It never ceases to amaze me how putting myself out there and simply interacting with others can lead to incredible things online. In this case, you’re about to read a phenomenal blog post, about the Keyword Golden Ratio, that came about as a direct result of me simply leaving a comment on another blog.
Last week, I commented on this niche site portfolio update written by Brad from Human Proof Designs. Not long after I commented, I received an email from Dom (the owner/founder of HPD) explaining that Brad was starting to answer my question about the Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR) in the comments when he realized that the answer could easily be an entire blog post. Since they’ve already covered KGR extensively on their blog – he asked if I would be willing to publish that blog post here.
I responded with an “absolutely!” And now you are in for a treat because Brad has written a stellar blog post that covers the Keyword Golden Ratio in great detail. The rest of this post is written by Brad…
After a recent post, Matt reached out to us to ask for some more info about KGR keywords, and so I offered to write this post for you guys, so that you can learn how to apply the process to your own niche sites.
In this post, we’re going to talk about some KGR hacks that:
- Allow you to target higher than usual search volume (Ie. more than the 250 searches per month that is normal with KGR). I call it the Rule of 63.
- Build a list of keywords with the highest likelihood of hitting the right ratio
- Show how to analyze keywords in a few seconds each once you have the initial list built.
If you’re not familiar with the KGR method of keyword research, Doug Cunnington over at FiveFigureNicheSite.com has popularized the method recently and explains it in this video:
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC0woVw-Sek[/embedyt]
Video Credit: Doug Cunnington – CLICK HERE to watch directly on YouTube
To give the TL;DW (Too Long; Didn’t Watch) version:
KGR stands for Keyword Golden Ratio; to get the ratio, you need 2 things:
1.) The “allintitle” Number of Results
When you do a Google search, you will notice the number of results show up, like this:The KGR method specifically uses the Google modifier allintitle: As you can see in the search above, when you search “internet marketing strategy” in Google, the search engine picks up 15.3 million results anywhere on the internet that include that specific phrase, or similar phrases, or anything related to internet marketing. When you us the modifier allintitle: however, you will see far fewer results:
This is because the modifier is telling Google: Only give me results where the EXACT phrase is used in a TITLE. So, no similar keywords, no phrases that include those words in a different order, not looking in the body of an article, or anything like that – just the exact phrase as you’ve typed in an article title.
One thing to note: You will see that when you do the allintitle: search the volume will show as 0 searches per month – that makes sense since nobody is regularly doing allintitle: searches with that phrase. To get the actual search volume, you need to consider the actual search volume from a traditional google search (no modifiers) in this case, 3600/mo as shown in the first image.
2.) Actual Monthly Search Volume for Keyword
Monthly Search Volume for the keyword. A really easy way to get this is to install the https://keywordseverywhere.com/ browser extension.What this does is show the search volume for any keyword right under the search bar in Google, like this:
Once you have a keyword, plus it’s search volume and the number of results in Google all you need to do is divide the number of results by search volume:
If the result is .25 or less, then you have a Golden Keyword – meaning there are not many results on the internet competing with this keyword.
If the result is .26 to 1, it isn’t quite as Golden, will be a bit harder to rank for. Over 1 is considered not really worth chasing.
To break it down simply, the KGR method says:
“Find me keywords that my competition isn’t targeting, so I can target those and get the traffic”
A result of.25 or less means you’ve found one of those.
Wait a minute…
At this point, people familiar with the KGR method might be saying, “Wait a minute…you need something else! You need keywords with less than 250 searches per month!”
While this is strictly true according to the strategy, with some caveats and understanding what a ratio is and what it is trying to communicate, we can squeeze even more value out of this strategy.
What is a ratio?
For our purposes here, a ratio is simply a way of using a number to answer a question. By nature, a ratio is designed to give an estimate and has a sweet spot. The further you get away from that sweet spot, the less accurate the answer.
An example:
Say you have a keyword with 10,000 monthly searches; you find out there are 2500 allintitle: results. Perfect! That’s a ratio of .25!
Not so fast. You’re competing with 2500 other articles at least. There are better fish in the sea.
There is a lower threshold too, like a keyword with 30 searches per month and allintitle: shows 30 results. That’s a ratio of 1, way higher than .25 so you’d just skip it. There’s only 30 results on the whole internet with that keyword in the title, but still the ratio tells you to skip it.
And really, at that low search volume you might be tempted to move on anyway.
This is why KGR is capped off at keywords with 250 searches per month or less.
So…?
So, when we say: “KGR works best for keywords with 250 searches per month or less” another way of saying it is “When a keyword has 250 searches per month, I want to find keywords that have less than 63 allintitle: results”.
Ok, where did the 63 come from??
You want to get .25 or less as a ratio for a keyword with maximum of 250 searches per month, right?
What is the highest number of results you can get that will achieve that ratio?
You guessed it: 63 (Remember? The “Rule of 63”?)
To put it in plain English, we’re saying that if you do an all in title search for a keyword with 250 searches per month and there are 63 or fewer results, go for it! It is a Golden Keyword.
So what’s the rule of 63?
The Rule of 63 states:
If a keyword with 250 searches per month returns 63 or fewer results, that is a small enough amount of results to make this keyword worth targeting.
Therefore, if a keyword with more than 250 searches per month also has 63 or fewer results, surely it is even more so worth targeting!
Let’s see a real world example:
Here we see a keyword with 1000 searches per month, and only 20 all in title search results!
I’d target that keyword.
How do you build a good list of keywords?
Now that you have Keywords Everywhere installed in your browser, and you can see the search volume of keywords as you type them in. You can just do a bunch of searches manually as you see different keywords, but that is going to be pretty demoralizing and time consuming.
Let’s build a good system.
Before we do that though, let’s set the stage. How can I use my time in the most productive way?
It is helpful to understand that since we are looking for results of 63 or less, or those with a ratio of .25 or less, we want to pursue longer phrases.
For example, a one word keyword is going to have way more all intitle results than a 3 word phrase, which will be less than a 4 word, 5 word, etc. Take a look:
Simply adding a second word cuts down the results number significantly.
Again, a 75% reduction.
Add another word or two and the number will keep going down.
So, longer phrases are more likely to have fewer results. That means that starting with longer phrases is more likely to result in KGR keywords.
So let’s go build that system now.
Step 1: Generate a list of about 1000 keywords
Go to https://www.hypersuggest.com/ and type in your keyword:
In this case, I did “best hockey” and chose the Both Suggest function, which means it finds keyword that both start with “best hockey” and end with “best hockey”.
You can see that by adding in “best” to the root keyword hockey, even in the first few results there is a nice blend of buyer keywords and info keywords.
Select the button above, and it will highlight all the keywords. Paste them into a Google Sheet, and then do a few more searches like:
hockey skates
hockey jerseys
hockey stick
Etc.
Each time, pasting them into the same Google sheet. There’s going to be some overlap, but that’s ok.
TIP: You can use a Google Sheets addon called “Remove Duplicates” if necessary.
Try out a few other tools too, like:
Answerthepublic.com
Ubersuggest.io
A bit hard to see, but there’s over 400 keywords pulled from answerthepublic.com; download the .csv file and add to your main google sheet.
Or use another tool of your choice, the main thing is we want a nice long list of keywords.
Step 2: Get Monthly Search Volume
Once you have the long list of keywords, you do need to get the monthly search volume so you can just copy the list from your main sheet (only 800 at a time) and then drop it into this tool:
https://searchvolume.io/
Step 3: Calculate Ratio
Once you’ve pasted it into the master sheet, add a row at the top and label the columns; then add a formula to column D and copy it down all the rows:
The formula is very simple: Search Volume divided by Number of results.
At this point, you can show the master sheet window beside a Google window, and follow the instructions below:
Then, it is simply a copy, paste, record over and over exercise.
Step 4: Gather KGR keywords and write articles
Dig out the ones with a ratio of less than .25 and write an article on it (or order articles) and watch them rank. You might not get them to the top of page 1, but in general they should get most of the way there!
Now for the paid tool version, which is much simpler:
Don’t forget to check out Doug Cunnington’s Five Figure Niche Site website. Doug actually dubbed the name and acronym for this method (KGR) and he teaches the method in great detail in his videos, on his blog and in his course…
Using Paid Tools:
Using Ahrefs to quickly gather a list of 1000 keywords:
- Go to Keywords Explorer
- Type in several seed keywords
- Select United States or the location of your choice
- Generate keywords
Once the report generates, select “All” under Keyword ideas:
As you can see, we’ve very quickly generated a list of 20,847 keywords. To pare this down:
- Set search volume to minimum 20
- Set Number of Words to 5
In this case, I set the search volume to minimum 30, because setting it to minimum 20 still left me with almost 1500 keywords:
Now that I have 890 keywords, simply:
-
Export as .csv
-
Follow Step 3 above (Add header row, formula, split screen, copy, paste, record).
Using this paid method, within 3-5 minutes you have a list of almost 1000 keywords and can very shortly begin the copy and paste exercise to generate the ratios.
I’ve shared some details of a site that has gotten to $100/month so far
Awesome write up. It’s cool when other people clarify and improve on your idea. 🙂 It just took 2 years of me telling people all about it for it to take hold.
Cheers
I hope it’s going to take a few more years for people to believe you and your KGR system Doug, that way I’ll have time to make some nice money before everyone realise how cool and efficient this techmique is :))
Awesome post Brad. Never heard of the “rule of 63” before. I would’ve tought that 63 all in title results would be a lot, at least for a site like mine that is 3-4 months old!
But it’s great to see other angles of this technique! Thanks
Thanks Doug!
Glad you were on the podcast a while back and shared the method! I have to say, coining the term was one brilliant link-building stroke of genius 🙂
Thanks Adrian!
The Rule of 63 is something I just had an epiphany on one day working through some KGR’s and seeing some high volume stuff and being like surely there’s a way to use them??
Yeah, 63 is the outer bounds, so the point isn’t to target lots of AITs with 63 results, the point is mostly don’t start out by cutting out keywords with more than 250, then start calculations – you’re leaving money on the table that way.
All the best with your site/s!