Hey, what’s up? Welcome to the final lesson of Module 1. In the last lesson you found a handful of topics that your Linkreators are going to want to link to and share. And that already puts you way ahead of most other people doing SEO right now. And now that you’ve found a topic that your Linkreators already share, it’s time to find a keyword that matches that topic.
That’s exactly what you’ll learn how to do in this lesson. But first, let me show you why it’s important to do keyword research AFTER you find your Linkreators. You see most people start off their SEO campaigns by firing up a keyword research tool.
They enter a few random terms into the tool and pick a keyword out of thin air. Needless to say, this isn’t how pros do keyword research. For example, let’s say you run a site about weight loss. Most people would head to a keyword research tool and choose keywords related to weight loss with decent search volume and low keyword difficulty scores.
In theory, that sounds great. In theory. But in reality, here’s the problem with that approach. The keywords that you pick from a tool MIGHT be on a topic that the linkreators will link to but then again, maybe not. And unless you do the research from lessons 3 and 4 of this module, you won’t know until you’ve already created your content. And by then, it’s too late.
Instead, it makes much more sense to find Linkreator-focused topics FIRST and then tailor your keyword research around those topics. That way, when you publish your content, you’ll have an army of influencers happy to share your content with their audience (and link to you). Make sense? Good. Now before we get into the detailed steps, a quick word of warning: as you go through this process, you want to avoid long tail keywords.
Here’s why: As you probably know, long tail keywords are keywords that have low search volume and low levels of competition. For example, instead of trying to rank for a tough keyword like “best digital camera”, someone taking the long tail approach would try to rank for keywords like “best Nikon camera under $500” or “best digital camera for a small business”. The idea behind this approach is that the 5 long tails are easier to rank for.
And if you add the search volume of those 5 long tail keywords together, they equal the search volume of a single high-volume term. On the surface, that sounds like a GREAT strategy. But in reality, it simply doesn’t work. Why? Two reasons.
First, Google now understands two different people searching for two similar keywords want essentially the same thing. For example, back in the day Google would look at two long tail keywords like “retro video game consoles” and “retro gaming consoles” as completely different.
Today, Google considers them one and the same. Which means they show very similar results for both keywords. The upside is this: When you optimize your Power Page around a single, medium tail keyword, you’ll rank for hundreds of long tails automatically.
In other words, when you have a Power Page on your site, Google will WANT to show your page to as many people as possible. For example, according to SEMrush, this page on Backlinko ranks for several thousand different keywords. Needless to say, my page isn’t optimized for all of those different keywords.
In fact, it’s optimized around a single, medium tail keyword – YouTube SEO. And because it’s a Power Page that has lots of backlinks, Google goes out of their way to show it to users that search for anything related to my topic. The other big problem with long tails is that the long tail approach dilutes your site’s link authority also known as PageRank. After all, for the long tail keyword approach to work, you need to publish LOTS of pages each optimized around a different, long tail term.
And all those pages can really hurt your SEO. Why? It’s simple: the more pages you have on your site, the more your link authority gets diluted across those pages. For example, at Backlinko right now, I’ve published relatively few blog posts.
And as you’ve already seen, I rank for some very competitive keywords above sites with thousands of pages. Which means that the authority that I get from backlinks concentrates in those few pages. And because each page on my site has a lot of concentrated link authority, they rank for super competitive keywords.
But if I had 10,000 pages, my link authority would be diluted across all of those 10,000 pages. And my site wouldn’t rank nearly as well. In fact, back when I did SEO client work, I had a little secret weapon that would usually help improve my client’s rankings within days. What was that secret weapon? Deleting pages from their site.
When I deleted pages, their link authority would be more concentrated on their important pages, and their rankings would improve. Specifically, I’d set out to delete what I call “Dead Weight” pages. What are Dead Weight pages? Dead weight pages are pages like: low-quality blog posts, archive pages, and duplicate or thin content pages.
And when you delete these Dead Weight pages from your site, your rankings can improve without building any links or doing anything at all. I have lots more on deleting Dead Weight pages in a bonus lesson below this video. But for now, let’s dig deep into Medium Tail Keywords. So, when you create your “Power Page”, you want to optimize it around a medium tail keyword.
But you may be wondering: What if you have a site or a client’s site that’s targeting a keyword like, “muffler repair Atlanta”. Or what if you’re an ecommerce site that wants to rank a category page for “cheap yoga mats”? No problem. If that’s the case you don’t want to optimize your Power Page around one of those highly commercial terms. I mean, it’s pretty much impossible to create a valuable piece of content around a keyword like “muffler repair atlanta”.
So if your target keyword is a buyer keyword like “muffler repair atlanta”, you still want to create a Power Page and optimize it around a medium tail keyword. And you can use your Power Page to increase the rankings of your buyer-focused keywords. How? A process called Authority Sculpting. Here’s how it works: First, optimize your product or category page around a buyer keyword like “cheap yoga mats”. Just like you normally would.
Then, create your “Power Page” around a related keyword, like “yoga for weight loss” or “yoga poses for a bad back” whatever your Linkreators are going to link to. Finally, use internal linking to funnel authority FROM your Power Page TO your product and category pages… and your product pages will get a rankings boost. How does this work? Like I mentioned in lesson 2, a while back I analyzed million Google search results.
And our data showed that a site’s overall link authority strongly correlated with higher Google rankings. In other words, if your site has a lot of links pointing to it, all of the pages on your site will rank better even if you don’t happen to have a lot of links pointing to a particular page.
Let’s look at a quick example: SEO That Works graduate Freddie Chatt is a marketer at the ecommerce site Amara.com. His first Power Page was optimized around the Medium Tail keyword “bedroom decorating ideas” Freddie promoted his Power Page using the techniques from Module 3. And those techniques helped him build a bunch of high-quality backlinks to his page.
So: once Freddie’s Power Page had some authoritative backlinks, he linked from this Power Page to a few of Amara’s high-priority category pages. And the rankings and organic traffic to those pages increased significantly. I have more detail about how Authority Sculpting works in a bonus lesson below this video. With that out of the way, let’s get into the details behind how Medium Tail Keywords work. So what is a medium tail keyword, exactly?
Well, we already learned why directly targeting long tail keywords is a huge mistake. On the opposite end of the spectrum from long tails we have high-volume “head terms”. These are super competitive 1-2 word keywords like “life insurance” and “digital marketing”. The obvious problem with head terms is that they’re insanely competitive. So with long tail keywords and head terms out, what’s left? Medium tail keywords.
Medium tails aren’t impossible to rank for keywords like “life insurance” or “digital marketing”. And they’re not long tail keywords like “best life insurance policy for a 55 year old” or “ marketing tips for Pinterest”. They’re keywords like “affordable life insurance” and “digital marketing strategies”. The question is: How can you find medium tail keywords?
Here’s the 3-step process.. Step 1: Enter a Linkreator-focused term into a tool Step 2: Sort by search volume
Step 3: Choose a medium tail keyword from the middle The first step is to enter a keyword that describes your linkreator-focused topic into your favorite keyword research tool. I’m going to use SEMrush for this walkthrough. But you’re free to use any tool that you’d like. For example, let’s say that you run a site that sells healthy meal plans. And you notice that your linkreators tend to link to content on the topic of gluten free food. You’d simply enter “gluten free” into the tool. That’s step 1.
Step 2 is to sort the results. So when you get your list of results, sort them by average monthly searches. That way, the highest volume keywords are on top. At the top of the list you’ll see head terms that are almost impossible to rank for. These are keywords like “gluten” and “what is gluten”. At the bottom of the list, you have the long tail keywords, like “what grains are gluten free”. The middle of the list are largely made up of medium tail keywords.
These are keywords like “gluten free grains” and “gluten free products”. Finally, choose the keyword that fits best with a Linkreator-focused topic that you found in the last lesson. Now I obviously can’t give you specific search volume recommendations because it’s different for every industry. But honestly, you don’t want to worry that much about search volume anyway.
Like I mentioned earlier, when you optimize your Power Page around a medium tail keyword, you’ll naturally rank for hundreds or even thousands of different keywords. And with that, this lesson is complete. We covered a lot of ground in this lesson, so let’s quickly recap what you learned. In this lesson you learned that focusing 100% on long tail keywords is a huge mistake.
You also learned how your Power Page can boost the rankings of your product pages using a process called Authority Sculpting. Finally, I showed you the 3-step process that you can use to uncover Medium Tail Keywords. You want to optimize your Power Page around a Medium Tail Keyword that you find using this process.
Speaking of your Power Page, in Module 2, you’re going to learn step-by-step how to plan, create, and publish your first Power Page. It’s where you start to build on the foundation that you built here in Module 1. Specifically, in Module 2 I’ll show you my 7 Power Page Content Frameworks. You’ll learn about the ELP, the Trademark Technique, The Go-To Guidebook and more. But for now, download and fill out the worksheet for this lesson. And I’ll see you in the next Module.
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