15+ Ways Keyword Research Drives SEO Success - CanIRank

CanIRank in Action

Learn how Consultants, Agencies, and Marketers are Leveraging SEO Intelligence Software

CanIRank is ideal for consultants and marketers looking to increase the ROI of their SEO and content marketing activities. Our customers include top agencies and some of today's most skilled SEO practitioners, but beginners can be quickly brought up to speed with our free SEO video tutorials and knowledge base.

Whether novice or expert, DIY or Full Service, the common thread we all share is a belief that data collection and analysis is a task best suited to computers, and that by leveraging modern machine learning techniques we can make better decisions and free up time for the more creative and rewarding aspects of online marketing.

What can you do with CanIRank?

Customer Case Studies

Fieldwire

Within 6 months of acquiring Fieldwire.com and launching a new website, we added traffic worth over $10,000 per year

AngelPad-funded Fieldwire had a winning product but no in-house resources to grow their traffic. CanIRank provided the perfect solution by helping them seamlessly transition from DIY software to Full Service agency as their company grew. Following CanIRank’s optimization recommendations, the Fieldwire team started seeing ranking increases within the first 2 weeks. After moving to a Full Service plan their traffic skyrocketed 853% in just a few months. CanIRank’s team also helped revamp the site’s information architecture and landed more press coverage than Fieldwire’s dedicated PR agency (which charged 25 times as much).

PDF Pro

From 141 to over 150,000 monthly organic search visitors after 6 months of CanIRank Full Service

As a new startup in a competitive market, PDF Pro came to us with almost no organic search traffic, a limited budget, and domain authority too low to compete against the entrenched players dominating the rankings. In 6 months CanIRank Full Service added over 5,000 new rankings in Google.com, increasing total traffic by a factor of 200. CanIRank’s team also earned PDF Pro coverage in USA Today, Inc, Business2Community, and PCAdvisor, landed a number of blogger reviews, and helped optimize and add additional content to the website.

Bavarian Clockworks

From launch to over $1,000,000 in sales using free organic SEO traffic

New ecommerce stores often have a tough time competing against Amazon, WalMart, Ebay, and other large incumbents with exponentially larger budgets and household name recognition. To keep the traffic flowing, smaller ecommerce websites often turn to Google AdWords, and soon all of their profits are going to Google. CanIRank helped specialty clock retailer Bavarian Clockworks find a way out of this trap using free organic SEO traffic.

1Scan.co.uk

CanIRank reversed the downward trend and doubled our rankings in just 1 month

“I own / operate a photo scanning business and for the last few years we've been able to rely on a good level of business through Google. However towards the end of last year there was a noticeable downward trend which accelerated a couple of months ago. I decided to convert 1Scan.co.uk to WordPress and was told I needed to 'do SEO', and also warned to do it right as there might be 'consequences'...

When I came across CanIRank it seemed like the place to guide me through the rocky waters. I am very pleased to say it has done just that, and in a few short weeks. I was pleased to find it gave me a lot of advice on what I could do, and I've set about with what I guess an expert will think is the low hanging fruit. Here are the results of less than one months effort for my key search term:

Average position - up 3 (and now on first page of Google)
CTR - up 7%
Clicks - up 533% (yes, that's five times better than the month before)
I have also found significant improvements on other key terms, and that while we ranked for just over 100 terms before, we now rank for nearly 200.

To learn more about finding low-hanging fruit to get rankings quickly, please see our video.

YogaDVDs.net

David vs. Goliath: How a part-time blogger outranked Amazon, eBay and Walmart

When you're a small business, it can sometimes seem impossible to outrank megasites like Amazon, eBay, or About.com: they have literally millions of inbound links with more pouring in every day, not to mention constant press coverage, advertising, brand recognition, and the best SEO experts money can buy.

But none of that stopped YogaDVDs.net, a small review blog written by a yoga instructor from Indiana, from using CanIRank to nab top rankings away from the behemoths for hundreds of valuable yoga-related terms like "yoga DVDs", "yoga DVD review", "best Yoga DVDs", and even specific products like "Tara Stiles yoga DVD" or "Barbara Benagh yoga". How did YogaDVDs.net do it? By using CanIRank to find the chink in the giant's armor: low Website Relevancy and mediocre Page Relevancy. To slay the giants, they first analyzed dozens of keywords to find which ones were least competitive, and started building up their traffic by ranking for long tail terms like "hatha yoga DVDs", "best intermediate yoga DVD", and "yoga dvds for weight loss". Those may not be headline terms, but the highly-targeted traffic converted well to sales, and the topical content helped YogaDVDs.net establish very strong Website Relevancy. Finally, when they had a bit of authority built up to start going after fat head terms like "yoga DVD", they used CanIRank's On Page Relevancy tool to make sure their content outscored the megasites, earning them high rankings with only a fraction of the links.

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Diagnosing what you need to work on

You wouldn't trust a Doctor who prescribes a cure before taking the time to understand what's wrong, and you shouldn't trust SEOs who act without understanding either. Under the "What do I need to improve?" section of the CanIRank Report you'll see how your site compares to current rankers in each of the major ranking factor categories. We also highlight specific Issues— weaknesses that you'll need to fix in order to become more competitive. Issues are scored according to how important that Ranking Factor is, and how far below the typical ranker your site is. For maximum efficiency with your SEO work, start working on the highest-scoring Issues. If you're not sure how to improve a certain Ranking Factor, just click "Fix" and CanIRank will generate an Action Plan helping you to address that weakness.

More on using CanIRank to determine the highest impact SEO actions for any website:

Finding low competition keywords for new niche sites

A well-targeted niche site can be a great way for internet marketers or anyone else with a little SEO knowledge to create an additional income stream. Niche sites take relatively little effort to set up (and much of that can be outsourced), and they're easily monetized via Google AdSense, Amazon, or other affiliate programs. Sites like SmartPassiveIncome provide a good introduction to building niche sites.

Every would-be niche site tycoon soon learns that choosing the right niche is the key ingredient to success. Choose a niche that's too competitive, and your site will rank too low to get any clicks. Choose a niche that's too small, and you won't get enough traffic or advertising revenue. Before CanIRank, internet marketers were stuck with primitive keyword difficulty tools like Market Samurai or Long Tail Pro which only consider a handful of factors with dubious accuracy.

In contrast, CanIRank is not only more accurate in assessing a keyword's difficulty, it also gives you a ton of actionable information about the competition so you can see specifically what it would take to rank. Here's how to use CanIRank to find new niche opportunities: first, choose a representative URL, like one of your other niche sites, or another small site that you know you can match (it doesn't have to be in the same topic area). Most internet marketers use a pretty similar process for niche site building— they use a handful of techniques for getting links, add about the same quantity and quality of content, and sometimes even give every site the same look. With a repeatable process, I can use my site about "Goldfish Training Secrets" as a representative URL to see if my techniques would suffice to compete in a totally different niche, like "herbal cat allergy remedies".

CanIRank will give me a highly accurate Ranking Probability, the expected volume and value of traffic for "herbal cat allergy remedies", and a Keyword ROI score that assesses the balance of value and difficulty. If I do decide to target that niche, CanIRank can help me be more efficient in my niche site building process by showing me what it will take to compete: I'll know how many links my competitors have, where they got their links, how well they're targeting the keyword, and even which related words I might want to include on my page.

Keeping clients informed

Clients generally need to know at least 3 things:

By using CanIRank to manage your client work, you'll automatically receive weekly Campaign Progress and Website Progress emails which effectively address each of these concerns. First, there's a list of all the Actions you've completed, so the clients can see that you've been hard at work. Each Action is linked to a full description in the CanIRank knowledge base which explains why the Action is important to search engine rankings, and what exactly it entails.

Most importantly: clients want to see results. Sometimes clients don't understand that Google rankings don't always immediately respond to the SEO work you're doing. Fortunately, CanIRank gives you a number of other metrics you can share, in addition to new and improved rankings. Perhaps you've told the client you're going to do some link building to build up their website's trust and authority. Show them how CanIRank's Website Strength score has been increasing steadily, and they'll feel comfortable things are on the right track even if Google hasn't yet caught on (or if something outside of your control, like technical issues or bad content, is still holding their website back.

Building a Traffic Machine

The "Traffic Machine" is an escalating spiral of SEO and content marketing goodness. It works like this: once your website has reached a certain level of Website Strength and Website Relevancy, you'll be able to rank for low competition keywords in your niche simply by creating a well-targeted page and pushing the page out to your social channels, email/ RSS subscribers, and existing readership.

A portion of those readers will link and share your new content, which slightly increases your Website Strength and Website Relevancy. The new ranking will also gain you a marginal increase in site visitors, some of whom will become regular subscribers and followers. After a few cycles with low competition keywords your website now has a higher Website Strength and Website Relevancy, so you can rank for keywords that are a bit more competitive. And those new rankings will bring yet more traffic, links, and followers.

This virtuous cycle continues as long as you are able to feed it with compelling content! Getting the Traffic Machine started is easier than you think: most people fail because they start off targeting keywords that are too difficult, and since writing content that nobody reads isn't much fun, they soon give up.

CanIRanks' Ranking Probability score helps you find keywords that you can rank for without a lot of link building or other promotional work: look for scores above 85-90%. If you aren't finding many keywords with scores in that range, chances are your website hasn't reached sufficient Website Strength and/or Website Relevancy yet. Look at the Competitive Analysis heatmap for a few of the keywords to determine which one is the culprit: you usually want to see your Website Strength and Website Relevancy right around the Ranker average in order for a keyword to be easy.

Pitching new clients

Quick: a prospective customer is on the phone and they want to know how you can help them. Landing this client could be a game-changer for your SEO consulting business, so you better come up with something fast!

As the introductions are being made you open CanIRank and run a report for their website and primary keyword. Glancing over the report, you immediately spot several issues. Compared to the top rankers, the prospect's site has much less thematic content related to the keyword topic. In addition, too many of their inbound links use unnatural anchor text, a risk factor for Google's Penguin algorithm.

You download a beautiful full-color PDF of the report and send it to the prospect while he's still on the phone. Explaining the role of each of the Ranking Factors in the report, you recommend adding a new tutorials section to the site to boost their thematic content, along with a brand-building campaign to improve their link profile and rescue them from Penguin.

Finding new content ideas

The ideal website content is information that:

  1. Potential customers are looking for
  2. Your website can successfully rank for
  3. Engages customers in a way that brings them closer to a sale

Brainstorming usually works great to come up with a dozen or so possible keywords that meet these criteria, but what do you do when you've exhausted all those ideas?

CanIRank can help by building a database of Keyword Ideas that grows every time you use the tool. We automatically look at keywords your competitors are ranking for, keywords the search engines consider related, and words that are semantically-related.

Then we let you sort and filter all of those by Search Volume (terms your customers are looking for), Cost-Per-Click (terms that convert to a sale), and Ranking Probability (terms your site can rank for). You can also use our exclusive "Keyword ROI" metric to find the keywords that offer the best balance between value and difficulty specifically for your website.

Optimizing workflow for maximum impact

Many SEO consultants excel at one or two SEO strategies and end up concentrating all of their work in those areas regardless of what a particular site needs. CanIRank's targeted Action Plans offer a compelling alternative.

Each Action Plan is generated based upon the specific needs of the website, with priority given to Actions that will have the largest positive impact on the site's weaknesses, whether that's on-page SEO, website authority, or link anchor text. In addition, the Actions recommended are varied to ensure maximum diversity in link profile and reduce the risk of triggering a search engine penalty.

Finally, the Action Plan is customized to the skill of the user: as you begin CanIRank will recommend Actions designed to teach best practices and avoid getting penalized by search engines. Once you've gained a bit of experience, the Actions become steadily more sophisticated to help you take your SEO work to the next level.

Crafting a perfectly-optimized page

Good on-page SEO now requires a lot more than simply repeating your keyword a certain number of times, or targeting a certain keyword density. Today, a well-optimized page needs to succeed in three main areas:

  1. Keyword Relevancy: including the target keyword and variations
  2. Topic Relevancy: including content relevant to the broader keyword topic
  3. Page Quality: avoid triggers for Google's Panda algorithm

To help you achieve ideal Keyword Relevancy, CanIRank measures how your keyword usage compares to top-ranking results and gives you an at-a-glance graph: "Under-optimized" means you're not giving search engines enough clues as to what your site is about. "Ideal" means your site has just the right amount of keyword usage. "Danger Zone!" means you're excessively repeating the keyword phrase and risking a search engine penalty. Finally, it's not just about how many times you use the keyword: good on-page SEO exploits the semantic nature of HTML to help search engines understand that some words on your site are more important than others. We'll show you whether it's most effective to include the keyword in your title tag, headers, anchor text, bold, etc.

Topic Relevancy provides context that helps search engines be certain your page is really about the keyword topic, and doesn't just happen to mention it.

Page Quality has become an increasingly important factor since Google launched their Panda algorithm update to attempt to demote low-quality pages like content farms, machine-generated pages, spun content, and other junk that clutters up the internet. Staying out of Panda's way requires eliminating or reducing the number of triggers to avoid becoming a false positive:

  1. Duplicate content that exists on many other sites, such as product descriptions
  2. Heavily templated content, with only a few elements changing between pages
  3. "Thin content", with very little substance
  4. High bounce rate
  5. No strong brand

To help you avoid getting into trouble with Panda, CanIRank compares your page content to the competition, and includes Action Recommendations explaining how to fix any Panda-related issues with your site.

Choosing what keywords to target with a new page

An adventure travel company is launching a new guide service on Mt. Rainier, and wants to know which keywords they should target with their page title and other key on-page elements. They use CanIRank to run a New Content report to see if a page on their site would be competitive for the keyword "Mt Rainier".

CanIRank tells them a top ranking would be worth an additional 19,800 monthly visitors to their site, and save them a whopping $15,552 in PPC advertising costs. Those are tempting numbers, but unfortunately, it looks like a top ranking won't come easy: their Ranking Probability score is only 54%.

Both their Page Strength and their Website Relevancy are way below that of the current top rankers. They click the button to get suggestions for less competitive keywords and find several interesting alternatives: "how to climb Mt Rainier" is much less competitive but would deliver only 20 visitors, and "Mt Rainier expeditions" would be worth 30. Finally they see "Climb Mt. Rainier", worth 480 monthly visitors and $194/ month in ad costs, and their Ranking Probability is a respectable 76%.

They decide to target this keyword with the new page. It looks like they'll need to improve their Page Strength and Website Relevancy to be competitive, so they also plan to boost those areas by featuring the new service on their home page and writing a series of blog posts with first-person accounts of successful Rainier climbs.

Examining the impact of a potential change

You're in charge of online marketing at a major clothing brand, and though your website enjoys a stellar reputation and lots of link authority, it doesn't receive a lot of search traffic because most of the content is just regurgitated catalog descriptions that already exist on hundreds of other websites.

You'd like to fix this by adding a new section to the site where fashion bloggers can contribute style advice, and need to make the business case to your boss. Firing up CanIRank, you enter a number of fashion-related keywords, select "New Content" report type, and enter the URLs of a few pages on your site at the same level in the hierarchy as the new style advice section will be.

CanIRank tells you that some keywords, like "cocktail dresses" and "suits for business" are too challenging for your site, but others like "best travel shirt", "how to wear a scarf", and "resort cover-ups" should be obtainable.

Finding low-hanging fruit to get rankings quickly

"OK, I'll give it a try. But if we don't see results within a month or two I'm going elsewhere." No matter how many times you explain to clients that sustainable SEO is a long game, they still insist on seeing rankings quickly.

The best solution I've found is to run through the entire ranking process on some low-hanging fruit— keywords you know the site will rank for quickly.

So, how to find the low-hanging fruit? You can use CanIRank's "New Content" report to see how competitive a typical page on your site would be for a certain keyword without even having to build a new page first.

Diagnosing a Google penalty

Suspect your site might be suffering from a Google penalty? You can use CanIRank to see if that's really the case, and identify some possible causes of the penalty.

First, create Existing Content reports analyzing a few keywords you think your site would rank for if it weren't suffering from a penalty. If CanIRank gives you a low Ranking Probability score or your scores in one or more Ranking Factors are low, that's probably what's holding you back, and not a penalty at all.

Safely and scalably building links

Link building is where many sites get into trouble. Google aggressively cracks down on anything they perceive to be "unnatural" links, but the definition of "unnatural" is changing all the time.

Avoiding penalties

Keep in mind that search engine penalties are primarily trying to punish and counteract the efforts of bad actors who are trying to manipulate search engine results. Avoiding penalties then, is often a matter of finding the right balance between smart proactive marketing and "manipulation".

Managing outsourcer tasks

Outsourcing can be a great way to reduce the cost of SEO, with a number of reasonably-qualified freelancers on sites like Elance or oDesk willing to perform basic SEO tasks for $10-20/ hr.

Figuring out how to go from page 3 or 4 up to page 1

Build a customized Action Plan

Many SEO consultants follow a standardized checklist for every new SEO campaign. But every website is different, and every keyword is different. Sometimes a site has plenty of links, but their content doesn't address the keyword topic adequately enough.

Monitoring the work of your SEO Consultant or Agency

Hiring an SEO consultant shouldn't feel like a visit to an auto mechanic: "Sorry, it looks like your rear discombobulator disc has jittered the flux capacitor, which is why you're getting that squeaking noise, and uh, that'll be $1200 bucks." You have a right to know what's being done and how it's going to help your rankings.

Demonstrate progress and value delivered

Clients want to see progress right away, but as a smart SEO you know the slow and steady approach is the safer, more sustainable path to SEO nirvana.

Automate keyword research

Keyword Research is one of the most essential SEO tasks, but also one of the most time-consuming.

Monitoring other SEO tools so you don't have to

In the previous 5 years, the amount of data available to marketers has grown enormously: tweets, shares, likes, links gained and lost, new rankings, ranking increases and decreases, MozRank, PageRank, Page Authority, Website Authority, indexed pages, indexation rate, error rate, click-through-rates, conversion rates, churn rates, open rates...

CanIRank helps you connect the two with a smarter rank tracking solution that just works.