I’ve been article marketing for several months now, and I’d like to share some data with you. I have several hundred articles live on many of the 
more popular article directories. I’ve been tracking referrals to my landing pages from all of them. Each one of my articles is written around one keyword phrase.
I looked at the keyword phrases of the top 50 articles, ranked by the number of referrals to my landing pages. I wondered if there were common characteristics for the top-performing articles/keywords. What I found probably won’t surprise a veteran article marketer, but for me it was a bit of a revelation.
The top keywords had an average of less than 200,000 quoted results – that means if you Google the keyword phrase in quotation marks, the results averaged less than 200,000. Some were higher, some much lower, but the average was around 200K. The top 10 performing keyword phrases had a quoted results average of around 100,000. (the graphic below shows how to find this figure).
The other common stat for the top-performing keyword phrases was a little more difficult to calculate. What I computed was the average number of backlinks (defined by Yahoo! Explorer) for the top ten Google results for a given keyword. One easy way to get this number is downloading the SeoQuake Firefox extension. You take the average of the Yahoo backlinks for the top ten results – and that average for my best article/keyword combinations was about 2,000 (1,000 for the to ten keywords).
So, to sum up, the vital stats I found were:
- Less than 200,000 quoted results (closer to 100,000 is better)
- Less than 2,000 average backlinks for the top ten results (closer to 1,000 is better)
Now keep in mind – this ONLY applies to article marketing, don’t use these guidelines for promoting your own domain. The article directories have better rankings than you will ever have. It’s easier to rank for a phrase on EzineArticles than your own domain, for instance.
The problem with this method is that it can get very time-consuming if you have a lot of keywords to check. The easy solution is a little software program called WebComp Analyst. It is simply the most slam-dunk piece of software I’ve ever bought for article marketing. Put in your keywords and it spits out the very stats I have just outlined for you. No fuss, no muss. You can even export your results into Excel. In my next post, I’ll show you a real cool way to manipulate your data from WebComp Analyst.
Many article marketers choose keywords for which their articles will never rank in Google. My method outlined here will start getting your landing pages some serious traffic.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi, great post and interesting analysis. What tool or method did you use to obtain the number of average backlinks for the top 10 results? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
You can use seo quake or I use Web Comp Analyst, as mentioned in the post.
I don’t understand the backlinks part. You mean top say you wrote an Ezinearticles for a particular keyword and that particular article managed to get 2000 backlinks!??
Also, can you tell me the average CTR to your website? That is the percent of visitors on Ezinearticles who ended up clicking on to your own website.
Anand
Techcrunchies.com
KnewThis.com
What I mean about backlinks: I’m looking at how many average backlinks exist for the top ten Google SERPs when choosing keywords. I’m posting articles for traffic to my landing pages, I don’t care about backlinks from the articles this case. I’m using backlink counts as a measure of how hard it will be to rank for a given keyphrase with my article. As far as CTR, you can look at your Ezine Articles Reports to get that…mine vary wildly, depending on the niche. I’d say if you are getting 10%, that is good.
Great post! Makes sense, checking the backlinks of the competition is something that I’m not doing. So many things to do, too little time.
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I’ll be optimizing that one.
Your blog is amazing, i first landed to another post but then get interested and thought, i will just look a little more arround to see what else i can find out about best articles arround.
Online articles directories have significantly gained in reputation during the last decade. The predominant reason for this are various SEO related features and possibilities an article directory has to offer to authors and content seekers. Some of the popularized articles directories allow authors to submit their content for free while some cost a small one-time registration fee. Submit your articles to a business directory and get your article published within a day!
Great insight about picking keywords for the purpose of article marketing. It’s much easier to get traffic to an article that you can rank for easily but that will also be searched for rather than trying to compete with millions of other sites for ranking on the keyword.
.-= Tiffany @ online passive income´s last blog ..How to Use Alexa.com to Find Hot Niches =-.
I just installed the SEOQuake extension for Firefox, and it got me totally lost. I am not used to seeing all this information and not to sure what to make of it yet.
For your articles that you write, do you also build back links to them or just rely on the PR of the directory itself?
What keyword density do you use for your articles?
Yes I know, lots of questions but, I am just getting started with article marketing and so far have not been doing that great at it.
Great Blog Carl, I also install SEOqueke and I had to disable some other tools in order to work and I would recommend not to over use it, just turn it on and off while reloading the window.
Excellent an in depth article. I enjoyed the stats you gave to measure whether or not the article could be a success. Many marketers tend to forget about values when it comes to articles. Relying on good content is a good way to approach article marketing but your post takes this to a much higher deeper level. Unique Content with an indication of which keywords are best to target.
I do have a question though. If doing article marketing for a successful website that has top 10 rankings for their main keywords, our aim being to increase rankings from top 10 to top 5. Should one rely heavily on article marketing for these keywords or are other techniques better?
I use SEO Quke, it is a great tool but of course the paid version is much better. If you are serious about internet marketing you need to try the paid version.
.-= Adi@Twitter Tutorial´s last blog ..Twitter Part 3 – How To Use Twitter =-.
Some really excellent insights in this post, although I feel like I need to read it again to let it sink in a little better. is there a good alternative to Webcomp Analyist for the mac though?
.-= James@branding-bible´s last blog ..eBook update =-.
I learned so much from this Carl. I’m also an avid fan of article marketing – i use for promotion and link building at the same time. Frankly, keyword research is really time consuming. Do you do it every time you write an article or do you finish all the keyword research first all at once then the writing later on?
Unless of course you outsource your article writing.. I’d be interested to know how you solve such concern regarding too much time involved considering you mentioned you have hundreds of articles already.
WebComp Analyst is somewhat of a one trick pony. But it does what it is intended for very well, and is a very affordable one time investment. If you are an online “infopreneur” it is certainly a tool worth a closer look. Like the other offerings from Jon Leger that I have used, the software runs well without any noticeable bugs or other problems and the user interface couldn’t be easier to understand.
Very good article. I haven’t done much article marketing yet, but I’ll be doing more soon so this post has been very helpful. I’m going to check out WebComp Analys right now.
SEOQuake is a great add-on and I recommend it as well. You have to be cautious with it though as it’s possible to get temporarily banned from Google if you have it set to activate on every page load. I always disable this when I install it, and activate it whenever I need to get some stats.
Kind regards,
Victoria