KGR With a Twist (Case Study Round Two)

I ran a test with KGR keywords somewhere in the last 9 months or so with... mixed results. Yes it’s a relatively easy way of finding quick low comp keywords but it’s also a lot of work to produce content for that low volume of searches and they don’t rank #1 instantly with no links.

If you don’t know what KGR keywords are - give it a Google. It’s a term someone invented to sell some shit but the theory might be relatively sound and there’s enough third party anecdotal evidence to interest me. The basic idea is finding keywords with a low search volume that also has low allintitle competition.

I honestly think the concept is outdated and RankBrain kind of kills the whole idea because who cares about allintitle when they use the intent better than the keywords. But let’s see what happens.

A couple of changes this time:

A) I’ve automated the keyword research entirely. Mostly did this before but I too, it a bit further this time so it won’t become the bottleneck. My limit is going to be producing enough content - not keywords.

B) I’m going with parasites. Yes, there are drawbacks to this but I’m going into a lot of different niches where I don’t have (and don’t intend to have) established domains. If they rank faster that’s a bonus.

C) I’m not going with Amazon keywords. SERPs are different in product keywords and the idea of no backlink SEO appeals to beginners who can convert easily with Amazon links but I’m not looking for that type of traffic here. I’ll be targeting evergreen info keywords with CPA and affiliate offers.

D) I'm looking at improving the offsite results a little. Anyone who's heard me talk about SEO knows I don't put any stock into the usual '2.0 tier' stuff but I have a theory or two I've been wanting to practice. This is partly based on something I heard a while back that I've been wanting to test and this seems like the time to do it.

As for the content:

I’m not really keen on writing thousands of words for low search volume keywords. I suspect the failure rate will be high and I can’t justify the time or outsourcing cost for making a lot of great unique content until I get an idea of how viable this will be.

To begin with I'm doing a mix of unique/curated content. It's not the ideal for ranking but it does rank and the theory is that if the competition is low enough I'll be able to get scalable traffic.

I'm also testing that vs some entirely unique content either written by myself or outsourced. I'll track the results separately.

So far:

I'm not known for my patience. Decided I wanted to try this out last night so I set up the system, got a list of keywords to target and put a half dozen live. Outsourced some others which I'm waiting for now and setup rank tracking.

We're actually on page 2-3 for a couple of the first keywords which is a good start.

Next steps:

Going to scale the content a bit more. I want a good mix of different content types so I can give this a proper test. Once I'm burned out on writing content I'm going to start putting together the offsite side of things. I expect to have that up and running before the end of the day.

Disclaimer:

I do a lot of SEO/IM marketing for my own stuff but I've never sold on BHW or in the 'make money online' niche in general. Mostly because I disdain customer service and would rather drive traffic for someone else's headache.

But I have been considering starting up a BST or two here on the forum and there seems to be a market for KGR related keywords. I figured I'd be upfront that I might start selling a related service however since most people seem to want Amazon keywords for it there's not a whole lot of overlap.

And an extra disclaimer: The idea here might be low comp keywords which (hopefully) rank faster but 'fast' is still a relative term in SEO. I'll be working on a bunch of other areas while this is ongoing but a large part of this is going to be sitting around and waiting to see what happens.

I'll update with rankings and anything interesting as it happens.

Can you show some data ?

Good luck with this.

Not trying to hijack here, but the KGR is an interesting methodology.

I saw a presentation by Doug 3 1/2 years ago where he used an example long tail to target.
Now me being me, always interested in researching and testing seo and keyword research, tried out what he'd talked about.



So when I checked it through LTP and 3 other tools, I emailed him to ask for more info.

I asked; the-keyword-golden-ratio, you use the example of; "how to build a kegerator from scratch". I just wondered how easy it was for you to rank that keyword.


His reply;
And to your question... I never used the KW revealer so I can't comment at all. It was an example off the cuff there and I never tried to write that article or anything. If you do, let me know how it turns out.


Moral of the story is, he was explaining how easy it was to rank for the keyword "how to build a kegerator from scratch", yet never actually did anything to prove it.

SirTop said:

Can you show some data ?

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I'll share traffic and ranking data when I have it. The actual search volume gets a bit iffy when you go this low down so my actual plan at the moment is to use it while filtering keywords and then completely disregard it since I can't control whether or not those numbers will be accurate. I look for terms which could be evergreen with a solid enough trend but you see some weirdness in the small traffic keywords.

@MisterF Not massively surprised. It was a clever idea to flog some affiliate shit and build himself a bigger YouTube following. I decided to go with his numbers because people would know what 'KGR' meant and it's a good a place to start as any but I'm not convinced a huge amount of testing really went into getting there.

I've said this before in the past but I think this works in key phrases where Google doesn't fully understand the intent and relies more on the phrase. I've certainly got some KGR keywords from the previous test which rank solidly #1 and bring in consistent traffic. I have others from that same test which never broke page 2.

This might mean it's worth doing if you can look at the SERP and it looks like it's relying more on the phrase than the intent - however my last test was with limited data and about as far from a scientific test as you could get really. I'm hoping to get some better numbers this time.

From where do you get monthly search volume data ?

I really don't like writing content for projects I'm not convinced about. I might just outsource the rest of this content curation because I'm already bored of it.

Sanjuwa said:

From where do you get monthly search volume data ?

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At the moment I'm getting it from a few different sources but for the initial testing I'm narrowing it down to just the ones showing 200+ in US search volume.

I think this could work, KGR role is merely an reminder for doing SEO in low competition area and it’s definitely on my list trying soon.
Good luck.

I've been doing KGR all this year over 3 sites, and like you OP am moving away or adding a new dimension in order to scale. Only 5 - 10% of KGR terms will bring in decent traffic the rest a few clicks a day if lucky, and that's with unique content.

I'm also testing parasites and so far Youtube and Pinterest boards have performed the best for KGR. My twist is increasing the monthly search and allititle numbers, then adding extra filters to the research, such as 4+ words in term and -500,000 competing sites.

Still testing this idea! The cost in time and money for content is the biggest draw back to KGR so am going to also test some doorway page ideas, plus KGR PPC.

I'll be following with interest!

dandan594594 said:

I've been doing KGR all this year over 3 sites, and like you OP am moving away or adding a new dimension in order to scale. Only 5 - 10% of KGR terms will bring in decent traffic the rest a few clicks a day if lucky, and that's with unique content.

I'm also testing parasites and so far Youtube and Pinterest boards have performed the best for KGR. My twist is increasing the monthly search and allititle numbers, then adding extra filters to the research, such as 4+ words in term and -500,000 competing sites.

Still testing this idea! The cost in time and money for content is the biggest draw back to KGR so am going to also test some doorway page ideas, plus KGR PPC.

I'll be following with interest!

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You might consider looking at your results for trends on page 1 SERPS. If Google is ranking other pages with the words/phrase in the title I suspect the intent of the search matters less than the keywords.

I've botted Pinterest stuff in the past but don't tend to like it for search traffic. It sucks unless they're on a desktop with a Pinterest account already.

I've botted YouTube stuff in the past and was actually looking at it yesterday when I started this project up. It might be the way to go but does bring in an extra bottleneck of getting YouTube accounts. A cool tip though. If you happen to spot any KGR keywords with a YouTube video ranking I'd be interested to see, so far I've only come across broad niche videos ranking.

It seems your in the same boat as me. You know there something to KGR, but somethings missing!

The only other direction to go rather than mass post creation, is treat each KGR term as a high comp keyword and go to town hitting them with pillar post style content. That would certainly increase the success rate.

I have used KGR and rank for the first page for a bunch of keywords such as does home depot take apple pay and how to use kohl's merchandise credit online (not my money site). Some uses of KGR would be on your own PBN's to establish a real website with traffic and even for guest posting. Someone wants to guest post on your site, find some KGR's in your niche. Get traffic, make money, rinse and repeat.

I am interested in the BST for KGR keywords. It would be interesting if someone could make some software to automate the KGR process, find keywords, check volume, check allintitle etc etc.

What I do for content is have it written for 1,300 words. Put keyword in title, in url and 1 H2. Rest of the article can have other faqs with h3's or additional info.

Some more content went up and I've outsourced some more which will hopefully go up after the weekend. Expecting to get the time later today to set up the offsite side of things and leave that running.

After that I'm pretty much done with this for a while. Tracking is running so I'll check back in and see what the ranking looks like.

dandan594594 said:

It seems your in the same boat as me. You know there something to KGR, but somethings missing!

The only other direction to go rather than mass post creation, is treat each KGR term as a high comp keyword and go to town hitting them with pillar post style content. That would certainly increase the success rate.

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There's an argument for this in some cases. If you're building up a domain in a niche you know (or at least heavily suspect) will convert in the long term then maybe it's worth doing.

Writing huge chunks of content for small drips of cold traffic is either going to be crazy expensive or incredibly hard to scale. Mass producing stuff which fails 70% of the time is still probably a better ROI.

EntertheDeals said:

I have used KGR and rank for the first page for a bunch of keywords such as does home depot take apple pay and how to use kohl's merchandise credit online (not my money site). Some uses of KGR would be on your own PBN's to establish a real website with traffic and even for guest posting. Someone wants to guest post on your site, find some KGR's in your niche. Get traffic, make money, rinse and repeat.

Click to expand...

EntertheDeals said:

What I do for content is have it written for 1,300 words. Put keyword in title, in url and 1 H2. Rest of the article can have other faqs with h3's or additional info.

Click to expand...

I like the idea of the guest posts to target the keywords but also dings the scaling. Unless maybe you do some reverse outreach and email people in your niche asking if they want to guest post.

I agree with the content strategy. You don't want to go old school 4% density with a 5+ word phrase or something.

The good news is we've got our first page 1 ranking. Obviously way too soon to mean much however it does bode well that the relatively scalable content can at least dance to the first page.

I need to make some tweaks to the offsite side of things and then get a bit more content together. It's dull work but I'll need at least a fair few up to get an idea if it's really worth properly scaling.

SEOMadHatter said:

The good news is we've got our first page 1 ranking. Obviously way too soon to mean much however it does bode well that the relatively scalable content can at least dance to the first page.

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I'm testing the high quality content idea, with a very optimized 3.5K word article. Not scalable but worth testing!

SEOMadHatter said:

I really don't like writing content for projects I'm not convinced about. I might just outsource the rest of this content curation because I'm already bored of it.

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About this - Why does everybody work alone? If you put 4 Grads in a house together in a cheap, but nice, central european city for a couple of months and wrote solid content for 6 months you could absolutely smash it

Holy shit no wonder Google is under fire for the snippets. This niche is rammed full of them.

I added another couple of articles to the first niche. It didn't take that long and I could definitely show a decent VA how to scale and run this setup for me. Starting to think about the numbers but I think I'll wait and see how the first lot go.

dandan594594 said:

I'm testing the high quality content idea, with a very optimized 3.5K word article. Not scalable but worth testing!

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Absolutely not my thing. If you're spending a lot of time/money on content I'd rather do it with something I'm going to backlink and rank for a big keyword.

ChesterF said:

About this - Why does everybody work alone? If you put 4 Grads in a house together in a cheap, but nice, central european city for a couple of months and wrote solid content for 6 months you could absolutely smash it

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Good question - with a couple of answers.

First of all - not everybody does. I'm in a coworking/living place just now and launched a new project with a guy here last night and another due to go live in a week or so.

Yes, if there were 4 SEO's working solidly for 6 months they'd likely build a pretty solid site but there's a bunch of reasons this doesn't work. Your work might be split 4 ways but so is your profit. If I can pay someone in Asia a few bucks to write an article that beats giving up 75% of the site.

SEOMadHatter said:

Yes, if there were 4 SEO's working solidly for 6 months they'd likely build a pretty solid site but there's a bunch of reasons this doesn't work. Your work might be split 4 ways but so is your profit. If I can pay someone in Asia a few bucks to write an article that beats giving up 75% of the site.

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I'm just trying to work out whether the pro competition effects of having a bunch of good quality people work together on something like this would be positive sum even accounting for the rev split, especially given the quality differential from outsourcing to east asia

There are BST for KGR words in BHW. Also check allintitle.co. Not my site and it gets expensive.

EntertheDeals said:

I have used KGR and rank for the first page for a bunch of keywords such as does home depot take apple pay and how to use kohl's merchandise credit online (not my money site). Some uses of KGR would be on your own PBN's to establish a real website with traffic and even for guest posting. Someone wants to guest post on your site, find some KGR's in your niche. Get traffic, make money, rinse and repeat.

I am interested in the BST for KGR keywords. It would be interesting if someone could make some software to automate the KGR process, find keywords, check volume, check allintitle etc etc.

Click to expand...

ChesterF said:

I'm just trying to work out whether the pro competition effects of having a bunch of good quality people work together on something like this would be positive sum even accounting for the rev split, especially given the quality differential from outsourcing to east asia

Click to expand...

Outsourcing to Asia gets a bad rep. Plenty of writers there with good quality work. You pay more than peanuts but less than 75% of the site.

You don't need to be in the same house of course. You could get 4 SEO's together remotely and try this - just put up a JV thread but the domain would have to be owned by a company not an individual. Otherwise, everyone does 6 months of work for the owner to do a runner.