Episode 298: A Powerhouse Keyword Research Strategy Using RankIQ and Keysearch with Dan Kinney

298_DAN_KINNEY

Dan Kinney: Hi, this is Dan Kinny from Joy To The Food, and you’re listening to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. 

Megan Porta: Hey, awesome food bloggers. Before we dig into this episode, I have a really quick favor to ask you. Go to your favorite podcast player. Go to Eat Blog Talk. Scroll down to the bottom where you see the ratings and review section. Leave Eat Blog Talk a five star rating if you love this podcast and leave a great review. This will only benefit this podcast. It adds value. I so very much appreciate your efforts with this. Thank you so much for doing this. Okay. Now onto the episode. 

What’s up, food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, the podcast for food bloggers looking for the value and confidence that will move the needle forward in your business. This episode is sponsored by RankIQ, ironically, because we’re going to be talking about RankIQ today. I am your host, Megan Porta, and you are listening to episode number 298. Today Dan Kinney is going to share with us his insights and his strategies using RankIQ and Keysearch to do his keyword research. Wow. That was a mouthful. Dan has been running Joy To The Food for nearly a year now, along with his fiance, soon to be wife, Mika. Both work full-time jobs and do everything together for Joy To The Food in their off hours. Throughout the process of building this brand, together they have learned a lot about each other and the best way to work with a partner.

Dan does the numbers and styling and Mika creates the content and handles communication. You guys have created such an awesome blog, Dan. I love your content and I just love talking to you guys. So thank you for being here again today. 

Dan Kinney: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here and talk about some numbers. My portion of the blog. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, it’s exciting. So we want to know if you have a fun fact to share with us. 

Dan Kinney: I do. You mentioned Mika, my partner in Joy To The Food. Her and I are getting married in a week and a half. So that’s my fun fact. Yay. 

Megan Porta: Okay. So I know you’re getting married in California, but where in California are you getting married? 

Dan Kinney: Yeah, so we used to live about an hour and a half up the coast from LA. So it’s right on the coast. That’s where we’ll be traveling here pretty soon to get married. 

Megan Porta: Enjoy. I’m going to be in California in a couple of weeks, too. When is your wedding date? 

Dan Kinney: It’s April 1st, April fool’s day. 

Megan Porta: Okay, cool. Enjoy and congratulations. I can’t wait to see, hopefully you put pictures on your blog and social media, cause I would love to see you. How beautiful. I’m sure it’s going to be beautiful. 

Dan Kinney: We definitely will. Yeah, we’ve been checking the weather and there’s an 8% chance of rain that day.

Megan Porta: Did you say 8 or 80?

Dan Kinney: 8.

Megan Porta: Okay, good. I was like, in California? Good. Hopefully you get the other, whatever, 90 I’m bad at math. Whatever that other percentage is. Thanks for joining me here today, Dan. I know we had talked outside of the interview that we did last time with you and Mika that you have started using this new strategy with using Keysearch and RankIQ together to hone in on a really good strategy for finding those perfect keywords for your blogs.

So let’s dive into that. Why don’t you just give an overview of each? So I don’t care which one you start with, but we can talk a little bit about each tool and then we can dig into how you actually use them together. 

Dan Kinney: Yeah. Great. So yeah, we use Keysearch and RankIQ as our two main tools for finding keywords and also optimizing our blog content. I can start with Keysearch first. Keysearch is a great tool for keyword research. One of the pros of Keysearch is that you can use it to search for any keyword that you would like to try to rank for on Google. It’s got a feature where you just search for a keyword and then it gives you a score of how difficult that keyword is to rank for on Google. You can enter your domain, your blog domain, and it’ll give you a suggested score to stay under for a keyword to rank for. So for example, we’re pretty new blog and we don’t have much domain authority. So our suggested score is 28. Sometimes we go a little over 28, but staying in that area or lower. When we find a keyword that has a score that is around 28 or lower, we have a good feeling that’s a keyword we can use to make a post that we can rank on the first page of Google for.

Megan Porta: Can I interrupt you real quick? So where do you enter your domain so that you can find that score? 

Dan Kinney: Yeah, let me pull this up here.

Megan Porta: I’m all prepped too. I’ve got Keysearch open, RankIQ open. I’m ready to go. 

Dan Kinney: Perfect. All right. So in the top of Keysearch, there’s a tag you can click on called Explorer. When you click on that tab, at the very top, you can enter your domain. Then just below where you enter your door main it’ll show score to target and competition level. So I’ve got mine open here and that’s where it shows me 28 is my target competition. 

Megan Porta: So it’s just a suggestion, like you said, you can go a little bit above, but to stay right around there and how much below it do you want to go? If your score is 28, you don’t want to go 10. Do you want to stay within a certain range?

Dan Kinney: I would say if you find a keyword that is a score of 10 and it has a high volume, we would still go for that. Yeah. It depends on the volume. Typically keywords with lower scores have lower volume of monthly searches. So if the volume is too low, then usually, we don’t quite go for it. We try to target monthly volume 500 or above ideally.

Megan Porta: How do you get that number? 

Dan Kinney: Yeah. So on the homepage of Keysearch, you can search for whatever you like. I’ve got French toast pulled up here, so I’m searching for French toast. After you search for it, on the Side of the page you’ll see a list of keywords. The top one, since I searched for French toast, is French toast that comes up. Then next to it, it shows different columns. The first column is volume. So I’m looking at French toast here and it says the volume is 201,000. So that is the number of times that French toast is searched on Google. 

Megan Porta: That’s a lot.

Dan Kinney: It is. This has a score of 58. 

Megan Porta: So probably not something you would target. 

Dan Kinney: No, not yet. Maybe next year. 

Megan Porta: Okay. So take us through French toast. So for you and your numbers, how do you know to look for 500 volumes and then take me through the process? As you scroll down and you look through the numbers, how would you decide on a keyword?

Dan Kinney: Yeah. So one of the things I look for is the competition. So on this search result for French toast, we are given the top pages in Google who rank for this word. So you can look at their domain authority. Typically if there are a lot of, or if the top posts have high domain authority, it’s tougher to to rank among them. But it kinda depends. We definitely do analysis on each of these posts. We actually go to the page and see what is within the post, because sometimes it’s not a recipe post that is within the first page of Google. So if it’s not a recipe post and people are looking for recipe posts, then you do have a chance to potentially rank for that keyword. So the first thing I look at is the domain authority and see if the top post for that keyword is close to our domain authority. Then I know we have a good chance of ranking among them. 

Megan Porta: So you would scroll down on that right side and select a different keyword that had more applicable numbers.

Dan Kinney: Yeah. That’s one way to do it. So if you scroll down, it lists a bunch of different keywords and I’m just looking now and\ gluten-free French toast is one of the ones that it shows and that has a score of 32 and a volume of 1600. So that score of 32 is closer to within the range of what we would be able to rank for easily. So that’s one way is to just scroll down on this list of keywords to find another keyword that you could rank for.

Another way is this filter feature, which is just above this list of keywords. You can click on the filter and it gives you a few different data points that you can filter out. So the ones that I use, the first is, you can enter your keyword so I could enter French toast. Then you can enter the minimum or maximum number of words that you want your keyword phrase to be. So if I enter French toast, I know I won’t rank for just French toast. Maybe I’m looking for a keyword phrase that has more than just two words.

So I would typically set the minimum number of words to three. So it’ll only populate keyword phrases that have three words in them. Then you can also set the minimum or maximum volume. So this is where I could enter 500, if I wanted to only see the posts that have 500 or more monthly searches. I usually don’t enter 500. Sometimes we will target keyword phrases that are less than 500.

Megan Porta: Where do you, how do you come up with 500?

Dan Kinney: I think that’s just where we have found success, I guess. Just through trial and error. We find posts that are over 500 and we’ve been able to rank for them.

Megan Porta: So just looking at what you’ve done in the past and what has worked and tweaking it based on that. 

Dan Kinney: Yeah, exactly. 

Megan Porta: Okay. So then you can peruse your new list and then see if anything applies. I love the filter option because otherwise there’s just so much to wade through and it’s really overwhelming. I can give up really easily, but now it’s okay. We can hone in on exactly what we’re looking for and select much more wisely and quickly. 

Dan Kinney: Exactly. The filter option is very helpful and gives you results that you maybe wouldn’t have thought of on your own. 

Megan Porta: Exactly. So then once you find something that has great numbers, then you select it. What do you do with it then? 

Dan Kinney: Our process, typically, since we do use Keysearch and RankIQ together, our process is, we look in RankIQ first. If we come up with a recipe idea and that’s because RankIQ, they handpick the best keyword phrases for you so you don’t have to necessarily do as much of this filtering and finding as we do in key search.

Megan Porta: So maybe we’ll pause there and just, okay. You gave us an overview about how to use Keysearch and the fact that you can search for literally any keyword that you want to, it’s a huge database. But first you go to RankIQ. So can you give us just a quick rundown of RankIQ? 

Dan Kinney: Yes. Yeah. So RankIQ is a keyword research tool. But unlike Keysearch, it hand-picked keyword phrases that you should be able to rank on the first page of Google, if you’re picking the right ones for your blog. So I’m on RankIQ right now. They have their keyword library. They have this library of different niches. So they’ve got quite a few food niches, so many. I’m looking through and yeah, there’s probably 50 different things. 

Megan Porta: Just to name a few, there’s beer, beef, taco slut, cookies, Costa Rican, Curry, Italian. Really, you name it and it’s probably in here. 

Dan Kinney: Exactly. The nice thing is you can give them your niche and that’s how these niches were developed. We gave them our niche that we wanted them to find keyword phrases for. They did the research. They found the keyword phrases. Three weeks later, our niche was up here with the keyword. Once you have a membership, you reach out to them with your niche and they will do the work for you, find the keyword phrases and give them some time because they do it by hand selecting all the keywords and it’ll be up there. So our niche is protein. We make a lot of protein recipes. So I’m just looking through the food protein niche, and it’s got all these suggested keywords for us to make great recipes for.

Megan Porta: There’s a lot in here. It’s awesome that Brandon, who is the founder of RankIQ, is so accommodating and he always invites people, like you guys did just, provide a niche that is untapped and he will explore it for you, which is unheard of and so amazing. 

Dan Kinney: Yeah. It’s great. 

Megan Porta: So how do you use this tool? You mentioned protein. Do you go into that category and then just start searching for specific keywords within that category, or how do you go about that? 

Dan Kinney: It depends. If it’s a recipe that we’re not sure if it falls within a certain niche, then you don’t necessarily have to select a niche. You can just start typing in a keyword. So French toast. I can type in, and then it will populate keyword phrases that are within any niche that have the word French toast in them. So I typically do that. Then I’m looking at the different data points for each keyword phrase to find the most favorable one. So the different data points that it shows you are competition, visits per year and then time to rank. So the competition is based on their score from, I think it’s one to a hundred and the lower the score, the less competition there is. So the easier it will be for you to rank on the first page of Google for that post.

The next data point they give is visits per year, which is the expected. If you’re ranking on the first page of Google, that’s how many visits per year you can expect to receive from Google clicks. Then the time to rank is between ultra-fast and average. So that’s the amount of time once you publish your post, you can expect to rank on Google. So ultra-fast they say you could expect to rank on Google within 30 to 60 days. Average, they say it could be up to 180 days before your posts would rank on Google.

Megan Porta: Which is still pretty fast. 

Dan Kinney: Yeah. We weigh the different data points. Sometimes there are posts that have really low competition, rank ultra fast, but also have high visits per year. So sometimes there’s just gems in there that are a no brainer to create. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. I love finding those gems. When I find them, I’m like, oh boy, I have to write this now before anyone else finds this. I don’t know if you guys do this, but I always sort by lowest competition to highest, just so I can see if I can find those gems right away. So I typed in French toast and I saw one that’s like 10 for competition. It gets almost 10,000 visits a year and it ranks very fast. So that would be a gem. I sort it that way. Do you guys have a strategy as far as what you look for first? 

Dan Kinney: Yeah we do the same. I do everything. I sort by lowest competition first and then visits per year next, and then time to. I yeah. Sort them all. Okay. I like that. I don’t think I’ll do all three at the same time, but yeah, I like that. Yeah. All right. Then let’s say you find something that’s just like one of those gems we were referring to, then you run a report.

Megan Porta: Do you want to talk people through how that goes? 

Dan Kinney: Yeah, definitely. Once you find the keyword. If you find it in RankIQ and it’s already in the library, you can just click, run the report. Then it’ll generate a report for you and give you some information to help you write your post. One thing it gives you is a list of titles that Google likes to see. So I’m just looking at one of my reports for a pizza bowl. The top keywords Google likes to see in a title for pizza bowl, it ranks them from highest to lowest. The first words, pizza, second word bowl. Third word: recipe. Then easy bowls, carb, low carb, keto. So this kind of helps you write your title, which is pretty important for ranking on Google and having a good title with the appropriate keywords and modifying our keywords. So we usually start with that, for writing our title for the post. 

Megan Porta: So take us through what the keywords that you just talked through and how you would form a title from that. What would be your final title? 

Dan Kinney: Yeah, so I definitely want pizza and a bowl in here. Ours is low carb, those are suggested keywords, so that’s relevant to our post. So I would make a low carb pizza bowl. Just looking at this, that looks like the title I go with. 

Megan Porta: Awesome. Then once you grabbed your title from the report, do you guys use the optimizer? 

Dan Kinney: Yes, definitely.

Megan Porta: Yeah. That’s gold. That’s gold, in my opinion. I love the optimizer. 

Dan Kinney: It’s so easy to use and clean and easy to understand. So we love it too. So the optimizer, you put in your post content and it gives you a grade from F to A+. It also gives you a recommended word count and it updates in real time. So as you are adding to your post or adding to the content optimizer, it’ll improve your grade as you add more keywords and it’ll update the word count in real time.

The main tool for the content optimizer is that it lists the suggested keywords that you should use within your post on the right side and checks them off as you have them in your post. So you can see what words are relevant and that you should be including your posts in order to rank on the first page.

Megan Porta: I love the little toggle that you can toggle on and off to show unused words so that you can eliminate all the words from the list that you’ve already used so that they don’t muddy up that side bar. Do you know what I mean? So you can just see exactly what you need to add, and then once you add something, it removes it from the list. 

Dan Kinney: Yes. It’s very user-friendly and clean and just easy to use.

Megan Porta: It is, and it retains links and like H one H two, it’ll retain all of that information so that if you are copying and pasting from WordPress to the optimizer and vice versa, it retains all of that. So you don’t have to worry about reformatting everything. It is a great tool. Okay. So anything else specifically about Rank,IQ before we move on? Because next I’m going to ask you if you don’t find something in RankIQ, what do you do then? But is there anything we’ve forgotten? 

Dan Kinney: I don’t think so. Yeah. We went over how to look for keywords. You can add your own niche and then use the content optimizer. I think those are the main parts of the tool. I think that’s it. 

Megan Porta: Okay. So let’s say you go into rank IQ. You said that you do that first and you look French toast up and you just don’t find anything that you’re specifically looking for. Then you take that to Keysearch. 

Dan Kinney: Exactly. 

Megan Porta: Then what do you do from there? 

Dan Kinney: I would use the filter feature in Keysearch to find a keyword phrase that is relevant to what we’re trying to post on. 

Megan Porta: Any tips about that? I love that you start with the filters so you can nail down numbers and all of that, that you’re looking for. Anything else to keep your eye on as you’re looking through Keysearch. 

Dan Kinney: Yeah. Like RankIQ, I’m looking at the French toast list of words. You can click on score and it will order them, order of the lowest score to the highest score. So it makes the process of looking through the keywords given easier. aYou can find those low scores or high volume keywords right away by changing the order. 

Megan Porta: Okay. So score, and then you can also sort by volume if you want to see volume from highest to lowest or vice versa. 

Dan Kinney: Yeah, exactly. Then it also lists CPC and PPC, which honestly, I don’t look at too much. The CPC is cost per click and it’s how much advertisers are willing to pay for that keyword to advertise on Google’s page. So a higher CPC means that advertisers are paying more and it’s a more profitable keyword. I honestly just don’t use those metrics. 

Megan Porta: I ignore that completely. 

Dan Kinney: Yeah, exactly. Really, the volume is what I’m looking at and the score. 

Megan Porta: Okay. How effective do you feel like Keysearch is? I know in my experience, RankIQ is really effective if I use it strategically. What do you think about Keysearch and how quickly can you rank and what are the odds that you’re going to rank? Does it just depend? 

Dan Kinney: I would say it’s not as, I guess reliable, as a RankIQ. I’ve found that when we make posts, I’m using Keywords that are already in the RankIQ library. We’re pretty confident that we’ll rank for those. Keysearch is a little more of an unknown. Since we are doing the keyword research on our own in Keysearch. But I think using words that have a score that’s within your blogs range. I think it’s pretty trustworthy.

Megan Porta: It’s a good tool, but it’s not like you talked about early on the database of words inside of Keysearch is massive. So I feel like the odds of finding one that’s actually going to be a home run is a lot less.

Dan Kinney: Yeah, exactly. Sometimes the data between Keysearch and RankIQ doesn’t make sense. They’re tools so they’re approximate, it’s not an exact science. So sometimes a keyword in RankIQ looks like it’s really good. But then in Keysearch, it shows that it doesn’t have any volume. There’s those little inconsistencies there. I guess that’s just why we like using both tools to compare and contrast the data that they’re each giving, both in searching for keywords and then also in the content optimization that each tool provides. We actually run the content through the content assistant in Keysearch, as well as RankIQ, just to compare and contrast what keywords each tool is suggesting to include in our posts. 

Megan Porta: Can you talk through running it through the assistant in Keysearch. 

Dan Kinney: Yeah. So on the top there’s the content assistant and you enter your keyword at the top and hit search. Then on the right side, it’ll populate some information. It’ll give you the volume and the score for that keyword again. It’ll show you the average word count for the pages that are on the first page of Google. Then it’ll show you recommended keywords to include in your posts. So yeah, pretty similar to what RankIQ gives you in terms of suggested keywords and then suggested word count. I don’t like it as much as RankIQs. 

Megan Porta: It’s not as robust. The feel is not as developed or thought through. 

Dan Kinney: For RankIQ, like we said that they, the keywords, when you use them, they either check off that they’re used, or you can hide them. For Keysearch, it shows you the keywords and they start out orange. But when you use them, I gotta use one now, make sure they turn blue after you use them. Yeah. I still just like seeing what words Keysearch recommends versus RankIQ. A lot of times they’re pretty similar, but sometimes Keysearch recommends words that RankIQ doesn’t and vice versa that are more relative to our post. If I had to choose that. Would you use RankIQs content assistant, but Keysearch is just another thing to check. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. It’s like a backup and I actually have started doing pretty much your guys’ exact system. So I do RankIQ first as well. If I can’t find anything there, I really try to make it work. But if I can’t, then I go over to Keysearch. I’ve been doing pretty much your exact strategy. So I love that we’re on the same page as all of that. 

Dan Kinney: Using RankIQ, we have gotten so many ideas for posts. Posts beyond just recipes, I think, have been really helpful. All these different how-to- posts or how to use leftovers or substitution posts, things that we hadn’t thought of before. When we first started, we would just do writing posts just exclusively on recipes. But there’s all these other types of posts that you can write that you can rank quickly for and generate traffic to your blog. I think that has been really helpful using RankIQ to just find some of those types of posts that you can be writing.

Megan Porta: Yeah. So instead of recipe content, I call it like for me, I just call it supportive or supporting content, because it supports my existing content in some way. So I can do interlinking to and from. I have so much content that it is really easy for me to find supporting content on RankIQ to write about. I don’t know if I’ve told you this, Dan, but that is my strategy for 2022 is to write exclusively non recipe posts, all of that supporting content to support and lift up all of my other like gobs of content that’s just sitting there. So far it has been wildly successful. I am just seeing things shoot up in Google immediately. Then whatever it’s supporting goes up in Google. It is a strategy that I wish I would have found years ago because it is freaking working. It is working so well. 

Dan Kinney: That is awesome. 

Megan Porta: I will say it’s not always fun to write about supporting content. I just wrote something like three ways to reheat fettuccine Alfredo. That is not super exciting, but if it is going to support my Alfredo sauce and my Alfredo recipe and it’s going to bump both up in Google, then it’s so worth it. That’s just something I wanted to point out that it’s not like something that’s going to stir up a passion for you necessarily, but down the road, it’s going to probably help all of your content rise up. 

Dan Kinney: Yes, definitely. That’s exactly how we do as well. Since we are a new blog, we can rank for some things that we would want to, or that Mika would want to create a post for. But we know putting in this work now down the road we’ll be able to rank for some of the things that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to do now, but down the road we will. 

Megan Porta: I always say this. Everyone’s probably tired of hearing me say this, but planting seeds. When I write those borderline boring posts, I visualize it like I am planting a seed that is going to germinate and later it’s going to grow hugely. That is motivating for me because we all want to see all of the seeds that we planted to grow into something beautiful. So that’s my weird visualization.

Dan Kinney: It may not be the most fun writing those posts, but what is fun is watching your traffic grow. That’s a lot of fun.

Megan Porta: A lot of people right now are saying that their traffic is down from last year. And I feel so terrible looking at mine, I’m up at least 20% year over year from last year because of RankIQ 100% because of the content that I’m writing. 

Dan Kinney: That is great. 

Megan Porta: Okay. Any other points you want to talk about from either Keysearch or RankIQ or how you use them together? Oh, I did have one question before we had final thoughts. Do you come up with ideas only based on what Mika wants to create? Or do you come up with ideas based on the Keyword research tools? Or do you use both of them?

Dan Kinney: I would say right now, it’s more heavily starting with the keyword tools first to find ideas of what Mika wants to make. Yeah, I would say that’s 75% of how we start. For determining what post we’re going to make. 

Megan Porta: I think that’s a smart strategy, especially now being a food blogger because it’s just such a saturated space and there’s so much competition, so I think, at least doing that for a majority of your posts, just researching a little bit first is really smart. Didn’t used to be like that. It used to be like, whatever random was in my mind or whatever I saw in the grocery store that day was what I made, but it’s a different world now. 

Dan Kinney: That sounds nice. We don’t know that world, having not done this very long.

Megan Porta: I kinda liked that world, to be honest with you. I miss it, but yeah, it’s good to be strategic too. Okay. So anything that we missed that you want to be sure to touch on?

Dan Kinney: I would just suggest watching videos or listening to podcasts and just really get to know these tools. Just spend the time learning them and everything about them, as much as you can. It really will help in the long run. If you put the time into understanding all the functions and how to use them as best you can.

Megan Porta: Yeah. They are your friends. I have to admit that I forgot that I was recording an interview for a while because I just felt like I was having a fun learning conversation with you, Dan. So I had to oh, that’s right. I’m recording this. That’s a good sign, I think.

Dan Kinney: Yeah. This has been fun

Megan Porta: Yeah, this has been really fun. Thank you for taking the time for it. So close to your wedding and congratulations. I cannot wait to hear how everything goes. I’m sure it’s going to be lovely and just amazing. 

Dan Kinney: Thank you so much. Yes, we are so excited. 

Megan Porta: Yay. I can hear it in your voice. Say hi to Mika. Do you have any additional words of inspiration to share with us? I asked you last time. So let me know if you have something else. 

Dan Kinney: My word of inspiration was just really understanding your tool and putting in the time up front. I guess maybe, like we talked about not writing some of the posts that aren’t the most fun, but are going to really grow your blog in the long run, I would use it as a suggestion. 

Megan Porta: I love it. All right. We’ll put together show notes for you, Dan. If you want to go peek at those, they are at eatblogtalk.com/joytothefood2. So remind everyone where they can find you online and on social media. 

Dan Kinney: Yeah, so we are at joytothefood.com. All the media platforms, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, just search Joy to the Food, Mika and Dan, and you’ll find us there. 

Megan Porta: Awesome. Thank you so much for all of this, Dan. Thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode. 

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