Researching Fiverr Search Trends: Strategic Keyword Management 101

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.

Fiverr Traffic Sources

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.

Q3 Fiverr Keyword Trends

For the record, and repeated from Niall Doherty's article, here are the six keyword phrases in question:

• twitch emotes
• social media management
• photoshop editing
• voice over
• content writer
• NFT

All of these are, or were, trending on the Fiverr platform, in Q3 2021. Here's how they performed organically:

Twitch Emotes

The data from 2004 to 2014 is excluded since it is a flat zero line. The trend line since then would seem to suggest that the wider demand for "twitch emotes" has passed. Combining the rising and top keyword queries from Trends, sample keyword phrases include:

• twitch emotes maker
• top twitch emotes
• how to make twitch emotes
• free twitch emotes
• how to get twitch emotes

Social Media Management

From the above graph, social media management would appear to be a trending topic in Trends that is also trending organically in search engines at large. By way of example, here are the top 5 rising keyword queries related to social media management:

• best social media management companies
• social media management price
• personal social media management
• social media management for small business
• best free social media management tools

The sentiment that this is a rising trend is backed up by the fact that there are plenty of related keyword phrases (25/25 in Trends Top Queries and 20/25 in Rising Queries). Quite a few of the Breakout rising phrases are geared towards geographic locations, too, which makes for easy reuse, by region, of content created for Fiverr affiliates.

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:

• background [hd] images for photoshop editing
• background images for photoshop editing free download
• online photoshop editing
• photoshop editing tutorials

It's also worth noting that there are fewer related keywords reported by Trends (13/25, or 52%) than one might expect for a keyword phrase that has been around since the beginning of Trends records. This also goes some way to supporting the theory that organic searches have stagnated somewhat, and is backed up by the fact that there are also only two rising queries reported by Trends.

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:

• voice over jobs
• voice over ip
• voice over video
• voice over iphone
• voice over artist

An educated guess would be that Fiverr affiliates are more in the voice over as a service category, rather than technology. For the curious, there's also a distinction between "voice over" and "voiceover":

"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.

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:

• content writer near me
• arabic content writer
• content writer wanted
• saas content writer
• web content writer

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:

• content writer job[s]
• freelance content writer
• content writer salary
• what is content writer
• website content writer

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.

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":

• opensea nft
• nft games
• nft art finance
• what is a nft
• how to buy 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.

Summary

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.

Sources & Resources

• Fiverr's Q3 Top Search Trends by Fiverr - what it says on the tin;
• eBiz Weekly #144 by Niall Doherty - while you're there, subscribe to the newsletter, it's beyond awesome;
• Ubersuggest's Fiverr Domain Report - even the free version of Neil Patel's Ubersuggest is worth using in your projects;
• Similar Web's Traffic Ranking Report - very useful stats, including per country, to help you gauge if, and if so, how to tackle a keyword research project;
• Californian Gold Rush by Spartacus Educational - worth a read if you're interested in the metaphors between the internet and gold rushes:
• Google Trends - if you're into keyword research and not using Trends, then you should probably give it a spin.

Keyword Research Competitor Analysis Tips and Tricks

In this article we will look at a few tips and tricks related to keyword research competitor analysis.

I'm going to assume that your target page isn't as high up in the SERPs as you would like, and that you have done some basic strategic keyword research to figure out which keyword phrases you should be targeting (depending on whether you have picked a Value or Volume keyword selection strategy.)

The reason the selection strategy matters is because the first technique is entirely keyword driven.

Search Competitor Analysis

Before anything else, you need to know who is in the Top 10 for your target keyword phrase.

The easiest way to do this is to go to your search engine of choice, and type in your search phrase as a query. Here are some important key points:

• make sure you conduct the search in an "anonymous" browser session (also called InPrivate);
• set the right geographic context by using the correct location-based engine URL (i.e. .co.uk/.com/.fr etc.);
• start with a narrow match (i.e. put the keywords "in quotes").

Once you have your list of direct search engine result page competitors, open each target link in a new window, and copy and paste the URL to a notepad or spreadsheet. Do as many as you see fit, across a wide spectrum of URLs (if a lot of them come from so-called "content farms" be wary), but make sure you have at least 10 unique domains / sub-domains.

Keyword Density

Once you've figured out who the competition is, use a tool like SEO Tools Keyword Density Checker to make a list of the one, two and three word keyword phrases, and rank them according to their relative density.

Why does this matter?

Keyword density is one of those measures that used to have recommended hard and fast rules about what the number should be. In the early days, keyword stuffing, a technique that consisted of repeating the target keyword phrase as often as possible in an article got results.

These days, however, search engines "recognise keyword stuffing as a disingenuous tactic" at best (source: Enge et al (2010) The Art of SEO, US:O'Reilly, p. 211) and "can actually get your pages devalued via search engine penalties" at worst (ibid).

Using the tool is easy: just plug in the page that you have identified as being in competition with your own, and then pick out the keywords and their relative densities from the resulting list. Now you know two things:

• the best keywords;
• the densities that are currently working.

Of course, the more pages you analyse, the better your keyword density research will be, and since the results are always relative to your own performance, you should also conduct the same exercise on one of your own pages.

Strategic Keyword Competitor Analysis

Another tactic you can use to expose keyword phrases that your competitors are targeting is to copy and paste the URL into the AdWords Keyword Planner tool.

In the same way that the SEO Tools utility above picks out keyword phrases, the Keyword Planner will analyse the content of the page, and pick up keywords from the Google and AdWords' keyword databases.

The result is a list that can be used to create content to rival that which is being put out by the competition, lifted from their own text. Incidentally, the technique can also be used as a cross check for your own content (to make sure Google is picking up the right keyword phrases) or s a way to pick out keywords to target with an AdWords campaign.

The Keyword Coach Keyword Research Tutorials are a good place to start if you need some tips on how to analyse the resulting lists of keyword and search data, or just search the blog for "long tail keywords".

Processing lists of keywords to find those that match your strategy is a useful skill to learn, and the Keyword Planner results are a great (free) data source to start with.

Finally, the SEMRush tool is great for giving you an overview of your competition, and the keywords that they are targeting. What's great is that it works well for sub-domains as well as domains. However the tool performs but less well for pages on a domain.

Maintaining a list of keywords that are preferred by the competition is a good way to add keyword research and keyword marketing to your ongoing competitive advantage, just assign some time in your keyword research strategy and process to apply these techniques and stay ahead of the pack!