This is the first-ever interview post on bloggermode.com and I am grateful to Anil Agarwal for accepting my request.
Anil is one of the most influential bloggers in India and has been blogging since 2010.
His favorite keyword research tool is SEMrush and he has earned more than $240,000 with its affiliate program.
I had the privilege to ask him some questions on keyword research.
Here goes the interview:
Take us through a typical workday.
Yudi, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me to your blog.
I’m based out in Gurgaon. I’m using a Co-working space here.
Most of the time, I am able to do productive work when I’m in my office. So I always prefer working in my office and not from home.
Sharing my schedule from Monday to Friday:
- Wake up around 6 AM
- Spend 15 min in checking emails and a few important stats.
- Get busy with offline dependencies till 11:00 AM
- 11:30 AM to 3:30 PM Blogging
- 3:30 to 5:00 PM Lunch break
- 5 PM to 8 PM Back to Blogging
- Again 10-15 min Before Sleeping
I try to give 6 to 8 hours to blogging related activities.
What’s your workspace setup like?
I don’t like distractions around my workspace.
I keep it very neat and clean.
Nothing on the walls around my laptop.
Sharing below a snap of workspace:
What tools do you find indispensable for accomplishing keyword research?
I rely on the SEMrush keyword magic tool for doing keyword research for my blogs.
Once in a while, I verify data from Ahrefs keyword explorer (just to make sure I’m not missing any important keyword).
For YouTube keyword research, I use KeywordTool.io
For people who have started their blogs, have spent a year and still haven’t generated traffic. What do you have to say to them?
They should just target long-tail keywords and go for those keywords where domains with no backlinks or few backlinks are ranking in Google search.
They should do a series of posts on a topic they are covering on their blogs. And then build some quality backlinks for them.
Keeping keyword difficulty: min-10 and keyword volume: 500-max in SemRush. Do you agree this is a good way to find low competition keywords to rank easily within a month?
If you are just starting, try to find keywords with KD less than 50, monthly search volume 200 approx and few ranked pages in Google search should have zero or few backlinks.
Write great content and then support it with some high-quality backlinks from relevant websites and blogs.
I would like to congratulate you on the successful launch of your first information product – Keyword Research Made Easy ebook. It is receiving an overwhelmingly positive response from the digital marketing community. Could you give my audience a little teaser of what they could accomplish if they get the ebook today?
‘Keyword Research Made Easy’ is written keeping beginner bloggers in mind. If you want to get better at keyword research, you should go for it.
After reading this eBook, you should be able to find lots of high traffic, money-generating, and easy to rank keywords. BloggerMode readers can download keyword research eBook from here.
Do you use any Google search operators to find keyword opportunities?
There are few Google search operators we can use to get a better view of the competitiveness of a target keyword.
Suppose I want to target a keyword called “blogging tips and tricks”. Let me show you some sample results:
blogging tips and tricks: 10,20,00,000 (Broad search)
“blogging tips and tricks”: 6,28,000 (Exact search)
intitle:“blogging tips and tricks”: 10,400 (Target keyword at title level)
inurl:“blogging tips and tricks”: 511 (Target keyword at URL level)
These sample searches will give you a better view of the competition level for your target keyword.
How do you determine the format of a blog post for a potential keyword? In other words, how do you gauge user intent?
We can get lots of insights about the intent and format for content while going through the top 10 results for our target term on Google.
Suppose I want to target a sample keyword called Ahrefs alternatives.
While going through the top 10 search results, I can easily sense people are looking for free as well as paid alternatives to Ahrefs tool.
And mostly list posts are ranking on Google search.
So if I want to target this keyword, I should create a list post and talk about paid as well as free alternatives of the Ahrefs tool.
Also, I should try to cover more tools than those that are done by most ranked websites.
So spend some time while going through the top 10 results and ranked pages before starting working on your content.
Do you believe link building is as important as keyword research? Or could we get success with just typing great content and expect people to link to us?
We cannot rank for any good keyword without building backlinks if we are working on a new or website with less domain authority.
We have to build some quality backlinks to compete with high domain authority websites that are already ranking for our keywords.
Waiting for others to link to us is a passive approach and nothing is in our control with this approach.
If you own a new website, chances of others linking to you are almost zero (as they don’t know about your domain if it exists).
Thank you so much, Anil for taking the time to do Bloggermode’s first-ever interview. I believe the audience would find it valuable and get to take action. What’s next for BloggersPassion?
On BloggersPassion, we are working on our second eBook which will be about affiliate marketing.
This eBook will be really helpful for those website owners and bloggers who want to make money from affiliate marketing channels.
We should be able to launch it towards the end of April month.
3 Key Takeaways from the Interview with Anil Agarwal
[-] For people who have stopped blogging for lack of patience, target long-tail keywords and get up to speed quickly. [-] Use Google search operators to better gauge the competition. [-] Before typing a blog post, go through the SERPs and check the user intent. Find out the content format and queries to answer in order to provide a well-rounded solution to the user.Let me know in the comments below right now:
– If you found this interview helpful
– Are you going to revive your blog or start a new one?