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I'm going to think out loud here:
I run around all of the SEO blogs out there desperate for high-level information and entertainment regarding this topic, and rarely get it.
But a couple of months ago I landed on some young guy's blog (I can't even recall who it was) who was doing nothing but case studies that weren't going so hot. The reason I remember is he kept harping about "KGR" over and over in his updates but never mentioned what it was.
Well low and behold, today I'm looking at Jon Dykstra's blog, https://fatstacksblog.com , which is easily one of the best SEO blog out there these days in terms of motivation and being a clever marketer, and he off-hand mentioned Keyword Golden Ratio, and I immediately realized "KGR!!!"
Turns out it's a simple concept:
Keyword Golden Ratio
With that said, if you don't want to watch the video, which is long-winded, here's the gist of the entire simple concept:
The guy is suggesting that you pull a ton of keywords, ones that make sense in a phrase, not stuff like "running app tracker iphone best," and pulling their All in Title count and dividing it by Search Volume. This leaves you with a what is hopefully a fraction.
So the guy doesn't say this, but I'm assuming that this works based on two of the strongest on-page signals you can send:
In the picture you can see that he managed to find a decent keyword: "what do i need to brew beer." This keyword only gets 90 searches a month, and only 20 sites in Google's public facing index contain that phrase in the title, giving it a 0.222 keyword golden ratio value. Most of us likely have sites strong enough that publishing an article with that as the title would guarantee a top 3 spot immediately, if not #1.
Of course this KGR metric doesn't take into account actual competition, just a sliding scale chance that it's not competitive. Those 20 posts with that phrase in the title could all be monsters with a million backlinks each.
But you could check the top 5 or top 10 quickly with something like Market Samurai, which I'll do right now...
#9 says it has it in the title but it's not an exact match, it's a broad match. Looking at the referring domains to the page, I'd venture to say that if you actually targeted this phrase, which none of them are doing, #2 is yours, if not #1 eventually (probably not worth it).
But what is likely worth it is ranking for a ton of one-time searches that have no volume reported. Long-tails and similar searches can probably be picked up and dominated by the sole fact of targeting the parent keyword. And this is just above being a commercial keyword. It's ripe for dropping some cookies for sure.
This Doug guy is doing this with some fairly low volume keywords, where it's the safest to make assumptions. I don't think this golden ratio is going to scale into higher volume very well. He uses his cut off point at around 0.25 KGR. If we went for higher volume keywords, I suspect we need to push that down to 0.10 or ever lower.
Anyways, if your site has a blog, this is likely a way to come up with a TON of content ideas to pass off to your writers. You could mass export keywords, calculate the KGR, filter for values equal to or less than 0.25 KGR, then delete rows that have non-sensical keyword phrases. Then just pass those off to the writers. You could blow a few hours on the keyword mining and likely boost your traffic by a decent amount pretty quickly once they're all published. For CPM and CPC info sites, this is straight cash money that will pay itself off eventually, probably within a year, I don't know. Depends on how much you pay your writers.
_______________
Anyways, I'm not saying we should all jump at concepts like these, but it was interesting enough to share. It's certainly nothing new, but giving it a jazzy name like Backlinko does means this guy will end up getting links and traffic for the term, which is a great example of marketing.
But as far as applying the concept itself, sites that have covered everything under the sun on their niches may be able to mine out some extra traffic without moving on to clickbait nonsense like most end up doing.
Have you guys ever employed something like this?
I know my site is ready to dominate searches like these and have been talking about it in my case study. I think @Kevin is exploiting this tactic, maybe not with the Keyword Golden Ratio. How are you measuring it, Kevin?
I'll definitely move to this approach one day, along with sniping out keywords from lesser sites after they do all the work for me. Looking at terms that forums rank for is a piece of cake for this type of attack too. I yearn for the day when I'm begging for topics to cover instead of being flooded and drowning.
I run around all of the SEO blogs out there desperate for high-level information and entertainment regarding this topic, and rarely get it.
But a couple of months ago I landed on some young guy's blog (I can't even recall who it was) who was doing nothing but case studies that weren't going so hot. The reason I remember is he kept harping about "KGR" over and over in his updates but never mentioned what it was.
Well low and behold, today I'm looking at Jon Dykstra's blog, https://fatstacksblog.com , which is easily one of the best SEO blog out there these days in terms of motivation and being a clever marketer, and he off-hand mentioned Keyword Golden Ratio, and I immediately realized "KGR!!!"
Turns out it's a simple concept:
Keyword Golden Ratio
All in Title / Search Volume = Keyword Golden Ratio
So here's the video, by this guy Doug Cunningham (here is his site).
With that said, if you don't want to watch the video, which is long-winded, here's the gist of the entire simple concept:
The guy is suggesting that you pull a ton of keywords, ones that make sense in a phrase, not stuff like "running app tracker iphone best," and pulling their All in Title count and dividing it by Search Volume. This leaves you with a what is hopefully a fraction.
The lower the keyword golden ratio is, the better. This means that there are relatively fewer posts attempting to rank for that term purposefully, and thus it's likely less competitive.
So the guy doesn't say this, but I'm assuming that this works based on two of the strongest on-page signals you can send:
- keyword in title tag
- keyword in H1 tag
In the picture you can see that he managed to find a decent keyword: "what do i need to brew beer." This keyword only gets 90 searches a month, and only 20 sites in Google's public facing index contain that phrase in the title, giving it a 0.222 keyword golden ratio value. Most of us likely have sites strong enough that publishing an article with that as the title would guarantee a top 3 spot immediately, if not #1.
Of course this KGR metric doesn't take into account actual competition, just a sliding scale chance that it's not competitive. Those 20 posts with that phrase in the title could all be monsters with a million backlinks each.
But you could check the top 5 or top 10 quickly with something like Market Samurai, which I'll do right now...
#9 says it has it in the title but it's not an exact match, it's a broad match. Looking at the referring domains to the page, I'd venture to say that if you actually targeted this phrase, which none of them are doing, #2 is yours, if not #1 eventually (probably not worth it).
But what is likely worth it is ranking for a ton of one-time searches that have no volume reported. Long-tails and similar searches can probably be picked up and dominated by the sole fact of targeting the parent keyword. And this is just above being a commercial keyword. It's ripe for dropping some cookies for sure.
This Doug guy is doing this with some fairly low volume keywords, where it's the safest to make assumptions. I don't think this golden ratio is going to scale into higher volume very well. He uses his cut off point at around 0.25 KGR. If we went for higher volume keywords, I suspect we need to push that down to 0.10 or ever lower.
Anyways, if your site has a blog, this is likely a way to come up with a TON of content ideas to pass off to your writers. You could mass export keywords, calculate the KGR, filter for values equal to or less than 0.25 KGR, then delete rows that have non-sensical keyword phrases. Then just pass those off to the writers. You could blow a few hours on the keyword mining and likely boost your traffic by a decent amount pretty quickly once they're all published. For CPM and CPC info sites, this is straight cash money that will pay itself off eventually, probably within a year, I don't know. Depends on how much you pay your writers.
_______________
Anyways, I'm not saying we should all jump at concepts like these, but it was interesting enough to share. It's certainly nothing new, but giving it a jazzy name like Backlinko does means this guy will end up getting links and traffic for the term, which is a great example of marketing.
But as far as applying the concept itself, sites that have covered everything under the sun on their niches may be able to mine out some extra traffic without moving on to clickbait nonsense like most end up doing.
Have you guys ever employed something like this?
I know my site is ready to dominate searches like these and have been talking about it in my case study. I think @Kevin is exploiting this tactic, maybe not with the Keyword Golden Ratio. How are you measuring it, Kevin?
I'll definitely move to this approach one day, along with sniping out keywords from lesser sites after they do all the work for me. Looking at terms that forums rank for is a piece of cake for this type of attack too. I yearn for the day when I'm begging for topics to cover instead of being flooded and drowning.
