The infographic provided by Marketmuse.com

Long has creating content around specific keywords gone.  Google has increasingly updated their search engine algorithms with Hummingbird, Vincent’s Change and RankBrain.  You can no longer depend on creating content without it being topic relevant.

If you are following who ranks on page one of Google many times the specific keyword your searching for is not contained in the results being displayed in the Google search results.

To give you a better understanding I ran across this article on MarketMuse about topic modeling.  The author did a fantastic job addressing what this means. A thumbs up on this detailed article.

Topic Modeling for SEO Explained

Search engines like Google have a vested interest in concealing exactly how they rank content. But there’s only so much you can hide in the information age. It’s known that search algorithms use topic models to sort and prioritize the 130 trillion pages on the web. While we may never eliminate the unknowns of SEO, we can use what we do know to an advantage.

Search algorithms are getting increasingly intelligent. The introduction of Hummingbird made that abundantly clear. Writing high-ranking content is no longer a matter of using as many keywords as possible. Instead, the algorithm employs models that measure the topical comprehensiveness of a page. It then matches it to a search query.

As a result, comprehensiveness has become a proxy by which search engines measure content quality. Moreover, Hummingbird made it easier to determine how Google ranks content. Fortunately for us, it provided a baseline for experimentation. Comparing rankings before and after the update has proven to be insightful.

How Do We Know Search Engines Use Topic Modeling?

Using a nascent version of MarketMuse, Neil Patel’s data science team assessed the rankings of nearly 10 million words of content. Their goal was to see how Hummingbird was prioritizing pages. 

They found that the No. 1 factor for predicting high rankings is topic comprehensiveness. It’s even more important than page authority and backlinks.

Topic modeling is an integral part of search algorithms. We’re not the only ones who think so.

If you’ve got some time on your hands, you can read this extensive research paper by the University of Maryland. It details the many applications of topic models. These include query expansion, information retrieval, and search personalization.

It’s difficult to envision a way to efficiently produce SERPs without topic modeling. There’s too many pages on the web. The way in which queries are entered is vast and complex. There are various on-page SEO factors taken into account for each search.

What SEOs Need to Know About Topic Models

Enter, topic clusters. These are groups of content that contain pillar pages that broadly cover your focus topics. They are, in turn, supported and linked to by pages that deeply cover topics related to your pillars. Topic clusters give you breadth and depth in a way that’s easily navigated by both humans and search algos.

HubSpot did an experiment showing how interlinked topic clusters resulted in better SERP rankings. It’s likely that the clusters made HubSpot’s content easier to crawl. That allowed the algorithm to quickly find the pages relevant to a query.

The interlinked clusters signal breadth and depth of a topic. It can lead users through a seamless journey that answers their questions. After all, that’s the whole point of search. Getting those questions answered is called searcher task accomplishment. It contributes to higher ranking by increasing the authority of your pages. Every time a user visits and doesn’t bounce, that sends a positive signal to Google.

Topic Clusters and User Intent

Searcher task accomplishment is a relatively new industry term. But the concept itself is not new. It’s what happens when you focus on satisfying user intent. You aim to provide as many answers as possible with your content in an easily navigable way. In other words, creating topic clusters.

Optimizing content around user intent involves some critical thinking. You need to determine the potential questions a person may ask. However, throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks isn’t a great way to strategize. It’s a lesson many content marketers have learned the hard way.

Creating topic clusters is best done with a solution that thinks like a search algorithm. MarketMuse takes a keyword, what we prefer to call a focus topic, for one page. Then it takes it and analyzes tens of thousands of other related pages. In doing so, it identifies subtopics, questions to answer, and user personas to address with your content. It does all this by using artificial intelligence to generate detailed content suggestions.

The software helps produce an outline of what your content should look like. It removes much of the guesswork for your writers. We’re not the only company that provides this value, but we do it better than the competition. For that, we have an ensemble of natural language processing algorithms, information theory, neural networks, and semantic analysis to thank.

Like Google, we’re not about to give away our trade secrets. But we can break down for you how more rudimentary topic modeling algorithms work. This should illuminate the differences between simpler tools and sophisticated software platforms.

Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency

Introduced in 1972, TF-IDF analyzes keyword frequency in a document compared to a set of documents. It measures the number of times a word or combination of words appears in a body of text. Then it determines the degree of relevance the text has to that term by comparing it to a collection of other documents. But its greatest downfall is that it can’t account for relationships, semantics, or syntactics. That’s why it’s not very useful in today’s complex world of SEO.

Latent Semantic Analysis

Developed in 1988, latent semantic analysis (LSA) looks at the relationship between a set of documents and the terms they contain. Specifically, it produces a set of concepts related to the document and terms. LSA gets us closer to discovering synonyms and semantically related words. But it still can’t identify relationships between topics.

Latent Dirichlet Allocation

This topic model, created in 2003, is commonly used to identify topical probability and relationships between topic and subtopics. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) analyzes the connections between words in a corpus of documents. It’s able to cluster words with similar meaning. As a result you have a more in-depth semantic analysis than earlier topic models. LDA also utilizes a Bayesian inference model to identify terms related to a topic within a document. It improves those assumptions each time a new document is analyzed. Using LDA, you can get a reasonably precise assessment of the topics discussed in a document.

Article curated, original article is here

This article supports the evidence we see with Authority Snooper.  If you don’t already have Authority Snooper head over to Authority Snooper and pick the software that shows the evidence backing up topic driven content.

For years after LSI, Authority Model and implementation of RankBrain (Artificial Intelligence) creating content with the topic in mind has dominated the results.

The curated article above focuses prior to RankBrain the technology Google has been implementing.  The evidence is in the search results and focusing your topics around what Google expects from page one candidates is critical.

Bottom line to all of this is find what is working in the search results and model it.

The question of whether you should start a Niche Store vs General Store comes up more often than not.

This bothers many when starting a new online venture as to what they should sell and how.

Let’s first look at what the difference is.

What is a General Store?

Setting up a General Store is exactly that a website that is put together to add everything and anything.  When you stumble upon one of these types of stores many times it has hundreds if not thousands of items available to sell to who ever lands on that website.

The thought many times is the owner assumes that a large number of products is a winning strategy because a passerby site visitor ‘is guaranteed’ to get interested in something and place an order.

Are these assumptions accurate?

What are the benefits of a General Store?

In eyes of someone setting up a General Store some benefits exist.

• Research is not necessary?

That thought process is a fool’s way on how to run a business. Even with a General Store you still need to have an idea on your market and customer preferences.

I will admit you don’t always need to learn anything about the market: you just fill your store with any products that attracts your attention, and wait for the purchases.

• Product choice is huge and requires less research

General stores, you can add just about anything to your web pages. Thanks to technology, you can fill your general store with what ever tickles your fancy really quick.  In a couple of clicks many apps allow you to import an unlimited number of goods from multiple suppliers  to your own store. Once done your site visitors enjoy a large variety of assorted items to choose from.

• Potential buyers is really wide

Selling lots of different products, you can expect many different people to come to your store and make purchases from you. You are not working with a tiny customer segment; instead, you are basically dealing with the whole world because of all the varied interests.

Wait.

Sound too good to be true?

Your right if your suspicious because, frankly speaking, this business strategy is not an end all as it may seem.

Down side of a General Store

On first impression setting up a general store might seem like the “easy way” to setting up quickly and undemanding. Don’t be fooled by this seemingly simple concept – in fact, running such a store in an efficient way is a really challenging thing to do.

• Product-related tasks become overwhelming

Large-scale general stores require a diverse range of products, They need LOTs of items (hundreds of them and more), otherwise you will be out of place to potential customers.

With today’s technology  you can import large amounts of  items in seconds and set prices for them automatically in a couple of clicks from many sources.

But imagine how long it will take you to edit and customize product descriptions?

You don’t have a choice to leave your products with non-unique unedited content that leaves you open for store visitors to find the same products elsewhere for lower prices.

On the other hand if your depending on organic traffic from search engines having unedited content will place you in the omitted results at the bottom of the Google search pages. So you must have unique and interesting product descriptions for SEO.

• Intense Competition

If you thought this was the easy model to follow, your not the only one. The internet is flooded with general stores.

The is generally a business model that is a race to the bottom for prices. Unless you have an in for the lowest priced selling items, this puts you in the commodities arena.  This is where the Giants of online business feel comfortable competing. Not a place for the faint hearted and shallow pockets for thin margins.

You have nothing unique about yourself to show to your visitors other than price. Loyalty means nothing to this crowd.

• Organic Google Traffic?

Since you don’t stand for anything unique, it is hard to get a foothold in the search engines. As I mentioned previously unless you have presence as a brand expect to see yourself listed in the omitted results.

• Marketing difficulty is amplified

You have two strikes against you for lowest price and non-unique content that does not offer the new search algorithms something to put in front of visitors.

What you are left is social media, but reaching the proper market is becomes even more of challenge. Paid advertising requires you focus on what is relevant to your prospects. General Stores are just not setup in general to accomplish this.

If you have no previous experience in this business area, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the unstructured and unfocused data within a general store.

What is a niche store?

A niche store is about selling a narrow topic of products.  It’s not necessarily about selling a limited amount of products but a narrow range of related products.  If you pick your niche properly you will have a very deep vertical and also a very broad amount of products to sell in your store.

In other words, you have lots of ways to identify and create a product niche, and your ultimate choice heavily depends on your personal interests and preferences.

It is always a good idea to choose the niche that you’re passionate about – or, at least, you should know a lot about the products, market trends, and customers’ preferences in this business area.

This valuable knowledge is the key to benefiting from all the numerous advantages of a niche store

Niche store advantages

Let’s dig into why focusing on a niche store is to your advantage.

• Easier management

Niche stores are easier to manage period.  When you look at examples of large niche stores and their history on how they started most times they start with one product and grow from there.

I’m sure we can all find one product to start with.

• Well-defined product range

You will always know what products to offer next as opposed to a general store.

For example: if your looking at water sports, related products are easier to find and focus on as your growing.

General stores will always have you hunting for your next big thing they are much harder to define your path for success.

• Competition Manageable
  

If you have done your research right, generally competition will be moderate.  Sometimes you will even find the big brands not dominating your niche in the search results.

This becomes time to pounce, dominate and become the authority of your niche.

• Understandable customers’ profile

When you have a clear idea about the like-minded people who are passionate about the niche you are in this makes it easier to focus on the specific topics and products that attracts your potential customers.

It’s all about understanding who you need to reach in the most precise way, so you can deliver your valuable content to the visitors coming to your web pages. Being like minded,  visitors will be happy to join the community you’re building around your brand because of the common ground you share with them.

• Marketing strategy better defined
  

When you speak your buyers’ language and hang out exactly where they do, you are very likely to succeed in creating just the perfect brand image. Many times this results result in frequent repeat purchases!

Bottom line your marketing strategy becomes easier to manage.

• Efficient SEO

With a niche store and a narrowly defined product offer, you have an opportunity to focus on the intent of your store visitors.  Choosing keywords with intent such as buyer keywords or how to keywords set’s you up to be ranked in the search engines by design rather than by chance.

The most important thing about these keywords is their power to attract highly interested people to your store.

If a person Googles a word combination that is similar to your target keywords, and clicks on your website address because it gets shown on the search results page, the visitors intent is being matched with your search engine listing.  If you play your cards correct, more than likely, they will make a purchase from you sooner or later if their visitor experience has been met.

• Higher conversion rates

Because buying on the internet is becoming more an accepted way of obtaining anything conversion rates can be higher.

The key thing is to match the intent and deliver a satisfying experience when landing on your webpages.

This becomes much easier to do delivering the proper content and earning their trust when doing business on the internet.

General stores your message is scattered and earning trust is very difficult.  Big Brands can get away with very large and diverse product offerings. Trust has already been earned with Brands so the buyers have less hesitation parting with their money.

While the little guy has to earn every customer until they become the authority in their niche.

Niche store disadvantages

I guess it all depends how you define disadvantage.  Personally setting up any business requires work and I see niche stores easier to deal with once you know what direction to go.

• You need to conduct a research

This is the longest and hardest part of creating niche stores. When done right the rest is mechanical for building your web pages and adding content.

The most important part of this phase is developing a strategy on how you are going to deliver the best visitor experience once they land on your site.

Luckily if your using Slick Time Savers – Authority Snooper as your research tool, finding out what works for the particular niche you have chosen becomes clear.

Looking at the actual search results you will see the winning combinations that got them to page one of Google.

You will find out what type of content works.  Not all content is text based.  You need to know this if you are going to meet both Google and your visitors expectations.

Page format and User Experience Design (UX) are key today.

Chrome is a heat map combined with Artificial Intelligence, Google is closely monitoring how people react to web pages and makes adjustments according to best user experience.

In future blog posts I will dive deeper on what makes a good user experience.

The takeaway here is to pay attention on how the competition has their winning pages laid out and model from there.

•  One product at a time
  

Once you know if your chosen niche is viable to jump in, start building pages around one product first.  This is important to focus on going deep with each product.

If your product and niche research is done right this is the time to focus on the best visitor experience you can give your visitors.

• Go wide and deep

Everything hinges upon the research phase of building niche stores.

Knowing what appeals to your market is critical both for getting them to click and trip the proper signals telling Google your site delivers that positive experience.

• Tweak, test and repeat

Last phase is pay attention to whatever analytic program your using.

Certain pages/products will drive more traffic than others on your site.

When you model a winning combination and find success keep the pressure up, it’s about being found so take advantage of situation.

If your still confused or looking for an advantage try looking at Done For You Solutions available at Slick Time Savers Done For You Solutions

Need some help working out the details reach out to me via skype

edc01475 and let’s see how we can help you

Hi as I have been gathering information for my new blog post to expose what is happening with domination of the Google Search Results by Big Global Corporations, I literally stumble upon someone else who can say it much better than I.

I ran upon an article

How 16 Companies are Dominating the World’s Google Search Results

by Glen Allsopp

If you do anything with Google Search at all this is a must read, don’t hesitate

After you read this article, if you already own Authority Snooper kudos, if not I hope after reading what Glen has to say about world domination of Google Search Results by a few gets you motivated to use this tool to do your own domination of the Google Search Results 😉

I have a story of my own to add about how big Corporations can put the little guy at a disadvantage including out of business.

Years ago when the internet was just starting, I owned an Aquaculture business. I sold both fish and products that supported Aquaculture.

The product I sold was all the Krill and Plankton exclusively to every Zoo, Aquariums, Universities etc… in the USA.

It was good times for me. You have to understand that these places could not live without Krill or Plankton there was no substitute. They had to feed those million dollar animals, such penguins, flamingos, seals, and many other water animals it was required in their diets to stay alive, no substitute existed.

Every 15-20 minutes I spent on the phone with them meant $600-$1000 profit in my pockets, life was good then.

In addition my business extended to the pet retail business which was also extremely profitable.

My nearest competitor was a product that was more than twice the retail price with the dealers profit margin in the area of 20-15%. This company was really raping the dealers. In addition the product was extremely low quality. The only thing it had going for it was market reach, the company had the market sewed up as a Dominating Brand. (which by the way is what is happening with Google Today and the cause for this post)

I come along with a product half the cost with a profit margin much higher, the dealer was making more money per unit than what they were doing with the competitor. The only problem was market reach.

I had two things going for me. Price and the product had real ingredients. The ingredients real fish eat.

So I trained every dealer how to promote and sell my products. They listened because it meant more money in their pockets for every sale. Customers loved it because they were spending half and their pet fish just loved the food, a win win for everyone. Including me more money in my pockets.

This went on for a couple of years my product became so popular the competing product was only stocked at the bottom of shelves and only carried because those days in order to buy wholesale you had to buy a package deal to do business. That industry was controlled by coercion, what a way to do business forcing dealers to buy products they don’t want or need, WOW.

I was a breath of fresh air when I came along,  not only did I add to their bottom line in trumps they only needed to order what they needed.

Eventually my competition started reacting. I was an independent and not controlled in the pet industry by the dominating companies.

Little did I know what was happening, till it was all said and done.

You have to understand my territory was huge I owned everything east of the Rocky Mountains and everything south of Canada in so many words half the United States, the territory was huge. I would spend 4 days on the road and 3 home to make arrangements for the next 4 days on the road. Life was good but very busy.

One thing learned about working for myself was always get in with both feet while the getting is hot.

While all this was going on, in the back of my mind I kept being reminded about a lesson from someone who was a mentor to me about business.

I remember him saying that certain industries are controlled by a few even thou they make you believe many exist. And they have very deep pockets and can make things happen out of your control regardless of what you do.

He had given me a title of a book to read, which I never did and eventually lost the name to it. I think this was one of my biggest mistakes I ever did not reading that book because that lesson had haunted me and still does today because it’s happening all over again but on the internet.

I’m going off on a tangent but a lesson that still haunts me.

Getting back to my blooming business, life’s good, money is pouring in life goes on.

One day on the road I think I was in New Jersey supporting my customers and the death blow finally happens.

I go into this retail pet establishment and everything change from that moment on.

My competitor, notice SINGULAR.

The competition had been very busy to the point they organized a hit team against me to put me out of business permanently.

Well I’m in this store and I ask where’s all the products that I had been selling to this dealer. None in sight.

The answer from the owner was I’m not allowed to sell your products anymore.

WHAT!

Explain that again but in more detail was my comeback. As you can expect I’m real confused on what is happening.

The owner started explaining in order for him to continue ordering his other products he needed to remove my products and in return they would compensate him with free products for one year, anything he wanted, just as long as I was removed from his store.

WOW!

At first I thought this was a one off, so I shook it off and explained in great detail how he was dealing with the devil my competitor.

Anyways my skin is quite thick, you need to have it if you do any type of face to face selling.

Off I am to my next customer.

The same thing, only this time this customer was given free freezers to hold his frozen food requirements including everything the previous customer had.

Just like domino’s, one customer after another on this route had signed their soul to the devil.

This trip turn into a nightmare and a wash no money made this trip.

When  I got home to make arrangements for my next trip, every customer I contacted told me don’t waste your time coming they all had the same deal made to them.

Now this is really getting out of control. WHAT HAPPENED!!!

Remember how I got off on a tangent about my mentor, what haunted me came into reality.

Without dragging this on to much further, I found out my competitor was not the brand I thought it was. It was not a stand alone product it turned out it was a small piece of a Multinational Consumer Products Company.

The company at the time was Palmolive, it might be different now they eat each other in consolidations etc… it’s what huge business do.

Anyways life goes on, I was put out of business in less than a week and very flattered that I, as one person could threaten a Multinational Consumer Products Company enough to  show up on their radar for them to take action against me. I was really flattered but made broke. 🙁

Huge lesson to be learned.

Getting back to my intent of this post.

It’s happening again, but this time I am better prepared I hope fingers crossed.

I designed Authority Snooper to help weave in and out of where these huge brands are and still make money.

Go and read the story of

How 16 Companies are Dominating the World’s Google Search Results

by Glen Allsopp

Someone else has really put some effort into the research of what I discovered years ago and it’s happening all over on the internet. You owe it yourself if you want to survive in business, don’t procrastinate like I did with that book that still haunts me today.

Now I really wished I had read that book, I think I will take this to my grave of one of the things I regretted not doing. Life goes on 😉

Ed Chiasson

Till next time

The paradox of The LongTail for keyword and niche research is a statement that apparently contradicts itself and yet might be true (or wrong at the same time).

The underlying principle of The LongTail in Internet Marketing in my opinion is generally being used wrong.

Just because you create or find keyword phrases with more words in it does not constitute what was originally meant by The LongTail.

The basic idea was about how the virtual world created almost endless possibilities to undiscovered profits just because of it’s nature as compared to brick and mortar businesses. Chris Anderson who is credited for The LongTail brought to light the concept that online businesses like Amazon, could make big money selling small amounts of hard to find items.

This was at the time in direct opposition too mainstream practices of how items were being sold. Businesses due to their physical limitations of distribution and storage were limited to selling hits, the best of best. With the sheer physical economics of scale, hits had a firm grip on what was in inventory and what was rejected.

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

As a result decisions of hits was left in the hands a few decision makers, largely ignoring a much larger lucrative market due to physical constraints of how our culture has conducted business since the beginning of time.

What’s this got to do with Internet Marketing’s abuse of The LongTail?

Internet Marketing advocates claim the use of single or short keyword phrases are highly competitive in their world for traffic generation from search engines. So if you were to find and use many keyword phrases that included two or more words the competition for them would be reduced. This would make it easier to rank for them and would eventually outweigh what traffic a single keyword would generate.

The concept is very sound and makes commonsense in it’s usage.

Here’s where they are right and go wrong with The LongTail concept.

This is where IMer’s  get it right. First single keywords are very broad in attracting the desired traffic, including insane for even trying to rank for single keywords. Considering the resources and authority required in today’s world with all the algorithmic changes that have occurred with search engines its foolish to even attempt this.

By targeting The LongTail many of the visitors to your content made the decision to investigate interested them due to the nature of The LongTail, all you can hope for is both you and the visitor match up. What attracted that visitor to your content was it takes more than one word to define and match traffic to content as opposed to relying on the single keyword for any niche.

Here is where many Internet Marketers make their fatal mistake with The LongTail usage and their quest for traffic to their content. The mistake is that just because any particular phrase has multiple words that it intrinsically becomes less competitive, this is far from the truth. In reality it’s competitiveness occurs because of interest in it’s usage this is the nature of it’s statistics in the real world.

Length of keyword phrases do not equate to low competition for search engine rankings. As I participate in multiple forums trying to help individuals seeking the truth. The first thing I always run across is, when I search in Google Planner I found keywords with low search counts etc…, the story is always the same.

Just because there is low search counts, it does not mean it is low competition. It just means that as the keyword phrase gets elongated it just means that less and less people are interested in a keyword phrase that is very specific for a very narrowly defined topic.

The search count itself does not define competition, it is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole assuming this.

The culprit to this is Overture many years ago as the web was getting defined. With Overture providing search volume data from advertising data, combine this with wishful thinkers trying to garnish the benefits from the stated volume of visitors to any particular keyword. This practice still continues and misleads the misinformed.

Today Google Keyword Planner has replaced Overture for search counts. They have done nothing to inform the ignorant masses of their flawed thinking. Why should they, their goal is to make money with Pay Per Click and gather data to understand patterns of where people focus efforts producing content for their search engine listings.

Google gathers data everywhere on their real estate, especially from Google Keyword Planner. Google’s gathering of data from Keyword Planner usage is monitored closely and what they do with it is beyond the scope of this writing. But be assured your being watched very closely in their information gatherings while you expose your hand on how your about to conquer their rankings.

So how do we go about taking advantage of The LongTail?

In short it is all about sifting through massive amounts of data, connecting the dots, and investigating particular patterns of human behavior in a particular niche with the primary function to draw targeted traffic from the search engines.

A mouthful in itself, the task at hand a bigger one.

As a trained Engineer and a early evaluator of browsers starting with Mosaic later called Netscape in the early days of a think tank I worked in. Taking that accumulated knowledge weeding out every possible combination that has ever been suggested for ranking in the search engines. I’ve pretty much solved how to increase your chances of working The LongTail to your advantage without blindly using Google Keyword Planner.

Notice I said increase your chances it is not the end all but it is the best we have till new metrics become available.

In the last three plus years the primary search engine Google has made some significant changes to their algorithms. Since they are the 800 pound gorilla holding over 70% of market for search engine traffic I will demonstrate with case studies using them as the focus.

The significant change that has occurred with Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) is they primarily focus on the authority of a domain. Originally the algorithms had focused on page rank, they still do but not to the extent they have in the past.

Examine any listing in the SERPs and you will see why.

To demonstrate this lets look at a small sample to illustrate what I mean.

Medical advice, medical problems etc… At one time anyone could rank in this niche now it is dominated by groups of doctors such as Web MD, Hospitals, and qualified professionals. For example a popular info product about embarrassing problems which was the rage of the internet, those problems were easy to rank for in the SERPs in the day.  Today most of those problems that require medical attention and part of The LongTail have as much competition as a single keyword.  With Google only ranking websites of authority, good luck trying to be visible on page one.

Finance, looking for financial advice, the ranking sites are dominated by big financial institutions. More authority sites.

Cooking, even this niche is dominated by large authority concerns. Large TV networks, magazines and prominent individuals such as Martha Stewart are on page one. You don’t stand a chance unless you carry the authority.

Brand Names, affiliate marketers had their day in the past,  now Amazon, eBay, Manufacturers the list goes on. The common denominator is authority, without this authority you don’t stand a chance.

This has been the trend lately with no sign of relief unless you know where to look. You can bet it is not Google Keyword Planner. Google has no interest in showing where. No wonder so many fail, following old outdated how to information. To make things worst it is still being proliferated as truth.

The masses still don’t get it, frustrated, most are looking for fertile ground elsewhere. The hot thing now is social media, the barrier of entry to traffic is so much lower. Even this is starting to slowly strangle easy profits. Especially Facebook.

But this is not where I am going. I am still focused on ranking in Google with The LongTail.

The smoking gun is the SERPs! They hold all the proof, not Google Keyword Planner. Still puzzles me how so many SEO, Keyword and Niche software out there still use Google Keyword Planner as the core metrics in their software.

I guess the software would not be so sexy if it didn’t have search counts, oh my if I don’t know how many people to expect is anyone looking for that keyword, will I be wasting my time etc… every possible paranoid excuse to cling to something that also is their Achilles Heel to their problem of not succeeding in the SERPs.

Being a software developer I have specialized software that crawls the internet and returns copious amounts of data to be logged and analyzed for every detail with surprising results.

It was in those days when Google was transitioning its algorithms from page rank to authority that led me to have a hard look for a common denominator. In the past when Google made changes it was easy and consistent, since page rank was the primary factor in ranking. But almost overnight things were not working.

Just about every SEO professional I was associated with was experiencing the same problems. Almost overnight many got out of the SEO business because you really could not SEO your way to the top at will anymore.

Problem with all of this is how do you define authority. Google isn’t going to help you there, it gave you the page rank tool bar at one time. Both sides benefited from this. Individuals tried to skew top 10 listings using this as a crowbar to pry themselves into the top 10 positions creatively. Google benefited with it’s intelligence gatherings of its usage. A win win situation, rare especially with Google.

Now that’s gone. It was the only numerical metric we could easily take a number and apply it to SEO.

When you look at authority sites in the SERPs, most are easy to spot, some not so much. What is missing is something, anything, that places a numerical value to easily filter out authority in the SERPs.

Many who read this are familiar with MOZ and it’s domain authority metric. This is all we have that even comes close to what is needed without Google producing a metric like the page rank tool.  So, if we assume for the sake of discussion that there numbers are approximately correct, we can conclude that we can filter the SERPs at will.

This post took much longer than anticipated and long time in coming.

If you continue working with obsolete methods and hoping to be seen on page one of Google good luck.

I recently had a conversation with a misguided individual who was so frustrated and ready to give up when he read my latest offer and realized he didn’t have a A-Ha moment but instead had a stupid moment. He was using obsolete methods that were obvious and praying for results. Our conversation was a reality check that he was clinging on to futile methods.

Don’t let this be you!

In posts to come I will be exposing a little discussed topic and industry coming on strong. I predict in about 5 years the little guy is going to have a real difficult time having a presence in Google with the evidence I am seeing. So far the evidence has proven the predictions of many.

Don’t miss out, keep reading and share.

Ed Chiasson

SlickTimeSavers.com

As marketers we keep hearing Content Is King if you want traffic and rankings

Who can ignore/avoid all the press that Donal Trump is getting

I promise this is not about politics but instead of a marketing experience I just had

Everyday I read a little something about each of the politicians running for president

Yesterday I read an article lining up Donald Trump with Hitler

As history shows us this happened because of a country in dismay

As the person writing the story points out it seems that history is repeating itself with Donal Trump and his views

Today Forges ran a story about how Donald Trump is unstoppable and it is a two page story

I tried to read page two and this is what I get when trying to read page two

Come on who thought of this, I don’t think so

I guess as marketers we need to try and test what works

I hope this is not the beginning of a trend to come

Because opportunity lurks at every corner for people who provide what others want without being held hostage in return to read their content

I told you this was not a political post 😉

Ed Chiasson

SlickTimeSavers.com

It’s uncertain what is happening with the new changes Google has made to removing all PPC Ads from the right side, I don’t think advertisers are happy with this move.

From what I read “While advertisers loved it“, I don’t really believe it, unless your deep in pockets, someone has to lose with less ads being displayed.

As many as 11 ads were displayed on a page before and now a new max we are being told will be 4 at the top “designed for highly commercial queries” from what I read in The Verge with a possible additional 3 ads on the bottom reported originally reported by The SEM Post

Google is continuing to tweak this since December when it was big news then.

I was working this morning Feb 21, 2016 everything seem normal after being contacted by a fellow colleague, then later in the evening I started doing some research and every listing was modified to the new format.

In addition free organic listings just took another hit for being pushed lower and lower below the fold.

Since 2012 the trend of adding images, some ads and other Google properties has sometimes removed any organic listings above the fold on page one of Google to be visible.

For the moment it is uncertain what the strategy is for reducing the max ads from 11 to 7 is going to be.

This move freed up more virtual real estate for Google’s Product Listing Ads to show in the sidebar

In addition this space will give Google more flexibility to display its other properties such as knowledge panel.

The change will impact search globally and all languages.

I think we are in for a big dance again with how organic search will be displayed for sometime.

The best I can make of this change it has to do with mobile devices surpassing desktops and Google is positioning search for this.

Update 2/22/2016

Today I am working with my authority software and decided to check some keywords for ad counts

definitely Google has covered above the fold with their products with organic search nowhere in sight

I still see some ads on right side if the keyword is not product driven

Will keep you posted

Ed Chiasson

SlickTimeSavers.com

Today I’m posting something lite and unrelated

Every so often we all need to clean house and email is no exception

A close friend sent this me

I hope the original person does not mind

enjoy

 Stay Young My Friend  

We  all need to read this one over and over  –
until  it becomes part of who we  are!

;
HOW  TO STAY YOUNG
1.  Try everything twice.
On one woman’s  tombstone she said she wanted this  epitaph:
“Tried everything twice. Loved it  both times!”  

2.  Keep only cheerful friends.
The grouches pull  you down.
(Keep this in mind if you are one  of those  grouches!)

4.  Enjoy the simple  things.

5.  Laugh often, long and loud.
Laugh until you  gasp for  breath.
And  if you have a friend who makes you  laugh,
spend  lots and lots of time with HIM  /HER.

7.  Surround yourself with what you love:
whether  it’s family, pets, keepsakes, music, plants,  hobbies,  whatever..
Your  home is your  refuge.  

8.  Cherish your health:
If it is good, preserve  it.
If  it is unstable, improve  it.
If  it is beyond what you can improve, get  help.

10.  Tell the people you love that you love them, at  every opportunity.
I  love you, my special  friend.

And if you don’t send this to at least 4  people – who cares?
But do share this with  someone.

Be  kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is  fighting some kind of battle.  

Wine  does not make you FAT ….

– it makes you  LEAN …..
(Against  tables, chairs, floors, walls and ugly  people.)

Being a Seo, keyword and niche specialist I’ve always been puzzled by how the masses behave believing old and out dated information.

What makes it worst is the proliferation of this information believing it is true.

I’ve finally found the answer why the masses believe old and out dated information!!

I am not sure who recommended this book but it has been the answer to what I have been looking for a long time.

Influence – Robert B. Cialdini – Influence The Psychology Of Persuasion

I highly recommend this book if you already have not found and read this book it is a must for anyone who wants to sell anything.

As a member of multiple forums keeping my fingers on the pulse of this industry, I see what is called the pluralist ignorance phenomenon.

This is where innocent, natural errors will produce snowballing social proof that push us to incorrect decisions.

This is what Buffalo’s, SEO, keyword and niche research have in common.

I’ll quote from the book as it says it best

This aspect of the social proof phenomenon always reminds me of the way certain Indian tribes – the Blackfeet, Cree, Snake, and Crow – used to hunt the North American Buffalo. There are two features of buffalo that make them especially susceptible to erroneous social evidence. First, their eyes are set in their heads so that it is easier for them to see to the side than to the front. Second, when they run, as in a stampede, it is with their heads down low so they cannot see above the herd. As a result, the Indians realized, it was possible to kill tremendous numbers of buffalo by starting a herd running toward a cliff. The animals, responding to the thundering social proof around them – and never looking up to see what lay ahead – did the rest. One astonished observer to such a hunt described the deadly outcome of the buffalo’s obsessive trust in collective knowledge.

In this way, it was possible to decoy a herd toward a precipice, and cause it to plunge over en masse, the leaders being trust over by their followers and all the rest following of their own free will.

Here’s where I am going with this, social proof is misleading you into making decisions based on technology that is over 20 years old.

You don’t even know this is happening to you, because your looking at so call experts to help you make the right decision and shortening the whole process.

Here’s some examples how social proof is leading you by the nose without being aware of how damaging this is for your business

Overture in the 90’s made available search counts for Pay For Click advertising.

Look into any forum or blog, when someone who desperately needs guidance for making decisions about keyword/niche selection. First recommendation is look at Google Keyword Planner the replacement for Overture for providing search counts.

Why?

It’s outdated, it’s inaccurate and worst of all everyone in the darn world does this. This creates competition, competition and more competition.

Oh, longtail keyword selection, another misleading recommendation. Popularized by wired magazine editor Chris Anderson in 2004. If you read the line above what do we get competition, competition and more competition.

If you take away one thing from anything I write here know your facts!

I would be surprised if you haven’t heard this before, the computer world whether it is virtual, hardware etc… becomes outdated very quickly most times in just months.

Just look at the dates the recommended social proof concepts have been accepted, over 20 years for search counts, longtail over 12 years.

Same for SEO, all the keyword stuffing schemes, meta tags list goes on. The only thing that has stood the test of time is backlinking. But that has also evolved. Typical old style linking many times hurts you if your not careful about the niche your in.

Some niches are more tolerant and relaxed for linking and highly spammed niches are scrutinized at every level for linking.

Do you think ranking technology in any search engine is going to stand still, I don’t think so.

All you have to look at is all the Google updates that are crushing any of your misconceptions of how to approach ranking in the SERPs.

Beware, each forum has a dominant individual who can’t yell loud enough that he is the know it all for SEO. At every corner they lurk to knock down your opinions which have been fully tested and put out there to help change a mind set of how things have changed.

You can’t even have a level conversation with these individual’s showing the evidence of how the new rules of SEO, keyword and niche selection has changed.

I know why they do this, they are vulnerable and insecure. Because someone might have discovered a new way, other than them and challenge their dominant position in any forum.

So when someone ask’s who the go to is for SEO, the first person mentioned most times is this particular individual.

They may know their SEO when it comes to ranking highly competitive keywords, but 90% of individuals who need help aren’t looking to rank in Google for difficult to rank keywords, they just need to know how to filter out hard to rank keywords.

Recommending outdated methods will not achieve this.

The scope of this article is all about social proof and how detrimental it is if you want to be successful in this fast evolving industry.

You need to look at the evidence. The evidence these days is in the Search Engine Ranking Pages to find your answers. Not outdated information proliferated by social proof .

I’m going to leave you with one thought and hope to drive this point about following Social Proof and how detrimental it can be if you don’t look up and see who is leading the Buffalo herd over the cliff.

I use to invest in stocks heavily made a lot of money, loss a bunch till I figured out how social proof was making me broke.

In fact just last night, a trusted friend fell into this trap trying to tell me why the price of oil is going down and why.

I had to chuckle when I was explained how this trusted world renowned person has discovered why the price of oil is going down.

Way beyond the scope here, but think about this.

In the stock investing world people who make money consistently avoid what the talking heads have to say without checking their facts.

When everyone starts moving in a market direction, the smart money has already made their investments when the talking heads cried out the sky is falling. The smart money is successful because they have checked out their facts, they don’t make decisions by chance.

The smart money buys low and sells high, while the followers of social proof buy high and sell low.

Till next time

If this has helped please spread the word, I want to help break the bonds of social proof and get you thinking for yourself, you will make more money this way.

Please reach me if I can help you, I am a very reachable person

Ed Chiasson

slicktimesavers.com

Transcript of video and link below

Hi Ed Chiasson with Slick Time Savers I’m very excited to show you something I stumbled upon

First what I’m about to share what you if this is your niche or you’re interested in this my apologies

This niche is such a perfect example to demonstrate what Authority Snooper does best

What I found kinda reminds me of the Frank Kern talking parrot subniche

From the data I’ve uncovered it looks like a winner

The presentation I’m sharing what you today for our first keyword of the day commentary is gonna be open viewing to all the keywords

What I had planned in all fairness to Authority Snooper owners was to blur out the keywords to comment while viewing only the ad counts and the main authority values

But being our first keyword of the day you get to see it all in addition you get all the keywords displayed with their ad counts and the domain authority values in a downloadable CSV sheet

Just check out the link below so let’s get started

Hair Jewelry

I just love it when you get up each day and discover something you didn’t know don’t you
This morning as I passed by the table where my wife was sitting yesterday I noticed a little package marked hair jewelry

I picked it up and looked at the contents nothing much just some hair pieces that hold the hair up but my curiosity got the better of me

I got Authority Snooper set up and entered the keyword phrase hair jewelry into add a keyword and waited to see how many keywords would come back from Google suggest

If you look up at the screen you’ll see that keyword list for hair jewelry

I checked the word count and it only turned out to be 804 keywords much smaller than expected generally I see quite a few more for the jewelry market

So what the heck let’s run it and see what shows for values

As it was running I scrolled down looking for what is easy to rank for and the first the first keyword I stumbled upon no big deal horse hair jewelry gold

I didn’t think much about it went down a little further see another easy to rank for horse hair jewelry with 10 ads on the page and green

Scrolled down a little more found a few more horse hair jewelry keywords now it’s starting to get really interesting especially the last one for another 10 ads on the page this is now more than a coincidence

So it’s time to group them so I sorted them by alphabetical order and scrolled down till I saw them

Now the keywords are starting to show

Now let’s take a look what we find here we go to horse hair fine jewelry nine ads yellow very doable takes a little bit of work

Let’s see horse hair jewelry clasps 9 ads doable because border line but still it’s starting to see heavy hitters here

Go down another one with end caps 8 – 9 horse hair jewelry findings etc…

So next thing I did was to take the keyword horse hair jewelry and run it and this is what we got for horse hair jewelry this time from 804 for hair jewelry we’ve gotten 197 keywords for horse hair jewelry

Being a sub niche of a niche out of a fairly large market there’s quite a few keywords here

Let’s take a look we got for ad counts we have about 15-20 percent ads that are eight and above

But if we look let’s say for halfway a fifty-percent there’s some advertising

Let’s take a look easy to hard about 50 percent a key words here very doable

So it looks like we discovered a sub niche where’s there is money to be made because the advertising money is in there

Quite a few keywords about a 3rd in green and then totally about 50 percent plus that somebody could get in here

You don’t see this very often

Here’s another thing that I want to show you if you investigate any niche that your working on and you ask yourself am I gonna be selling a hard product or info product

In this particular case info products are not the way to go

Here we go how do I make horse hair jewelry which would be a book there’s no advertising in there and there’s a lot of heavy hitters

Let’s go down to another one seven how to make jewelry with horse hair same thing in the red you don’t see any Green keywords for making an info product

Most of the green keywords that your gonna see are for hard products are local keywords like

Horse Hair Jewelry California

So if you had a little store offline business here’s one that would be good for you

Other than that it’s about the actual jewelry itself the hard goods

In closing I hope you can see how powerful the little tool is

The mantra of Authority Snooper is

Instantly know if the fight to the top 10 in organic search is worth investing time in and energy at a glance before you lift a finger or spend a dime

I think we demonstrated this today in finding a possible winning niche this the modern way of doing niche and keyword research using real time data that is completely up to date

Thanks for listening and don’t forget visit the links below to learn more

Yesterday as I was skimming the news I see that one of Google’s driver-less cars gets stopped by police.

As I thought to myself what next this has got to be interesting
for the actual story go here

Finds No Driver To Ticket