iStock_000002700453XSmallI am taking some much needed R&R this week and have been getting a few tasks out of the way while enjoying the downtime.  One of the tasks that I tackled yesterday was the keyword research for a handful of new niche sites that I will be launching over the next few weeks.

What I want you take away from this post is that the keyword research is ABSOLUTELY the most valuable first step that you can take when creating any niche site. You can also apply this to your blog or any other site that you want to create targeted, high traffic content for.

I had at least a dozen niches that I wanted to look into and ended up with five or swix reallyu good opportunities.  If I had not performed the due diligence and done some in-depth keyword research I could have spent a lot of time targeting a half a dozen niches that would have been literally impossible to compete in.

I am not going to get into all of the specifics today but here are a few key guidelines that I follow when hunting down opportunistic key words.

First, I go to the free Google Keyword Tool and type in my main keyword (I use synonyms for this search). Then I take each of those keywords and put them back into the keyword tool, one at a time, and uncheck the synonym checkbox and use exact matches from the drop down menu.  I look for keyword phrases that have at least 3 words in them and have 30 searches per day and ideally 100 per day if possible.  If I have a niche that I am particularly knowledgeable in I will allow myself to go closer to 30 if I have to.  Otherwise, I stick to around 100 searches per day to be safe.

The next thing that I look for is less that 100,000 competitive sites when searching for that keyword on Google.  When you find a keyword that you think you want to explore a little further, go to Google’s main search page and search for that phrase in quotes.  In the top right of the page it will tell you how many competing pages were found for that phrase.  This number should be under 100,000.  If you can get under 40,000 or less you are really getting into a good niche.

After finding a keyword that meets these criteria, I then scour the top 10-20 listings that Google returned for my search of that phrase in quotes.  If you find a majority of top domains (ie. Overstock, Bizrate, Amazon, eBay, etc…) within the top 10 listings, it is going to be very, very hard to make it to page 1 in Google for that phrase and you might want to find yourself a new keyword to target.  I am not saying that it is going to be impossible, but it is probably going to require more work on your part and still may not pan out for you.

This is just a brief introduction to keyword research and should be enough to get you started.  I will explore some of the tools that I use to help with my keywrod research in the near future.  But for now, this method should be a great help to you if you are not tackling keyword research the way that you should be.

A lot of times the right keyword is going to be the difference between success and failure.  Why not put the odds in your favor instead of just taking a shot in the dark???

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Filed under: Keyword Research