This strategy utilizes the fact that that if new websites rank at the top for keywords that get thousands of searches per month, you can also rank high on a new website of your own or an already existing site using those keywords too. Young websites can also rank well if the right keywords are targeted and since these sites have had less time to establish links and be an authority in the given niche, the rankings are mostly due to on-page SEO and freshness of the site.

There are three ways you can find and utilize the best keywords and niches that have the potential to give you high ranking:

1 . The Free but Very Slow Method

This is the method for those who are on a tight budget or too scared to invest in what they are not sure of. It is very slow but effective nonetheless.

You need hundreds of keywords that are related to your niche and get between 500 and 5000 searches a month. This range is ideal because picking keywords that have less than 500 searches is not worth targeting, and more than 5000 searches a month are less likely to have a young site's ranking. You will need to build a batch of keywords after which you search for them on google.

Some website results will pop up whose names are unfamiliar and you do come across such, pass them through whois.com or any other WHOIS checker to see how old the domains are. If the sites are new and are ranking on the first two pages for the chosen keyword, take note of them. Use limeproxies or other similar tools to see the traffic they are getting and what keyword they are ranking for.

It can be a very slow process but is the only choice you have of you are on a budget as you will not have to spend a penny. Keep in mind also that it only takes a site to get a hit as you can find a lot of other keywords to target for by looking into other queries they are ranking for.

Speeding Up the Process a Notch

The free process is very slow and tiring as you will have to enter every query on google and take each site through WHOIS checker to see how old the domain is. To solve the problem of having to enter every query through Google, you can use tools like Scrapebox and SERPScraper.

Both tools will let you extract google search results for as many queries as you like.

At this point, it is worth mentioning that you will need to make use of a proxy or stand the chance of having your IP banned by google. A good proxy to use here is limeproxies as they offer you secure proxies and at a cheap rate. The number of proxies you want depends on the number of queries you are looking up and the speed you want to work with.

Interesting Read : Benefits Of Proxies For SEO And Keyword Research

Using a WHOIS checker is free and as you can check up to 500 domains at a time, it is convenient. Do not forget that you need a very young website with a lot of top-ranking webpages before you dive into their keywords.

Going Full Speed with a $500+ Budget

Using the DataforSEO tool is a great option if you want to scale things up. It allows you to pull out as many search results for as many queries as you want without having to use Scrapebox or proxies. The only downside is the pricing as you need a minimum deposit of $500 after the free trial.

Another tool that is great at combing through search results for all queries pretty fast is WhoAPI. They are cheap and effective.

You need to bear in mind that it all comes down to how effective your processes are. The better your process for combing through search results and verifying the age of the top-ranking domains, the better your chances are for finding valuable data.

The End Result

If new sites rank at the top for popular, intent focused queries, it is worthy to note the queries and the backlinks that helped in the ranking. This strategy will help you in good keyword research, backlink sources and good niches to go into for top ranking purposes.

With the use of google custom search tools, you can build your own search engine that allows you to search the entire web or just some specific sites. It is good for you to know what your competitors are up to as it concerns content marketing and with the use of SEO and custom search engines, it is very easy to do so. A custom search engine allows you to search the specific sites you see as your competition.

For this strategy, we will get rankings from Detailed on some of the world’s best design blogs and add them to google custom search engine.

With an intitle: search, you can find out the keywords that are focused on more than the rest for the month based search queries which tend to include fresher content ideas for you to imitate.

Targeting design trends with monthly search queries is a thing as you can see, and replicating this by someone interested in that niche would give a good ranking. Another keyword with high search volume and queries that change monthly is wallpaper. A good target for keywords as well. If you have a number of sites in your custom search engine, you can also see who is targeting search terms for 2020.

Interesting Read : How to Check If Your WordPress Blog Posts Are Ranking for the Right Keywords?

Depending on the niche you are in and the sites you are tracking, you can have great insights about your competitors with the use of queries like:

• Intitle:giveaway – allows you to see what audiences respond to best
• Updated on – combine with date sorting to discover updates on old content
• Last modified – same as “updated on”. It depends on the sites in your niche
• “we interviewed” – this is used to find people who are open to talking to multiple sites within your space

If you get creative with these insights, you can use messy looking terms when searching through the entire internet and have them lucrative when searching only through your competition.

A good point to note here is the fact that you can set your own sorting options to a degree in google custom search engine. Head to Search Features > Advanced and you’ll see the following:

This allows you sort by specified keys in page maps, rich snippets markup or metatags.

Here is an extract snippet from google’s documentation:

“For example, if your content is marked up with reviews rich snippets, you could enable sorting by rating (number of stars) or other numerical keys. If your content includes a PageMap identifying a publication, you can sort results by Publication Date.”

Going by this example, set up a key to sort pages based on the number of reviews received. It is the perfect scenario if the niche is one with a high tendency to get ratings and you want to know which pages to give more attention to or which products need extra promotion.

Here is what the keys look like:

Using it to search for the sites that have been added to your custom search engine and entering custom search terms, you will get results like the following:

Keep in mind that you do not have to do a selective search using a custom search engine as you can search through the entire web. The keys can be applied to most schema markup. Just be sure to have enough sites in your custom search engine if you are doing it manually to have useful results.

Other keys you can try that work on some sites are:

• Review-RatingCount
• Metatags-DateModified
• itemprop-DateModified

The first strategy was about finding high ranking young sites and mimicking their processes but you don’t have to apply the theory to only young sites as young pages can also benefit from it. To make the most out of this, you will need premium tools like Ahrefs or BuzzSumo. While these tools are not for free, you can model the entire process with a hack for free.

1 . The Free Way to Find Fast Ranking Pages

The first thing to do is to pick some big sites that publish content frequently. Don’t pick a site that publishes frequently but on different topics like Business Insider or Huffington. Instead, go for a site that is an authority in a particular field. If you are into personal finance, good sites that are an authority in the field are NerdWallet and Value Penguin.

Once you have picked some big sites, go to google and perform a “site:” search while changing the date range to find articles that were published from three to eight weeks ago. You should not get anything younger than three weeks because google usually ranks new articles high before they drop or rise to their rightful position. Going for articles older than eight weeks means the articles have had time to build links and it makes competing a little more difficult.

An example of this is seen below using NerdWallet as a case study and was carried out in September 2018:

You can see that the first article appears to be published recently and NerdWallet ranked well for related queries but it isn’t a good example and here is why. It wasn’t published in 2018 unlike what is stated and archive.org shows its real date of publication to be 2017. Its date is too way back and makes it unsuitable for the experiment. Go through other search results and you will find other articles like this on vinyl sliding:

It isn’t present on archive.org but a trick to find out its real date of publication is to open the images and see its upload date by checking its URL. It works on most WordPress sites.

The post carries the date July 2018 and the date on the image URL matches this so it is highly likely that’s the real date. Now you search for queries you suspect the article will rank for and verify this using the free keyword data from chrome extension like keywords everywhere.

Without having to spend any money, it is fair to say that this recently published page is ranking high.

2 .The Premium and Faster Alternative

Premium tools like Ahrefs and BuzzSumo will make the whole process of finding recently published articles easier.

Ahref’s Content Explorer is built to be of advantage in this area. It goes beyond helping you find recently published articles by the site as it also gives you an estimate on how much search traffic they are getting and what keywords they are ranking for.

Interesting Read : 18 Best Market Research Tools in 2019

BuzzSumo is also a great tool that shows you when a particular content was published and the content links and share counts. It doesn’t, however, show organic traffic stats.

Detailed blog in September 2018 used Ahrefs to perform a site search for Smashing Magazine after choosing the date range and then sorted them out based on articles with the highest search traffic, the following result was gotten:

You can see that Smashing Magazine published an article at the end of July and has hundreds of visitors searching for “august desktop wallpaper”.

This is feasible for any site and in any niche. It saves a great time and if you can afford it you should get it.

An example is seen in how quickly LinkedIn started ranking for their definition of B2B marketing:

Or the best performing newly published content for PCWorld:

It is not uncommon to stumble across a website from a search result and consider it a terrible one and wonder how it ranked so high. Well, next time you find something like this, stop in your tracks because you have found a great site to compete with. This strategy dwells on the fact that some sites rank well when they probably shouldn’t, or likely won’t one day. So you find out what works so well for them and use it to your advantage.

You may have your own thoughts of what a poor search result looks like, but by looking into forums you can also find keywords to target.

With no particular site in mind, let’s look at what poor search results look like using the makeup space niche. Makeup Talk is one of the most popular sites in the makeup industry and here are some of their top ranking contents:

A forum would be a better place to get answers to questions like “is ipsy worth it” as there are a lot of opinions in one place for you to benefit from. The Makeup Talk thread hasn’t had any updates in years and at that time, a lot would have been updated on those topics. A searcher will find new content more valuable than content from years ago making it easy to compete against.

Another way to find easy to target queries is by looking at what is ranking well in Reddit subReddits. R/Succulents helped with this keyword research of an intent focused query with a good amount of traffic:

The page contains only 15 comments which are pretty low for Reddit and not even one of them answers the searcher’s query. All comments are asking the same thing.

The “Today I learned something” section also ranks high for some interesting queries no matter the niche:

With an abundance of subReddits, RedditList is a great place to get an idea of sections of the site to look at.

Keyword research involves finding and making use of the right keywords that will drive traffic to your website and this is a key aspect of internet marketing. If ignored or not done properly, time, resources and money will all be wasted trying to rank for terms that are either too difficult to rank or do not provide quality traffic.

The following steps are useful when doing keyword research for your website:

1 . Finding Good Keywords and Avoiding the Bad Ones Using Limeproxies

The following criteria are what defines a good keyword.

1 . Low Competition

Limeproxies allow you easily track various keyword rankings anonymously so your IP doesn’t get banned. Doing this allows you to estimate the competition. The higher the competition, the more difficult the ranking for the keyword will be. So doing this saves you the waste of resources trying to rank a keyword that is not likely to get to the top.

2. High Search Volume

If nobody searches for a keyword then it is useless trying to rank for it so the higher the search volume is for a keyword, the better. The keyword search volume, however, needs to be at equilibrium with the competition and a good minimum is 200 global exact searches per month.

3. Relevance To Website’s Niche

Except for your website is about different topics, the keywords have to be relevant to the website’s niche.

4. Likely To Convert

Keywords that attract buyers and have good conversion rates are good keywords. Keywords that attract buyers often do this better than those that attract web surfers.

2. Using the Right Keyword Research Tool

Using the right keyword research tool is the backbone of the entire keyword research and so it has to be done properly. There are a lot of tools you can utilize for this purpose and using limeproxies will allow you to track keyword rankings in various locations. They enhance your SEO actions by helping you find the best keywords that will rank your site and webpage at the top. This is relevant if you are building a site for a local business or a specific region. For this purpose, you will need keywords that are specific to the region and limeproxies are a perfect choice as they offer proxy networks worldwide.

3. Pick a Domain Name Based On Keywords

Knowing how to pick the right keywords is the first step, and knowing how to build them into your site is also as important. Picking a domain name with your exact keyword contained in it is a good way to rank high in search engines.

There are two ways of picking domain names:

Exact Match Domain: if you are using this method of picking domain names, then you will have to purchase a domain that is an exact match to your keyword. In the past, this method had made low-quality sites rank high and in response, Google updated its ranking algorithm. It now works as google has taken down the penalty but know that if you are using this method, google could still go back to updating their algorithm and prevent this from being a thing.

Branded Domain: this method involves picking a name that reflects the name and business of the site without doing it too much. It is not exactly the keyword but contains it.

Things to Avoid

When picking a domain name, avoid placing dashes between the words. Adding numbers with no significance before and after the keyword is also wrong you should not attempt it.