Does The Keyword Golden Ratio Work? » Human Proof Designs

Yes

There you go, you can shut this page and go back to your kitten videos, or whatever else you were paying attention to before you opened this! 🙂

Oh, like, you want some actual proof and stuff?

Aaaaaaah. Ok, sure thing.

Or maybe you don’t even know what the Keyword Golden Ratio is. That’s fine, and hold yourself then because you’re in for a keyword treat.

For those of you who wonder what does “KGR” mean or where it comes from, here’s a quick rundown (for those of you who do know already, you can jump to “There’s more than meets the eye” section straight away)

KGR keywords or The Keyword Golden Ratio is a term coined by our friend Doug Cunnington over at nichesiteproject.com. 

It essentially refers to keywords for which there aren’t sufficient sites in the entire internet targeting them for page 1 to be any competitive.

There’s an actual math behind it and here’s Doug’s video for you to catch up on that.

We also recorded a podcast episode with him about the KGR method and here’s part 1 and part 2.

Alright, let’s delve into some details and uses. 

There’s More Than Meets The Eye

Something we’ve discovered over time after researching massive amounts of these keywords, is that any keyword with less than 63 “all-in-title results” could potentially be a super easy win, even if the search volume is way above 250s/m. 

The ratio won’t work over 250 searches, but “capping” the max allintitle results at 63 will. Of course if you’ve watched the video now understand that 63 results is already 3 pages of search results targeting that exact keyword, but it’s cool because a good number will be forums, Q&A sites, and others you can easily outrank.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let me show you the rankings for all the KGR keywords I’ve personally targeted with one of my sites and what’s behind some of those “low search volumes”.  (So you can also see that we put our money where our mouth is).

Note: We like to use KW Finder and Ahrefs as our keyword tools.​​​

If you’ve paid close attention to the image, besides all the #1 ranks (for which I’m just lowkey bragging really), you’ll notice a few things:

1. It doesn’t always work.

Sometimes the keywords don’t rank page 1- 2 straight away. Almost 80-90% of the time they do, so long as the site has some authority and you’re leveraging topical relevance with good interlinking.

But sometimes they can take 3-4 months to move up.

Hence the baby icon. Gosh, I should be a designer.

2. Cannibalization.

It’s very easy to target keywords that are too similar and end up munching your own hand.  See the URL for one of the keywords that is ranking nowhere. It’s being cannibalized by other extremely similar article.

That’s a fail I’ll eat.

3. Search volume is still a joke.

This is about the two keywords at the beginning with the red box around the SV. So when you’re checking volume, your best bet to get something accurate is Ahrefs. This point deserves another capture to explain itself:

And

How are those pieces pulling so much traffic if the search volume is “low”? 

One is seasonality, which most keyword tools don’t take into account and just spit an average over 12 months (which doesn’t capture trends effectively either. Looking at you fidget spinners). 

The other one is simply ranking for a bajillion variations of the keyword.

Moral of the story: Don’t discard the whole KGR thing because it goes for “Low volume” stuff. You may surprise yourself how much s**t one single article can rank for and how much traffic it can get.

4. It’s smart to group similar keywords together.

The example I used is the xyz vs 2 vs 4 vs 5 abc keywords. There’s’ like 4 combinations of those. 

I originally found just one: 2 vs 4 abc. I knew ABC was available on more sizes so I decided to create an article doing an “ultimate comparison” between ALL sizes and their use.

It’s a proper good article, written by an industry expert and it ranks for them all. Traffic is good. 

I link to my “best blabla” page for each size. Boss.

5. Notice the type of keywords.

 It’s mostly informational stuff besides some “Best Blabla” and some  “[Brand] [Product] review” ones.

I’ve purposely left the modifiers I use to find those keywords while filtering on ahrefs or semrush for you to get ideas when you do keyword research. I look for types, why, when, how, what, best way, problem, get rid of, sizes, list….

That’s pretty much all is there to say about the image above. Hope it served to explain why I was tempted to leave the article at just “Yes”.There’s however a few other things you should know.

Known Issues

It’s hard to find KGR keywords around products. The formula that works is “best ABC for XYZ”, but depending on the niche you’ll find just a handful. The smaller the niche the hardest. It’s a ton easier to find info keywords.

The money, green, moolah, cash, guita, pasta, parné…

Info content doesn’t make money per se. Hmh… so how do we go around this?

I use KGR info keywords to support money pieces. 

So if I have an article about “best straight razors” and I find 4 or 5 KGR info stuff about shaving or straight razors, I’ll use them to increase my topical relevance and send some internal anchors to push that money piece. 

I also use some of them (the ones that don’t rank ha) as power/buffer pages.

Whenever I’m building links, instead of sending 20 links to my target page, I’ll send 10 and spread another 10 amongst support pieces.

Keeps things more natural, reduces the chances of getting slapped by breaking link velocity.

Alright, If you’ve liked this article, and ready to try implementing KGR keywords into your content plan, we got the solution to save you lots of time! Our KGR Keyword Pack will give you hundreds of good KGR-compliant keywords to target. This can literally save you hours or days of keyword research.

Have a good one!