The Real Deal On Keyword Research

If you frequent the MMO blogs then you have no doubt run across a hundred articles that discuss how to select niches. Articles everywhere, lots of comments and questions and its obvious that people are confused as to how to select a niche or even what a niche is. I see a LOT of these questions on the BANS forums so I thought I would share my thoughts.

Common Mistakes

It would seem that newbies fall into one of two categories when they “select” a niche. They either tackle a very broad category that they have little hope of ranking well in OR they pick such an obscure and small little niche that even if they took position 1 in Google, they still won’t get any traffic.

The advice I read in the articles encourages readers to target a small niche. It gives you a feeling of accomplishment when you are able to rank 1st page on Google results but disappointment quickly settles in once you see what kind of traffic it’s worth.

On the other end of the scale you have people targeting far too large of a niche with a little bitty BANS or adsense mini-site. If you’re buried on page 45 for Ipods, what good does it do you? Very little I would suspect.

I favor something in the middle, but honestly and I can’t say this loud enough, there is NO MAGIC formula for selecting a niche, it’s far more important to select the right keywords. You can profit in ANY niche if you have the right keywords.

Starting Point

I have abandoned the whole micro niche concept, simply because it doesn’t bring the results that make me happy. I have instead chosen to target large niches but with really good keywords and some decent SEO strategies. A large niche like the former “Ipods” example already draws over 5k searches every single day.

There are some microniches that I have seen people target that don’t draw that search count in a year. If that works for you then great, but me personally I would rather try to slice a small piece of that 5k per day search traffic using some longtail keywords. If I meet with immediate success, then I will build on that site and build on that site.

If you want a bare minimum idea, I personally want to see 2-300 searches a day for my main keywords before tackling a niche.

Digging for Keywords

The real trick to niche site success is your keyword selection, not your niche selection. You could even carve out a piece of that IPOD pie if you target the right keywords. IPODS have to be one of the most competitive markets ever made, so let’s see what we can find.

I run a quick search using the free SEOTool keyword tool first, simply for no other reason than it is super fast and gives me an idea of where we stand right from the gate. If it looks promising then I will put the keyword into my keyword tool, Keyword Elite.

I love Keyword Elite for a lot of reasons, it’s the best keyword tool I have ever used AND it has no monthly fee. Wordtracker and Wordze are great tools but if you stick with this marketing gig for very long, that monthly fee will quickly grow to be far more than what you would pay for Keyword Elite.

What Kind of Site

It’s also important to consider what kind of traffic you are after. You have “buying” keywords and you have “information” keywords. IPODs is a hugely competitive arena, and as such it has a HUGE base of users who might want to know how to load songs on it or other stuff.

I am leaning towards an Adsense site for this example, so let’s see what we have for keywords. First we’ll load up the old Keyword Elite and run Ipods through it. Keyword Elite pulls data from Google, Yahoo and WordTracker. This is waaay better than most tools that only target one data source.

For the interest of time I am only going to select a few keywords to make the example work but with most larger niches, you will have hundreds and hundreds of potential longtail keywords to target so time spent here can pay off for years to come. I’ve narrowed my keyword choices for this example down to just a handful.

Now let’s take a look at the search counts. One of these jumps out at me considering we are building an Adsense site and targeting “information” seekers. Look at “how do Ipods work.” This longtail has good search counts, low competition on Google and is an “Information Seeking” keyword.

Keyword Elite has a great feature that allows you to find out who your competition is for the top x number of spots that you select. When we check our “How do Ipods Work” keyword you can see that Howstuffworks.com holds the top 2 positions in Google, even over Apple. Interesting.

Well we know who we are competing with now, so let’s take a look at how good they are. This is where your jaw should start to drop. SEO Elite is just crazy good when it comes to inspecting your competition. Let’s fire it up and take a look at how good they are.

A ton of information on the picture below. This is the Offsite SEO information about their site. Offsite SEO is basically the number and quality of links and sites linking to you. Links are what drive Google’s search algorithm and they are CRITICAL to your success. Look over the picture below, quality sites linking to this website. Some high PR sites and some great links….but……..

As you can see they are pretty solid, good page rank, great Alexa, lots of links and at first looks pretty tough. SEO Elite allows you to even go one step further and that is to find the anchor text of the links coming in. Our keyword is How do Ipods work” and for that keyword, they have zero incoming links. This makes the keyword vulnerable. The site is ranking #1 for the site authority, not for that keyword authority.

Not a single link using our keyword as the anchor text. That’s great news, Google gives a LOT of weight towards anchor text. Can we take this for position one? Probably, nothing is guaranteed but that particular keyword is very vulnerable. Even if we only managed page 1 that would bring traffic and that is only 1 keyword. We can literally target 1000s of keywords with an adsense site.

Conclusion

SEO Elite will tell you a LOT more about a site but for this article we are focusing on keyword selection. I don’t know of any other tool combination that is as powerful as Keyword Elite and SEO Elite. They are just sick and will give you such a HUGE leg up over your competitors that it isn’t even funny.

If you are a sports fan, this is like having the other teams play book. You can find their links, their anchor text, the IP density, adwords information, you name it. You can check both their off site SEO (backlinks) and ONSITE SEO. You will literally know more about them than they know about themselves.

If you intend to make a serious go at this game then I cannot tell you enough how important it is to have these kinds of tools at your disposal. They require an upfront purchase, but they have no monthly fees and you quickly come out ahead versus a monthly fee plan.

Don’t fall into the trap of using ratios or free keyword searches. All a ratio should be good for is to get you in the ballpark, to weed out the junk and find the potential. EVERYONE is using the free tools, the real value lies in being able to find out what your competitors are doing.

How strong are they for the words you are targeting. If they are weak, then you know how to take them down. The same principles apply to BANS stores or Adsense sites. The only real difference is the kinds of keywords you target. Information seekers or those looking to buy, depending on the niche they can be the same thing.

The only thing holding you back at this point, is you.