Keyword research is by far the most important part of your niche site business. It will determine the profitability of your site and everything else you do after your keyword research will be more effective if it is done properly.
I can’t stress this enough.It’s about competition and popularity, remember? There are free tools and paid tools and I will give you one great referral in each category.
Google’s free keyword tool is quite good and you can find it here;Google’s Free Keyword Tool
I want to show you what this tool looks like with an example of how to begin. As you can see I have entered the keyword phrase “leather luggage”.
After entering your initial keyword phrase, the tool will produce a list of related phrases with the number of Global Monthly Searches.
Your goal is to gather and export those phrases with at least 1000 monthly searches. Some people would suggest more than 1000, but once you get above 3000 or so you will find that the competition is too strong.
Unless you are doing research for a local business you can disregard the “Local Searches” stats. If you click on any of the headers the tool will sort the data in ascending and descending order, which I recommend for ease of use.
I also highlighted the “previous interface” in the upper right hand corner. This brings you to the previous version of the tool, which I actually prefer because it presents results in a more familiar way to me. You may or may not want to try it out.
You could play around and gather keyword data in this tool for hours and put together a long list of related keyword phrases as well as your “main” keyword. When you save your list (I choose .csv Excel spreadsheets, but some use simple Notepad lists), make sure to save both the words and the Global Monthly data for your next step
Competition analysis is next. Keep in mind that in a perfect world, your main keyword will be your niche site’s domain name and your related keywords will be article titles, post titles, blog categories and used in the content in strategic places in order to optimize your site for high rankings. Take your keywords and go back to the Google search bar as follows;
You can see that I have typed in my keyword phrase in quotes. The quotes make Google return “exact phrase matches”. For the purposes of our exercise, exact is what you want to determine your competition.
Essentially if that results figure is less than 50,000, then you can likely compete for that keyword phrase. In this case, “leather luggage” returns more than 400,000 competing websites, so this phrase is too competitive.
You would conduct this research until you had at least 10 keyword phrases with more than 1000 searches monthly and less than 50,000 competing results in Google.
Obviously more than 10 phrases is better, more than 1000 searches is better and less than 50,000 is better, but these are good benchmarks.
Now I’m going to throw another free tip at you without much explanation, but if you can see the power of this, you “get it”, and if you can’t then dig until you do. It’s called the Google Wonder Wheel and it’s COOL;
Now you have a good idea of your market and a solid list of phrases that you can use in your niche site content. Once again this research can be significantly more detailed and you could use a lot more techniques and analytical tools than I’ve shown you here. Doing this work properly and taking action is more important at this point than “perfecting” the research at the beginning.
You will, however, want to continue to research and study this skill as you move forward because perfecting keyword research will make you more money!
At this point I want to recommend a paid tool that I own and use that can speed this process up and also offer you many other productivity and research shortcuts as well as help with content creation, search engine optimization, back linking and much more.
Market Samurai is a fabulous piece of software that also works on Windows and MAC computers.You can GET A FREE TRIAL DOWNLOAD here;
Market Samurai
If you really want to accelerate your progress, this is a great investment.