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.

Why Every Site Needs a Search Engine

This article gives you two ways you can implement site-specific searches on your web page. Think of it as like having your own site-wide search engine. The question is: why should you do it?

It's simple, really: keywords used by your target market are part of your marketing resources. They help in market research, market development, and outreach marketing.

Search terms used by your visitors tell you what they want to see on your site. They also tell you how you should be marketing your site, what content you you should be producing, and how items should be listed for sale.

However, it can be tricky to make the most of this valuable information, and capturing it through various plug-ins is not always straightforward, or cheap.

Both these techniques are highly transparent, and free to use; my advice is to start using on-site search to monitor your existing market and build out your strategic keyword management process using the data that you gather as a result.

The Simple Search Solution

Use Google site search.

The background to this approach is represented by the following Google query:

• site:searchengineland.com keyword research

This simple instruction tells Google to only return results for the site mentioned. This is convenient for site owners who want to check their coverage of keyword terms, but also very convenient if you want to provide a site specific search function.

The only caveat is that the pages must be indexed by Google.

Drop-In Javascript

There are two parts to the solution:

• The HTML for the search form;
• The Javascript to open the search.

Refinements on the following drop-in HTML and Javascript are many and various:

• open the search in a new window;
• open the search in an inline frame;
• use various search modifiers to steer the result;
• etc.

The one major advantage is that you'll see, in your web traffic statistics, the search terms being used to query Google. This means that you can check that people are coming to your site for the right reasons, and, crucially, check that you're still serving them to the best of your ability.

Here's the basic HTML:

<input id="search query" type="text" />

<button 

onClick="window.location.href=submitSearch(document.getElementById('search_query').value);">

Search</button>

All that this does is call the Javascript function submitSearch (defined below) with the contents of the text input (that's what all that getElementById code does), and then set the URL of the current page to the result of the submitSearch function.

Here's the Javascript (stick it at the top of the page, in the head section):

<script type="text/javascript">

function submitSearch(search_query) {

  search_domain = encodeURIComponent('site:your-domain.com');

  search_text = '+"' + search_query.replace(" ", "+") + '"';

  return search_domain + search_text;

}

</script>

This snippet forms the query out of the site and the query text, making sure that it is safe for use in a URL. Important: you should replace your-domain.com with your own domain.

The result is a Google search page, containing results for the keywords typed in by the visitor, restricted to pages from your site. In your logging, you will then see an Exit with the URL, inclduign the keywords.

Note that this doesn't work for sub-domains terribly well; so, for it to work, you will need to buy your own domain name, even if you only use it to point to Blogger!

More Advanced Options

Create a Google Custom Search engine, and add it to your site.

There are a few pre-requisites:

• Your site is registered in Search Console;
• You have Google Analytics set up.

The process is relatively painless, if a little technical. However, as always, the Google help on the topic is pretty good, and as long as you can edit your web site HTML, it should be fairly straightforward.

A big plus for bloggers, especially, is that it can be monetised via AdSense, too.

Tip: You get a bit more power, and advanced analytics (thanks to integration with Google Analytics and Search Console) including the ability to use sub-domains.

So, What Now?

The worst thing you can do is nothing.

At a minimum you need to give your site users a decent way to search your content for something that is meaningful to them. The next worst thing would be not to track the things they look for.

Google has tried to make this a bit more opaque, in the name of privacy. They hide the content of query strings made by users who are logged into their Google account, for example. However, you should attempt to get as much search data from your own site as possible.

Why?

The reasoning is simple: if a visitor comes to your site, looking for something specific and can't find it, it's your responsibility to make sure that you supply it.

This is how market research operates. Strategic keyword management - treating your pool of available SEO friendly keyword phrases as a valuable business resource - relies on market research.

Without it, you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping that some of it sticks.

Keyword Research, Search Engine Optimization and the Customer Journey

Putting keyword research and SEO at the core of your business strategy can change the way that you align your marketing activities with the customer journey to create new and unique opportunities.

In this article we explore the link between keyword research, SEO and marketing. We will challenge the traditional view of the customer journey which tries to find a market for an existing product, and look at it from the point of view of the customer.

The Customer Journey

The typical customer journey is often viewed as starting out quite passively (Awareness) and ending with the active Advocacy of a product.

However, with the advent of search engines comes an opportunity to turn this Awareness into more active participation.

Rather than creating a product, and then trying to make the market Aware of it, keyword research allows us to approach marketing the other way round.

Given that at any one time, our prospective customers are researching solutions to their problems, it seems only logical to use their own queries to fuel the product development process.

Not only that, but if we are producing me-too products, we can see what kinds of comparison points the market feels are important, which will help to design the solution as well as give us a conversation in which to participate once the product has been created.

In fact, this conversation between the market and the search engines and social media platforms is present at every stage of the customer journey:

• Awareness: as soon as the market knows that something exists, they start to look for alternatives;
• Consideration: once the market becomes convinced of the merits of the products on sale, they then start to look for confirmation that there are valid options on the market;
• Purchase: having made the decision to buy, the market will look for the best option to acquire the product as a function of price, availability, service, etc.;
• Retention: subsequent conversations between the market and the business will fuel an ongoing process of refinement, and constant attempts to increase the value of the relationship in both directions;
• Advocacy: customers will generate conversations that can be leveraged as content in their own right (testimonials, for example) or new opportunities to develop the relationship further (products, services, and so forth).

At each of the five stages above, there are opportunities for keyword research and SEO to work together to help propel the business forward.

Keyword Research, SEO & the Customer Journey

Using a niche keyword research service such as those offered by The Keyword Coach enables you to pick the market's brain and build up a picture of what's important to your future customers. Your basket of keyword phrases is a resource upon which entire businesses can be built.

The Keyword Coach treats keyword research and search engine marketing as strategic resources, rather than merely a part of your online presence. As such, they are constantly evaluated in terms of internal and external context, how they can be deployed (using a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle), and integrated with the strategy of the organisation.

One example of this is performing Amazon niche site keyword research for product owners (including authors). Amazon is not only a marketplace, but also a search engine, with almost all the features that a traditional search engine has, including auto-suggest.

Coupled with using an indexing engine like Google, it is possible to leverage user generated content as well as marketing content to take advantage of the conversations that are created during the customer journey: from their initial discovery of a product, asking questions about it and eventually leaving reviews.

All of these interactions use key words to describe aspects of the product, both positive and negative, and keeping track of them will help create real opportunities.

In a larger context, the same processes can be used to track customer conversations both on the organisation's site, in social media, and through search engines in order to help make strategic decisions as to what to take to market, where to concentrate efforts and picking the best time to launch.

Why SEO Is Important for Business: Keyword Research, Search Engine Marketing and SEO Principles

To understand why SEO is important for business, we first need to discuss what SEO means.

It has become a buzzword and is often synonymous with "more traffic". However, not all traffic is good traffic.

In the beginning of the world wide web, a search engine was not a sophisticated tool. Subsequently, most search queries were one or two words long, returning a limited set of pages and raw traffic volume was the most important goal.

Playing the numbers game meant that there was an assumed direct correlation between visits and sales.

In those days, SEO meant attracting as many visitors as possible by having high repetition of keyword phrases (otherwise known as keyword stuffing) and many pages that may not even have content relating to what the business was selling (known as spamming the index).

Recent innovations in search engine technology, however, has led to more sophisticated and targeted queries, fewer chances of being able to play the numbers game, and, above all, more opportunities for quality SEO.

Today, SEO has a new meaning.

It's about engagement with search engines, rather than manipulation. It leans heavily on keyword research as part of the marketing strategies of an organisation, and relies on an intimate understanding of the market.

Modern SEO is about quality content meeting the needs of your market, and understanding the intent carried by the words in each query that you choose to target.

It's no longer just a numbers game.

Does SEO Work?

The point of SEO is to get content indexed for keywords that allow you to engage with the customer by proxy, and help them through their journey from discovery to purchase.

If you constantly remind yourself that this is the only reason to conduct SEO, then SEO will work for you and your business.

The moment you turn it into a pure volume game, where you purchase articles from content farms in an attempt to spread your net as wide as possible with no regard for the intent of the fish you might catch, SEO will, at some point, cease to work.

You may well temporarily climb the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), and even achieve the number one spot, but it will be both temporary and expensive.

Better to be focused on a narrow, yet responsive slice of the market, and promote content that carries with it the intent to engage with your brand.

Then, SEO will work for you.

How SEO Helps Business

SEO, or search engine marketing (SEM) can help your business in many different ways. However, they're all linked to the strategic marketing plan of the organisation, which can be grouped under three main headings:

• product development
• market research
• sales

Whilst this is a somewhat simplified view, it represents the bare minimum for an organisation's ongoing strategic SEO and keyword research process.

Product development uses a combination of competitor and keyword research, as well as keyword discovery to see what people are looking for: within and outside your target market.

Once a basket of phrases has been isolated, market research can be performed using keyword research techniques to narrow down both the product or service and the route to market.

Finally, with all the research conducted, the market can then be tested as part of the sales process: using SEO to guide prospects through their journey from discovery to purchase.

So, SEO helps business in three main ways:

• develop new products;
• explore and develop markets for new and existing products;
• promote products, services and brand values to the various target markets on their own terms.

This last is something I call participating in your market's conversation, and it's the easiest way to engage and make sales.

Is SEO Worth It?

Like any form of marketing activity, your investment is repaid in an increase in sales; working out if it has been worth the investment will depend on the value of that return.

However, different organisations have different goals and different measurements of their return.

There will be cases where SEO does not translate into measurable direct effect, leaving the return to be evaluated on its own merits such as brand attachment and market education.

There's also the issue of timing.

Many people abandon SEO after just a few iterations, failing to see any direct change in visitor numbers, or conversions. The fact of the matter is that it can take weeks, sometimes months, before any effect, positive or negative is apparent.

Done correctly, SEO will be worth it. But it's not a quick fix, and the effectiveness needs to be measured and evaluated regularly and on its own merits.

Should You Do SEO Yourself?

In a word: absolutely.

You should do as much SEO as you have time for, regardless of whether you have also contracted an SEO professional to do it for you.

However, the caveat is that bad SEO can be as damaging to your business as good SEO can enhance it. So, at the very least doing your own SEO will require a level of self-education.

The best practice is to employ an SEO professional for a year or so, and ask them to help educate you. Then, keep them on a retainer to help out whenever you note that something has happened in the industry that affects the success of your search engine marketing activities.

There are also some activities that are so time-consuming that it is much more productive to outsource them -- integrated keyword research services, for example.

Black Hat SEO vs. White Hat SEO

There's been a lot written about so-called black hat SEO techniques over the years. Much of it has been an attempt to promote valid services, or providing advice on gaming the whole SEO system.

Like anti-virus software, the industry has, at times, felt like an eternal arms race. Search engines change the algorithms to exclude unscrupulous tactics, then black hat SEO specialists try to find a way round them.

Luckily for business owners, who could waste a lot of money trying to keep up, the solution is that search engines are getting smarter.

There's still the possibility that some less ethical techniques will emerge to beat them, but the general thrust of development means that business owners and SEO professionals can rely on solid keyword research, innovative, engaging and high quality content to attract their target market.

Hopefully this article has helped you to work out why SEO is important for business in general, and specifically, how SEO can help your business.

A good start would be to see some real life Keyword Research Examples, or browse the SEO Tutorials.

Amazon PLR Keyword Research Cheat Sheet: A Worked Example for Nutribullet vs. Breville Blend Active

Recently, I was putting together some juicer versus blender PLR, and happened across a great technique for generating quick traffic based on products that Amazon customers are actually looking for!

The following is a cheat sheet that should help you to quickly pick, compare and write about products that are sure to rank well and be popular.

In addition, using my keyword evaluation techniques from the SEO tutorials, you can also be sure that they represent money in the niche, ready to be spent.

Step 1: Most Wished For vs. Most Gifted

Amazon maintains lost of best-seller lists, and while the main list tells you what's hot right now, the Most Wished For and Most Gifted lists often tell a different story.

For example, Most Wished For products have a market that knows what it wants, and is likely sharing that with other people -- friends and family mainly -- who are looking to buy them a gift.

Most Gifted is a response to wishes, plus an insight into what people actually spend their money on.

So, you should look for two items that figure highly in both lists, but which aren't the same (for a versus piece) or which are complementary (for an up-sell piece).

In the image on the right, I've highlighted the related products which can be pitched one against the other, with a little research.

In the bottom left of that image, you'll also see a complementary product for the Breville Active Blend -- a bottle that has been gifted a substantial number of times.

This kind of market intelligence tells you a lot about the target market and how you can create content that will generate interest. But what it doesn't tell you is which keywords to target.

Step 2: AdWords Research

This is where we bring in the AdWords Keyword Planner.

Regular readers will know that this is my current go-to tool for the raw evaluation of keywords, despite being a Market Samurai affiliate, simply because most other tools get their data from either the AdWords or Google databases.

A simple search reveals that (at the time of writing, and for the UK market) Nutribullet as a keyword out-pulls Breville Active Blend by about 35 times. Plus, a review of the suggested keywords shows that there is also more advertising money being spent across a wider spread of keyword phrases for Nutribullet than for the Breville.

This makes sense: the Nutribullet is more than twice the price, and therefore it's likely that with the brand attachment that seems to come with it, there's more money to be made by selling them.

But we can't ignore the facts: the Breville is more often wished for, and its accessory (a spare bottle) is more often gifted.

With high traffic, and relatively high advertising spends, the stage is set for a Nutribullet vs. Active Blend project. So, what do people actually want to know?

Step 3: Question Research

This is where we start to think about the hungry market. We want to know if there are any burning questions that the prospects need to know the answer to before choosing one or the other.

I start with the underdog -- the Breville in this case.

The tool of choice is KeywordTool.io; there are others, but I happen to like the no-nonsense interface that it offers.

On the right is the result of a quick search for questions on 'Breville Blend Active' for the UK market, as reported by Google.

You'll note that I've highlighted the four specific questions that related to the product that we have already seen in the Most Wished For / Most Gifted list.

This is important, because it tells us that people are looking for, and then buying the bottles that go with the Blend Active.

We could stop here, and create a whole micro site all about Breville bottles. But, there's more!

The next step is to to the same query for Nutribullet. This time, instead of 11 suggestions, Keyword Tool returns over 130.

The question is, where is the overlap?

The answer is that there are many. Just a few:

• ... crush ice
• ... blend nuts
• ... dishwasher
• where to buy ...

More importantly, there are a whole bunch of questions specific to the Nutribullet, but which could equally be asked for the Blend Active, such as 'is ... just a blender', and 'is ... worth the money'.

Part of the keyword research phase of SEO is in finding these crossovers, as they both give you something to write about, and also widen your market.

Some will be worthwhile, others not so much, so the final phase is to evaluate those phrases that will generate traffic.

Step 4: Keyword Evaluation

This is an easy one:

• research the questions on Keyword Tool
• copy and paste them into Keyword Planner
• sort by 'Page Views'
• export the results

You now have a list of the most popular keyword phrases. If you're feeling keen, you can even take the resulting spreadsheet, and devise a formula to work out which will be the best in terms of the traffic, competition, and advertising spend, but a first cull based on raw traffic is a good way to start.

Step 5: The Content Plan

The longest part of the process is to create 10 to 15 blog or article titles that reflect the keyword phrases chosen, and then three to five headings that are related to the theme of the piece, and leverage other related keywords.

Add that's it for the keywords. The usual advice holds for modern SEO practices; don't go overboard, trust semantic search to pick up the sense from the natural language and make sure that wherever the reader thought they were going to get, you actually deliver.

So, with five easy steps, you should now have enough material to promote (and even cross-promote) products on Amazon that are bang on trend. At least for now.

Don't forget that Amazon updates the Best Seller, Most Gifted and Most Wished for lists frequently, so if you find one that is a constant source of inspiration, set up a page change monitoring service so that you are alerted every time the lists are re-published.