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| SEO Tactics for Bloggers |
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| Keyword Research for Pros! |
If you were to make a list of industries with solid, almost guaranteed returns, that would have longevity and high ROIs, you'd probably find tobacco pretty high up the list. It would certainly be rubbing shoulders with oil, alcohol, and weapons manufacturers as an industry that seems resistant to all manner of regulatory and economic change.
Of course, we know that this traditional view no longer really holds. It's only really inertia that keeps it on top: that, and addiction. The treatment of tobacco dependency has also been traditionally a big business that is pretty profitable and reasonably easy to get into, if competitive by nature.
A quick search returns around 16.5 million results for the single exact phrase "stop smoking", and about 2.3 billion on a loose match that would probably also take into account "quit smoking", "give up smoking" and other assorted related phrases.
Talking of which, scrolling down to the "Related searches" section of the first SERP throws up some interesting keyword modifiers, qualifiers and indications of intent:
Aside from the competitive nature, these are all good flags that you should dig a bit deeper and see if there's some money in the niche. Guess what? There is. According to AdWords, you'll pay around £3 to advertise in this niche, with several tens of thousands of prospects looking for solutions linked only to the phrase "stop smoking".
If we assume a 1% CTR on the sum of all possible biddable keywords, that's around £3,000 per month to reach the market. To me, that shows that it is capable of supporting revenue generation, although it should be noted that the spread is wide. In other words, real advertising spend could be within the range of £8.90 to £3,430 taking into account the lowest traffic at the cheapest bid to the highest traffic at the highest bid.
But there's also another problem.
According to the UK's Office for National Statistics, tobacco "usage dropped from 15.8 per cent in 2019 to 14.5 per cent last year" (source: Daily Mail) In fact, the proportion of smokers in the UK has been falling consistently year on year since the 1970s.
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| Data from ONS, Graphic from the Daily Mail |
The data itself is interesting, and the article in question provides some good insights, but we're more concerned with the overall picture: a 1.3% drop consistent with history, and the lowest proportion of smokers in the population (over 16s only) since the year 2000.
When you're looking for opportunities, it doesn't really matter what causes these drop-offs. In the case of tobacco use, everything from advertising, to the reduction of screen time showing smokers in soap operas, rising cost, and the effect of lockdowns will contribute.
No, our primary interest is in checking that the decline of the industry isn't likely to cause a similar decline in the size of the opportunity. We're after some kind of corroborative effect, or, better, proof that the "stop smoking" market is effectively immune to the decline of the smoking population.
Sadly, it isn't.
When an industry declines, there is often, some kind of collateral damage. The little self-help industries that grow up around very specific addictions (from texting, to sex, drinking to smoking and everything in between) are usually the first to suffer.
To try and figure out if these declines are affecting an associated market, it is useful to carry out trend analysis, paying specific attention to:
Any of the above is a red flag. With that in mind, here's the 2004 - 2021 trend line for the three leading competing search terms for the quitting industry linked to tobacco use:
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| Search Trends since 2004 for the UK |
First flag: look at those seasonal spikes between 2004 and 2016. Each of those peaks is in January, and I would associate that with one thing - New Year's Resolutions to finally kick the butt. Whereas that swing was huge in the early 2000s, in the late 2010s, it has become much less marked.
Second flag - a downward trend across all three terms. Although close to levelling out, the decline is marked and roughly follows the 1.3% by volume due to the effect of reduced seasonality.
The final flag is the fact that the gap between the lines has narrowed. There's no longer a clear leader (like the red line over the yellow line in 2004-2010). No, as we wend our way towards 2022, those three lines are closer together than ever before.
If I had a client whose bread and butter was the "stop smoking" market, I'd be telling them to pivot and pivot hard, into finding another addiction to cure. Of course, I'd have to help them find an alternative, using strategic keyword research, but that's for another time.
If you'd like to find out if your industry is in danger of declining away from you, then leave me a comment below and I'll be in touch. Or, you can tweet me (@gwleckythompson) or look me up on Facebook.
"Figures released by analytics firm Kantar show 449,000 consumers bought their Christmas pudding in September - a 76 per cent rise on last year." ~ Daily Mail
Even on such a small relative sample, that's significant. It seems that online grocery shopping remains more or less in line year on year. As the article says (referring to September 2020 and September 2021):
"while the proportion of groceries bought online was up 12.4% over the same period, compared with a 12.2% rise in September and following seven months of declines" ~ Daily Mail
Ever curious, I wondered what the search trends could tell us about this. For example: do people search for new ways to buy their Christmas puddings online, and do the search trends reflect the 76% increase in sales reported in the Kantar study?
The quick answer is, er, no. Online searches are about 12% down when comparing the two periods (September 2020 vs September 2021) indexed on a maximum value occurring in December 2020 as seen in Figure 1.
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| Figure 1 - Christmas Pudding Searches 1/9/20 to 30/9/21 ~ Google Trends |
The conclusion? People know where to buy their Christmas Pudding, be it online or in their local grocery store. They're not trying to find new suppliers, and, possibly, they're not quite panicking. Yet.
It's much the same story for Christmas Cake, too, as shown in Figure 2.
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| Figure 2 - Christmas Cake Searches 1/9/20 to 1/11/21 ~ Google Trends |
If you draw a line across the graph in Figure 2, through 24/10/2020 and 24/11/2021, there's a gradient representing a drop of around 12%. Spooky. It's also a gentler rise than in 2020, suggesting perhaps that in 2021, people know where to get their cake as well as their pudding.
For those curious as to who is winning the Pudding vs Cake war, Figure X shows the two comparative trend lines.
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| Figure 3 - Christmas Cake vs Christmas Pudding Searches 1/9/20 to 1/11/21 ~ Google Trends |
So, if you're thinking of breaking into the online Christmas cake and/or pudding space this year, maybe it's not the best business idea ever.
Another popular hobby at this time of year is baking. Series 11 of The Great British Bake Off ran from September to November last year and is currently underway this year (2021). Perhaps people are baking their puddings and cakes? Spoiler alert: not so much.
Let's first take a look at the recipe trends compared with general searches for Christmas Cake and Pudding. The result is in Figure 4.
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| Figure 4 - Christmas Cake vs Pudding vs Recipe Searches 1/9/20 to 1/11/21 ~ Google Trends |
The green line shows the trends for Christmas Pudding recipe searches. That one never really gets started until people seem to panic around 20-26 December when general Christmas Pudding searches also peak - a sudden interest in making a pudding that can't be found in the shops, perhaps?
As an aside, The Great British Bake Off started in 2010, but search trends seem to indicate that it hasn't had the effect on Christmas Cake and Christmas Pudding recipe searches that its general popularity might suggest (see Figure 5).
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| Figure 5 - Christmas Cake vs Pudding vs Recipe Searches since 2009 ~ Google Trends |
As I was running the numbers for Figure 5, I also noticed that the Christmas Cake peak is usually in December, when the Christmas Cake Recipe peak is in November. It's almost as if people give it a go, then take one look at the results and search for alternatives...
For completeness: the variance for the recipe query is 1.73 for an average index of 18, which is 9.6%, whereas, for the straight-up cake query, that rises to 6.73 on an index averaging 63, or 10.7%. Read into that what you will.
My own opinion is that, despite a strengthening interest in Christmas Cake recipes, it's probably not enough to make a business around. Pity, that, because I rather liked the idea. But, if it hits that 50% trend marker in Figure 4, I'll reconsider my advice - if half the Christmas Cake market is looking for recipes online, then maybe there's money in the market. At the current 25% level, it's going to be a little hit or miss.
A final note: the AdWords spending in this market is in the 15p - £1 range across variations of Christmas, cake, pudding and recipe, including single word variations like pudding, and cake, not to mention cake recipe and pudding recipe.
For me, that's an indication that despite relatively high volumes (cake: 100K - 1M, everything else in the 100K band, except pudding recipe in the 10K band), the money just isn't there to be had. Otherwise, people would be spending on advertising.
Comments, as always, are welcome, in the section below, as well as any direct questions, offers of work, etc. I filter the thread so I can pick those out rather than let them get published!
Recently, Fiverr posted a list of the top searches from the platform, and legendary ebiz myth-buster, Niall Doherty listed out the top 6 in his eBiz Weekly newsletter. The reason that Fiverr posts these is so that "you can successfully promote the most up-and-coming services to your audience" (Fiverr).
Of course, avid keyword researchers know that this is only half of the story. Like all destination sites (Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, news sites, etc.) Fiverr is partly a search engine and partly content creator and as such whether the pages index well by Google (and others) actually matters.
Now, beyond offering Fiverr gigs, there are also opportunities to offer services such as PLR, deep-dive keyword research and so on to people actually doing the work. For example, people offering photoshop editing are often on the lookout for ways to pull in more customers, and a list of well researched and keyword rich hot topics would be a worthwhile investment to them.
It also should come as no surprise that even if Fiverr is being used as the collection and rating agency for many freelancers, they often have their own pages where they promote their gigs. In both cases, organic traffic (from 3rd party search engines) is likely to be important.
When we would like to know, is of the top 6 keyword phrases, which ones are global, and which ones are local to Fiverr. This helps make sure that our research is on point, and that we select the correct market profile: are we selling gold, or are we selling shovels to dig for gold?
The first step is to establish where Fiverr gets its traffic.
According to SimilarWeb, Fiverr gets around 68% from direct links (i.e. people typing in fiverr.com or linking to a fiverr.com page directly), with a further 20% coming from search engines. The remaining 12% is split between social and mail (just under 11%) and display advertising and referrals (just over 1%).
The search engine traffic is about 75/25 in favour of organic over paid keyword advertising. Social is split between YouTube (roughly half), Facebook (about 1/5th) and the rest is Pinterest (7%), WhatsApp (5%) and Twitter coming in at about 4%.
From this brief data-gathering exercise, we can see that the strategy appears to be heavily weighted towards on-site search, or affiliates directly linking into their gigs from their own pages.
This is backed up by Ubersuggest's domain report for Fiverr, which notes a backlink count of around 50 million, with about 7 million no-follows. That's 50 million links into Fiverr from sites other than search engines.
That said, Ubersuggest also notes that Fiverr ranks for around 1.7 million organic keywords. Clearly, these aren't all going to be permutations of Fivver, gig, paid gig, freelancer, and so forth, so it is likely that the keywords surfaced by their internal stats will also be indexed by the search engines.
Therefore, our in is to provide ways for Fiverr affiliates to produce content that enables them to rank well outside Fiverr, rather than giving them PLR to sell inside Fiverr to their customers.
For the record, and repeated from Niall Doherty's article, here are the six keyword phrases in question:
All of these are, or were, trending on the Fiverr platform, in Q3 2021. Here's how they performed organically:
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| Twitch Emotes |
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| Social Media Management |
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| Photoshop Editing |
The peak organic search volume for photoshop editing appears to have been somewhere in 2017, with quite a big drop-off in 2019 that hasn't really recovered. The top related queries revolve around the following topics:
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| Voice Over |
Not only is the trend line for voice over flat, it is also hovering around 25% of its peak, which occurred in mid-2004. The top related query is for voice over jobs, and there is some confusion in the results between voice over as a technology (voice over IP) or as a service (voicing over video). Here are the top 5:
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| "Voice Over" vs "Voiceover" |
The other obvious query - "voice-over" - was even less popular than the red-labelled "voiceover". There might be some space to help out Fiverr affiliates in this topic, but be prepared to weed out a lot of tech-related red herrings.
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| Content Writer |
Another topic that is on the ascendency across search engines, and not just on Fiverr, content writer has a number of very interesting rising queries revealed by Trends:
All of the above, with the exception of "web content writer" are also Breakout queries, meaning that the comparable volume is so far beyond the others as to be considered trending very highly. However, the trend lines for these indicate that the market may be smaller than the overall trendline suggests. Here are the top 5 related queries (based on the last 12 months) for comparison:
There are some solid possibilities, but the overall sentiment is that it will be pretty competitive for both the Fiverr affiliates selling into the market and any content strategists vying to help them.
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| NFT |
Quite what people expect to find on Fiverr when they search for "NFT" isn't clear. It feels unlikely that $5 will buy you something that you can turn into an NFT that can be exchanged for *gulp* millions, but reading articles such as this one from CNBC about a boy who made a small fortune from Weird Whales proves that anything is possible.
From the chart, the newness of NFT as a search term is obvious. However, it also has 25/25 rising queries in Trends, and 25/25 top queries, which hints that it may be more than a flash in the pan. Here's the top 5 rising queries that mention "NFT":
There are plenty more, and they are all Breakout. If you are a techie, who knows about NFTs, and you can find an angle on Fiverr, this is the one that I'd be pushing: offering content to affiliates providing NFT services.
I'll see you there, selling pickaxes and not gold.
The above is a very brief skim across the top, as a demonstration of how you should treat strategic keyword research when considering either helping existing freelancers on a platform like Fiverr. Remember that it's far easier to sell shovels, picks, and denim workwear than it is to mine a diamond or chunk of gold.
Please reach out in the comments below to discuss any of the above, or request a one-on-one session to explore keyword research and content strategies for your own projects.