a great job uncovering easy-to-rank keywords and getting a lot more of my articles into the top 10 positions on Google. Learning how to do proper on-page SEO was also a huge contributor to this success.
But I still had three significant problems.
The first issue was that I was taking a shotgun approach to how I selected keywords to target on my website. I literally had no clue which terms to pick. (Perhaps you can relate to this?)
My only criteria at the time was that the keyword had to have low competition in SERPs. Other than that, the keywords I chose could have been about any random topic in my niche. And that strategy eventually stopped working as topical relevance became more important to Google’s ranking algorithm. This caused my web pages to slide down in the SERPs.
The second issue I suffered was that some web pages earned me a lot of passive income through affiliate marketing (and eventually display ads once that revenue model became available) while others were barely making a few pennies.
Sometimes I would pour my heart and soul into a new article with high hopes of it delivering stacks of cash to my bank account. But more often than not, those articles would just rake in a couple of dollars each month and a majority of my income was coming from only a few URLs where I accidentally struck gold by picking some highly-profitable keywords.
The final issue that almost put me out of business altogether was that I had no content publishing strategy in place. I basically opened up a keyword research tool, found a good keyword to target, then wrote an article on that topic.
Sometimes I spent an entire day looking for a single keyword and a week or more actually getting the content written and published. My publishing schedule was all over the place with absolutely no consistency whatsoever. (Does that sound familiar?)
One week I might have published 2 articles, 0 the next, and 3 a month later. Everything was so haphazard with my writing schedule. And that inefficient way of publishing content was gravely holding back my website’s growth.
Now, fast forward to today.
After clunking my way through many different websites, I eventually came up with a powerful keyword research process that solved all of my problems from before. This definitely didn’t happen overnight though, as I had been doing SEO since 2005 and had plenty of years of trial and error to figure it all out.
But now my process is dead simple for finding the very best keywords to target for my websites that keep them swimming a big beautiful blue ocean with organic search traffic rising month-over-month while also squeezing every ounce of profit out of each visitor who lands on the sites. There’s no second-guessing why my content doesn’t rank well in the SERPs because most of it hits the top 10 positions with ease.
I also ended up developing a reliable content publishing strategy that transformed my shaky passive income side hustle into a rock-solid steady business that keeps me in the fast lane. Now every website I create follows a proven publishing plan for success where I know exactly what I’m going to write, when it will be published, and how much content I need to reach my traffic and income goals.
This trouble-free method removes all the guesswork out of how to take the very best keywords I’ve found using a simple keyword research tool and put them into a content publishing schedule that’s guaranteed to deliver results. Having a plan like this in place has made writing so much more enjoyable and profitable for my business.
So why am I telling you all of this?
Because those strategies are exactly what you’re going to discover in this Keyword Accelerator Playbook.
I’m literally giving you my exact blueprint for how I do keyword research day in and day out in the fastest and most optimal way. And it works with practically any keyword research tool on the market.
In fact, I encourage you to spend as little money as possible on one of these tools, which is the exact opposite of what a lot of other SEOs out there are saying to do. Instead, they insist you have to pay for expensive software like Ahrefs to have any chance at keyword success.
But I’m here to tell you that’s simply not true. I’ve built and sold websites for more than $100,000 using nothing more than cheap keyword research tools you’ll find out about later in this playbook. So don’t let anyone fool you on this.
I’m also teaching you how to set up a content publishing schedule so you have a complete plan to follow to reach your website goals faster. This is an area where I haven’t found any other SEO expert, blogger, niche site builder, or affiliate marketer sharing information.
Oddly, the entire Internet marketing industry is practically devoid of teaching website publishers how to create a content publishing schedule to run their online business more successfully. And that’s one top reasons why I had to include this crucial information inside this playbook. After you go through the step-by-step instructions on how to create a content publishing schedule with ease, you’ll be set up for a lifetime of achievement for publishing content in the most effective way on any website you create.
My ultimate goal is to help you get your website into the SEO fast lane so you can enjoy higher website rankings, traffic, and profit.
It was a great feeling to get these processes that took me years to refine out of my brain and put down into words for you to read and benefit from. That’s because I know in my heart how much these strategies can help transform your life as a website publisher if you put them into practice and stick with them for the long term.
Not only will you be able to experience faster growth in website traffic, but you’ll also know what it takes to achieve higher earnings through display ad revenue and affiliate commissions. Plus, you’ll have the foundations in place for creating an effective content publishing schedule that can keep you on track to grow your website beyond your wildest dreams.
I hope that gets you excited.
Because it excites me to share it all with you in this Keyword Accelerator Playbook!
So let’s hit the road and see how far you can go.
Your SEO Mentor,
Stephen Hockman
Founder of SEO Chatter
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