Posts Tagged ‘backlinks’
Is Your Niche Keyword Profitable?
Since your keyword forms the foundation of your niche, a profitable niche is literally built on keyword research.
Everything you do to establish your online presence begins with your keyword. You’ll use your keyword to select your domain name. (It will give you a slight edge in ranking.) You’ll add keyword focused content to your website. And you’ll promote those keyword rich pages, building your back links, working to get top rankings for your pages.
If your initial keyword research is faulty and you’ve chosen a bad keyword, you might find yourself up against a huge wall of competition where it could take forever to get your pages ranked.
Worse yet, after promoting your site to a page one ranking, you find there is no market, no traffic, for your keyword. All of your efforts were a total waste of your time.
So, what makes a niche keyword profitable?
A good keyword is one that people are searching for, one that puts you right in front of your traffic, and one in which your competitors are either light weights or you can see that, in time with back link building, you can overtake your ranking competition.
Obviously, your best bet is to go up against light weights from the beginning. Or find a keyword where there is little or no competition. This way your promotion will be easy and you can rank quickly. On the other hand, if you are up against some heavy competition, but you are passionate about your keyword, have patience, and are willing to put in some work, odds are that, in time, you will rank.
So how do you begin to find a profitable niche keyword?
You can scour Amazon’s Best Sellers in each of their categories. You can go to the Dummies Books site and look over their listings. Google Trends will tell you what’s hot. Check Google News and the Wonder Wheel for ideas. Do an online search for “10 Top Selling Products.”
Profitable keywords offer a solution to a nagging problem. Keywords sought after by avid hobbyists can put you in front of some serious traffic. Or you could sneak up on a keyword by using trigger words, like “problem,” “solution,” “calculator,” “guide,” “how to,” “lessons”…and see what they turn up. Finding keywords can be great fun.
Once you have your prospective keyword, you’ll want reliable data to be sure people are indeed searching for your keyword and you also want to check out your competition.
Where can you find reliable data?
The free Google Keyword Tool can give you a good idea if your keyword is being searched for, and a Google Search will lead you to your competition.
In the Keyword Tool, type in your keyword, let’s say it’s golf swing. Click search.
You’ll see what is called a broad match listed in the Global and Local Monthly Searches. Don’t stop there. These numbers can be very misleading since they will be inflated.
To illustrate what I mean, go to the far left hand column. Under Match Types add [Exact] and “Phrase” and click Search again. Now you’ll see three different numbers for golf swing..
Golf swing, broad match, has 450,000 Global Monthly Searches
“Golf swing,” phrase match (seen in quotes), has 368,000.
And exact match [golf swing] (in square brackets) gets 18,100.
Big difference.
When someone searches Google for golf swing and hits Enter, the exact match is golf swing. Phrase match results will contain any phrase that has the words golf (and) swing next to each other (in the exact order) in a phrase, like…a famous athlete’s golf swing can… While broad match will contain golf and swing in any order, as in, now is the perfect season to swing into golf.
So to get the best data possible when researching your prospective keyword, always search for an exact match. Depending on what how targeted your keyword is (a precise make and model number is very targeted) and the cost of what you are promoting (say $200 – $300), an exact match of 500 in Local Monthly Searches just might pay off (although 1000 to 1500 would be better).
Many gurus will tell you to search Google with your prospective keywords in quotes to check out your total competition. Some say under 50,000 total results makes it a good keyword. But let’s think about this…
Are you actually competing with 50,000 results? Or are you really competing only with the sites ranking on Google’s first page.
So logically, your competition has nothing to do the total number of search results. Your competition is the site sitting in the spot you want.
So evaluate your competition by first checking their off page SEO to see if your site is able to rank and therefore worth building.
Find out the amount and quality of back links going to your competition. See how long they have have been on line… Are you up against an authority site? (I mean, you really can’t go up against sites like Wikipedia)…or a huge, heavily backlinked manufacturing site?
There are many free tools to help check your competition’s off line SEO: Rank Checker, FireFox’s SEO Quake (an add on), Traffic Travis can help with both on and off page SEO. For more tools, search Google and YouTube for “free SEO tools” and be sure to check out seomoz.org/tools.
If it’s a go, start building.
Next post: On Page SEO
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