By Blog Marketing

let me ask you a question:

are you driving traffic and doing SEO for yourself (affiliate, Amazon, Adsense or your own site) or as an "offline consultant"?

If so, you and I know how time-consuming (and frustrating) it can be to figure out which keywords you can rank for easily and which ones are just a giant black hole that sucks up your backlinks, time and money!

Why?

Because there’s just no consistency in the way Google ranks any particular site for any particular keyword.

Well, check this out to see how this little "Keyword Sweetspotter" can literally save you HOURS of research time and probably weeks, if not months of ineffective
backlink-building: (watch this first video if you are primarily doing "online")

Watch this second video if you are primarily doing "offline consulting":

Here is an example of how this works in practice:

See, how for the term "quit smoking naturally" Google thinks it should show an ezinearticle (yeah, it’s not dead;-) NATURALLY, without any backlinking?
But then below, for "lose 10 pounds in 3 days", despite being fully optimized for the KW AND having 58 backlinks, the ezinearticle only shows up at position #91.
Google clearly decided that for this KW it is NOT showing any ezinearticles on the first page.

However, check out what Google thinks about the hubpage for "lose 10 pounds in 3 days". It’s in position #2 siphoning off traffic (12.000+ searches per month, hint, hint) all day long, and all that despite NOT being fully optimized for the KW and having a massive 3 (yes, only THREE) backlinks.

Which one are YOU going to target when going after "lose 10 pounds in 3 days"?

Here’s an "offline" example:
The lines highlighted in green are page 1 CATEGORIES which show up on page 1 of Google.
Meaning: you want to make sure your clients are in those CATEGORY-listings, or even sponsor those.
The dentist in Dallas will get lots of exposure from the superpages category, because it’s on page 1. They won’t get much exposure from citysearch.com, because, well, it’s NOT on page 1.

The lines in yellow: these guys are on page 1 for individual business listings. Awesome – if they are YOUR clients.
If not, time to knock them off!

As you can see, they rank with ONE measly backlink (and yet, they are on page 1 of Google).

If you want to help a tattoo removal place in Dallas, focus your energy on yelp-listings (and make sure you get TWO backlinks…), and forget about citysearch and yellowpages.
(yes, these are good as supplementary backlink-juice providers, but all that tender care and love should go to the yelp-listing!)

Check out the guys in RED, they are on page 2, so your chance to approach them with an irresistible offer…

(btw, what I’m highlighting here is me showing you something in the picture, the Keyword Sweetspotter is a stylish b&w, just so I don’t get any support tickets: but hey, I thought the app is doing lovely hand-drawn coloured boxes…) (and yes, we can talk about a V2.0 which does some of the thinking and color-coding for you)

Now, you may be asking "but Veit, I see the point for offline-consulting, it’s all about direct response, you want to drive people to a website.

But what about doing this for pure SEO, why would I even want to go head-to-head with other competitors, a link is a link, and it doesn’t really matter if it’s on page 1 or not, right?"

They want to see real people visiting your site and then having a good user-experience.

And they are steadily decreasing the value of those backlinks that don’t drive human visitors.

That’s why it’s so important to pick those web-properties where you can rank easily so you not only capture some old-fashioned link-love, but also make sure it’s a Web-property where you ultimately drive human visitors to your site.

So, to sum up: the Keyword Sweetspotter is going to save you lots of time picking those sites where Google ranks your content "naturally".

But, what’s more, it is going to save you tons of time, $$$ and effort trying to rank content where Google is already telling you that they are NOT going to rank it!

No more wasted backlinking packages, SENuke jobs, fiverr.com jobs, efficient but totally ineffective outsourcers!