The "Cheap" Keyword Trick Brands Are Too Proud to Use

0:00This is a super easy SEO tactic almost everybody should be doing. The SEO legend James Dooley talked about it 2.5 hours into our recent 3-hour podcast a couple days ago. If you didn't see it, it's using the word cheap to get higher click-through rates in the search engine results pages. The word cheap? So, not most brands don't want to be kind of seen to be cheap, but loads of users seem to you wanted to search the word cheap. So, every If you're struggling for a keyword for a service, instead of saying everyone's like, "Best this, best that, best this." Go in with cheap or cheapest or low value, and

0:43you're going to put that modifier in and not have anybody else is going after it, and you end up These times, you end up getting that many clicks for it. You end up ranking for best anyway cuz the amount of clicks that come through. I love this tactic. There is some nuance to it, and I'm going to break the nuance down. And how exactly you can execute this depending on how much volume the keyword has, how much authority the keyword requires, how much relevance the keyword requires. All these different

1:11factors go into it. The search intent. So, first of all, you don't just have to use the word cheap. It can be affordable, low cost, budget. If you have a freemium tool, you can use free. I do this all the time. If you have a a SaaS that has a freemium tier, you can use a word free. You can use inexpensive. There's so many synonyms that you can use for this. But it's beautiful because brands don't want to describe themselves as cheap or inexpensive, and so this is where you have the advantage because regardless of what brands want, searchers search this, and even if they don't search it, they

1:47click on results that say it. They click on results that says this is cheap, you can afford this, this is low cost, this is free. And as anybody doing SEO knows, if you win the click-through rate battle in the search engine results page, that's the biggest ranking factor. And then after that, of course, you need to satisfy search intent. And so, how you execute this, and I'm going to share a lots of examples, depends on how competitive your keyword is. So, we'll start with a keyword best web design agencies. So, let's say lots of other sites are targeting this exact keyword best web design agencies, and you want

2:25to rank really well, preferably number one, for best web design agencies. You're going to need to have your exact keyword best web design agencies in at the very least the URL slug, but preferably the page title and the H1 and the beginning of the first sentence, as well. So, you could do a page title and H1 combination like best web design agencies that you can actually afford, and your URL slug would be the keyword best web design agencies. Now, if you had more authority and your competitors didn't, you'd still have the slug best web design agencies, but the page title wouldn't lead with the keyword. The page

3:06title would be the cheapest and best web design agencies to make your brand stand out. And this is where some of the nuance comes in. The more authority that you have, the faster you can rank for a keyword where your text isn't perfectly optimized in the most important places, like the beginning of the page title. But if you had enough authority and your URL slug was still best web design agencies, you could slowly just climb the ranks for the keyword because people might click on yours anyway, just seeing your page title lead with the word cheapest. And this nuance about why having more authority makes it easier to

3:44rank fast for keywords that you're not perfectly optimized for, this is also why you see high authority pages and sites ranking for a lot of keywords that they don't have in their page title or URL slug or H1, but maybe they have a page that has a lot of authority or a site that has a lot of authority, so they can just rank for lots of other similar keywords or even just terms that are in their page. But, here's another nuance to this. It also depends on search volume and intent. Maybe tons of people are searching best web design agencies, and for a keyword like this,

4:17best is more important than affordable. So, then you would still want to lead with best. Maybe maybe affordable takes a backseat to just having the top web design agency, and people will pay a little bit more if they know that it's really like the top one. And then, if you're positioning yourself as a luxury brand, you probably don't want to use these terms at all. And searchers might not even want to click on luxury brands that have affordable or low cost or cheap. So, actually in a situation like that, by saying like cheap luxury, you might actually lose the click-through rate battle. But, for most brands,

4:54again, the general principle applies. Brands don't want to describe themselves as cheap, searchers want to click it. Most searchers want to click it, so using cheap or a variation is a great way to stand out. E-commerce, let's do e-commerce now. How about carry-on luggage? So, targeting a keyword like this, which has crazy search volume, targeted by lots of different sites, targeting a keyword like this will only work for a higher authority page or website. So, for example, you build a bunch of links to your page or your site just naturally has a lot of authority to distribute. And so, you would have a page title like cheap carry-on luggage,

5:32lightweight, roomy, and travel-ready, and then the brand name. And your URL slug would be carry-on luggage cheap. You want to lead with the keyword, and then put cheap at the end of the slug. Why though not lead with cheap in the page title? Well, carry on luggage cheap as a page title, that just wouldn't sound natural. Carry on luggage that is cheap, something like that could work, but maybe cheap is so important to searchers and cheap is such a short word that people don't have to do a lot of reading to see that this page is going

6:04to address what they're looking for. Cheap is five letters, so they quickly scan the word cheap and then see the rest of what they searched, carry on luggage, and they say, "Oh, okay, I want to save money buying carry on luggage." They read the rest of this, lightweight, great, that's what I want. Roomy, great, that's what I want. Travel ready, super easy, okay. But your URL slug is still very optimized for the keyword. You might even be able to remove cheap from the URL slug, but you'll need more authority then because you are making the page a bit less niche. Basically, if enough people searching carry on luggage

6:40want cheap carry on luggage, this page can rank number one even though the URL slug in the page title is niche down. Now, these are more competitive keywords, especially carry on luggage. The reality is the highest intent keywords that have the highest purchasing intent, they tend to have lower search volumes because there's just naturally less people at the bottom of the buying funnel who are ready to buy right now or make a discovery call right now. So, they have less search volume and that makes them under targeted, which means you don't need very much authority to rank for these keywords. But you still need high relevance. So, I have a SEO course

7:20compact keywords thing on my shirt if you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. My course is about how to do SEO that makes money. How to find keywords where the searchers are looking to buy something, use something, or make a discovery call. And I show you how to find these keywords, how to target them with conversion-based SEO landing pages, how to structure your site for these pages, how to do an SEO technical audit, how to build links, how to do so much in SEO. Extremely thorough course, and these keywords are easy, especially compared to a keyword like carry-on luggage or web design agencies. For keywords that are under-targeted, if you

7:56want to more template-ize this, you could just do my page title formula. And that is you have the target keyword, then a vertical dividing line, then a benefit or searcher's goal, another vertical dividing line, then the brand name. And in the middle section where you say the benefit or the searcher's goal, you just say affordable and something else. So, if we use the made-up brand from episode 1,130 of this podcast, the $50 micro-influencer SEO strategy nobody is using, it's a great episode. We have this made-up brand Brickera, and Brickera has a page targeting the keyword residential general contractor software. And then you have the benefit or searcher's goal,

8:36and after the vertical dividing line you say affordable project management. So, the full page title reads residential general contractor software, vertical dividing line, affordable project management, another vertical dividing line, then the brand name Brickera. The URL slug is residential general contractor software. The H1 probably could just be residential general contractor software, and the first sentence would lead with something like Brickera's residential general contractor software, and then explains why this software is so good, why this software is going to do what the searcher knows that they want. A searcher knows already what the purpose they're hoping for residential general contractor software to fulfill. And so you just need language that says our

9:20brand is going to do what you want. And again, with the page title, if you offer a free trial, you could say free trial. If you have freemium, you could flat out say free. This is such a great tactic. I wanted to do a full episode on it. I'm so glad that James shared it on our podcast. And I made this episode just to break down the balance between search intent, volume, authority, relevance, and hopefully this episode addressed all of that. If you want to go deeper into all of this, this is a testimonial from

9:52Compact Keywords, my SEO course. I wholeheartedly recommend Compact Keywords by Edward Sturm. I was hesitant cuz I came from e-commerce and I was like, "Well, what can this really do?" And it's been beyond amazing. So, for example, I created this page called Best Rotating Beds, and I'm ranking number two. And that's contributed to a $4,000 sale. And this So, it's now kind of just this really fun game. It's like, "How can I find these You could call it low-hanging fruits, or I call it like just long-tail keywords and setting up these silent sales

10:27machines. And inside the course, I was also able to receive these templates, give it to a developer to create. Then I asked Edward for a couple questions, found out that he's super helpful. Um and I'm just, you know, I'm a fan of Edward's, whether it's his YouTube channel or his Instagram and TikTok and everything. But being a student is something else. So, I'm forever grateful for that, and I'm also just looking forward to diving a lot deeper. I'm I saw initial, you know, success. So, it's been about I'd say I've been in 5 weeks or 6 weeks right now, gaining momentum. I hit a couple roadblocks, and again, Edward's

11:04been super helpful. That, and then there's these weekly breakdowns that are phenomenal. Thanks again, Edward. Again, you can get that at compactkeywords.com. And that is all for this episode of the show. This is episode 1,133 of the podcast. 1,133 days in a row doing this show. If you watched this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. and I will talk to

11:33you again tomorrow. Bye now.