This post was made for interns exactly 1 month ago, but I’ve decided to open it up to the public. The instructions regarding the BCMI tool obviously don’t apply, but you should understand that concept from previous videos. For now it’s pretty safe to say that keyword research is slightly more keyword agnostic then it used to be, so using the PA and the SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool is not a bad idea. Also this is based on expired domains but it could just as well be for new domains (you just don’t have to worry about matching niches).
Before you read this post, I suggest you take a quick refresher over these 3 posts:
Keyword Research Part 1
https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/keyword-research-training-part-1/
Keyword Research Parts 2 and 3
https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/keyword-research-training-parts-2-and-3/
How my Competition Tools Judges Competition
https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/exactly-how-my-private-competition-tool-scores-competition/
Ok now that you’ve refreshed your memory, login to your account on the tool. This week you will see a couple new links in the left menu – CMI and BCMI.
CMI (Competition Metric Index)
This tool tests a single query and shows you the APA of the top 10 (scroll to the bottom). It’s good to use for a quick single check. I also recommend you double check some of the BCMI results here if they look too good to be true. It does suffer a lot from proxy issues (below), so you may have to click Go! A few times before you get a result.
BCMI (Bulk Competition Metric Index)
This is the tool you will be using a lot. You are limited to 3 tasks a day, and 800 rows per task. You upload a single column csv with a keyword (no brackets or other chars), and it will process the list and spit out the results in another spreadsheet (similar to the DA Checker). This may take awhile because of the same proxy issue, and occasionally you may see an error in the results. If so, just put the errors into your next task.
A quick note about Google and Proxies
Google hates it when proxies scrape it. I have 100+ private proxies being rotated, a sophisticated quarantine system and de-captcha system, but I’m still having trouble. The issue is that Google bans entire subnets of proxies from proxy providers, so even if you are throttling things well, Google will ban you because someone else on your proxy service is abusing them.
How to find keywords for your domains
I highly suggest you find keywords that are loosely related to the former topic of your site. The easiest way to know the topic is to check the anchor text of the domains linking to the site. Sometimes you won’t be able to get specific anchors, so what you could do is do a related:domain.com search on some of the domains linking to it.
I say loosely related and I mean it. If your expired domain is about a church in some city, go ahead and tackle anything Christian or Catholic, or anything related to that city (and just give it a religious edge). If your site was formerly the domain of a mayoral candidate in California and has lots of links from California newspapers, you could target something related to california (perhaps jobs related). If your site is about mushrooms, make it about healthy snacks or recipes. Don’t get hung up on your keyword being exactly related to the former topic of your expired domain, but also don’t stretch too far the other way and turn your mushroom site into an auto insurance site.
So once you have a few different niches you think your site could accommodate, simply plug everything into GAKT (try both the Keyword and the Ad Group Ideas). Export a ton of results, combine them into a single spreadsheet and run the macro that turns the sheet into a calculator. Focus on the domains that are $20/mo+. Take up to 800 of those and shove them through the BCMI tool and you will have completed your first pass of targeting. Grab the domains that have all 10 results with an APA <60, the majority of which are <50 to look at closer for pass 2.
Your 2nd pass of targeting will be to use SEOQuake to check the # of pages indexed in the SERPs that passed round 1. Just like I explained here. Only target keywords for domains that have a site in the top 10 with <30 pages indexed, or a generic articles site in the top 10.
Alternate Option
You may have some trouble finding keywords, and if you are, I’d like to encourage you to try this option. Do everything exactly the same way, but instead of basing it on exact match in GAKT, based it on phrase match. Try to find domains that will make >$40/mo on phrase match, but on exact match have an LMS <600. To do this you should check both exact and phase match in GAKT when you search so you can make the comparison. Your CMI results and your contextual CPC amount should be based on the root exact match search (the one that has an LMS <600). The idea is to earn on the longer tail, which should be very simple to rank on, since no-one is targeting even the short tail version of the keyword due to low LMS numbers.
Matt Hagens says:
Has anyone had better success with AdSense on expired domains vs building out a new domain? If the keywords that we are picking are easy to rank and as Hayden explained a few posts ago that links don’t appear to be as important as content, then is the best use of expired domains using them for AdSense?
amp says:
What I have been hearing, mostly is that domains with good background are only used as chained off dummies, of course filled with good content and equally treated as your main income site. All interconnected in a comfortable way you find it and in it’s own private network. But now these methods seem to be put off a bit, especially with the massive EMD update, stirring things up, sadly.
amp says:
Good points. I also would like to point out my heavy agreement, as a matter of fact worldwide issue with proxies. To be honest, I have been having major difficulty expanding my process all because of the massive algorithms Google took to ban proxies. How would you recommend the use of Bing/Yahoo for scrapes?
amp says:
Oh.. what happened to the Forums???
Daryl Mander says:
I’m recently bought my first set of expired domains, building one out into an authority site and the rest I’m going to do bare minimum development on, reclaim their old PR and then sell at auction to see if I can turn a profit. I wonder if that second approach has been tried before and if anyone had success with it?
Mike says:
Hayden,
Can you share what you are seeing in terms of results from your new larger niche building strategy?
Are you getting close to your goal of $500/month per site or is anyone else seeing results from this strategy yet?
Thanks.
Rob says:
I would love to hear ANY update on the methods that you and your students were full speed ahead on back in September and October….
Hayden says:
Still in the link building phase. Getting decent long tail traffic and ranking on google.co.uk so far. Will keep you updated.
Jack says:
Hi Hayden,
I wonder how you can build so many Adsense sites and then also link to these sites from your blog network without Google taking action against that. Are you not worried abou getting your Adsense account shut down, or your sites, or the network?
I mean having so many sites in your Adsense account is a big red flag (MFA), and once Google takes a look at these sites and its backlinks, isn’t it quite obvious you built all these links? And in case something happens, you have a backup plan to replace Adsense?
Thanks
Hayden says:
I don’t put much on any single Adsense account (usually max it around 3k/mo). I’ve had half a dozen accounts banned, believe me, I have experience here.
Jack says:
You said you have a few Adsense accounts banned. What did you do with the sites connected to an account. You just rolled them over to a new account without changes?
Thanks
Jack
Hayden says:
Yes and have never been impacted for it.
Ron says:
So this might be a not so good question, or you may have covered it in another video? IDK because I have not looked at all of them yet, but I am going to do so.
My question would be concerning having your adsense account/ accounts banned… How would one go about getting several adsense accounts?