Keyword research eludes most people, but in order to profit online it is yet another one of those skills that must me learned. The good thing is that even though there are dozens of variation, most everything you need to know boils down to a few key (and free) tools. Get these basics down and you can improve on it in a number of ways.
Recommended ingredients:
Firefox
SEOquake plugin for Firefox
Open and save these in one folder so you can open them all at once:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
There are dozens of free tools to choose from looking up keywords but we are beginning with the basic concept first. The core of our research will begin at Googles free keyword tool. It comes with free Adword accounts but is not necessary. Start by going here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Once you’ve gone to the page, you’ll see there’s a link to a relatively new tool called the Search-based keyword tool, and this is what I’m going to use to show you how to find HOT niches. It was designed to show you relevent keywords on your website, but when reverse engineered it will reveal what people are looking for and buying.
Google are literally telling you what people are searching for to BUY. And they’re categorizing it all up for you. For this example I am going to use ‘digital cameras’
Once we’ve found a suitable one we’ll then go back and forth between Google Keyword Tool and WordTracker to seek alternatives and fine tune a better defined sub-niche that’s getting either a lot or a reasonable amount of search.
Spyfu will give a view of how much people are paying for a particular keyword, amount of advertisers and other keywords that those advertisers are using. This will give a picture of if there is money to be made. More advertisers using expensive keywords is what we’re after.
Google are literally telling you what people are searching for to BUY. And they’re categorizing it all up for you. For this example I am going to use ‘digital cameras’
The next screen you should have open is:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
There are several options we can turn off and on here. Really all we need right now is the “Approx Search Volume” (and maybe the click price). Below is a snapshot of that page. Experiment with the Show/hide column and change the ‘Match Type’ to EXACT
In this example (you can’t see it but) I started with digital camera but that has a search of over 2 million and I just know it’s to competitive – to generic. We are looking to dig deeper. The last one on the list is “digital camera lenses” with 49,500 searches.
A good place to start.
I take ‘digital camera lenses’ and plug it into Spyfu – it shows 20 competitors so we know that some one is making money on that key word… lets look further.
In your plain ole Google search engine type in your keyword surrounded but the quotes. This will do an exact search for “digital camera lenses” (with quotes). This results in 259,000 competing sites.
Thats a few more then I like and when you view the SEOquake stats if the top 5 they have high page rank, low Alexa rank and lists Wikipedia – this might be hard to beat… so we back up and head down another path. Long story short I checked out underwater cameras, camera lenses, and camera cleaning. None of those fit the loose criteria I am looking for.
What to look for:
Search results of anything above 5,000 is good. 10,000 is better, 20,000 is excellent.
With an ordinary Google search. Anything below 500,000 is good, 250,000 is better.
Top 5 sites do not have a PR of over 4 and no authority sites.
(example of authority site).
In the long run I stumbled upon ‘hd camcorder’ but had over a million competing sites. But ‘hi def camcorder” and “hi-def camcorder” both have under 50,000 competing sights with low PR ranks. This combination of keywords will do us nicely. Along the way though you will find that Wordtracker and Spyfu started not showing results – it would be better if they did, but is OK because we know that we are digging deep enough now. Getting more specific. That and along the way both Keyword Tracker and Spyfu gave us lots of name brands that we can sprinkle into our website and article marketing.
Half the battle of out ranking current competing sights is to register a new domain name that includes your main keyword. The term ‘hd camcorder’ gets the most searches so see if hd_camcorder.com is available. No? Try hd-camcorder.com, hidef-camcorder.com, hi-def_camdorders.com, etc.
From here the natural progression would be to take your collection of keywords and start writing articles and submitting then to article directories. With the right corresponding keywords your articles could get an automatic PR of of 3, 4 , 5, out ranking your actual site but still drives traffic to your site.
So keyword research not only pertains to building a site, but to article writing and driving traffic also. When used together it is just a matter of putting your ads or affiliate links into it. (maybe adsense for beginners, but there is more money in Amazon, ebay, CJ kind of sales).
All the numbers about competing sights and searches per month are loose figures. A lot still depends on what you are promoting, how you are promoting it and how comfortable you are writing and maintaining your site. (SIDE NOTE - Google seems to be leaning more heavily towards LSI (latent-semantic indexing) – synonyms … not how many times you include the keyword to your article or web pages)
In Closing:
I know that this is a lot of information to digest and it takes time and practice to get the hang of it. But as you probably all ready know… For those that don’t have the time, or just don’t want to learn all the details, there is always a solution for sale. The cream of the crop when it comes to automated keyword research is Keyword Elite … This new keyword software program allows you to plug in a root keyword and it will immediately generate thousands of highly profitable Adsensekeywords. Heck, it’ll even create Adsense optimized web pages for you… but that’s really a side benefit of the program.
You can also monitor your Adwords competition to see which keywords are actually making themthe most earnings each month… Then, you can steal their keywords and use them as your own!
The software even allows you to create your own Adwords ads and them upload them to your Google Adwords account, without even logging into your account. A safe estimate would be that it does 90% of the work and saves you hours a day.
Adsence Arbitrage
Adwords Made Easy
***
*****
For more information on Keyword Elite and getting even more detailed advice for keyword research in general - download either of both of these free reference guides to read at your own leisure.
*****
***
Leave a Reply