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Keyword Research is still just as essential today as it has always been, for SEO.  This Article gives a step by step example on how to properly pick Keywords for a Niche site.

Niche marketing has become synonymous with doing business online. The sheer deluge of niche products released in the past two years is clear evidence that as competition for traffic intensifies the race is on to find profitable, relatively untapped niche markets. 


So let’s say you’ve picked your niche market as well. How do you decide if it is worth going into? The mere fact that you might think  that it is a great, unheard of idea that will create instant demand is not good enough. Let’s face it: Ideas, especially online business ideas are a dime a dozen. Whatever you think of, chances are that someone has tried that on the Internet already. 


So the ‘idea’ itself is not the magic ingredient for picking the right niche. Then, what would work? 


To evaluate the profitability of an online business idea, you need to do your keyword research . 


The thing is, if you’ve heard of keyword research, there is a very good chance you’ve heard the regular advice on it: 


  
Build a large list  of keywords 
  
Use tools  like Yahoo Search Marketing’s Suggestion Tool or WordTracker to generate keywords and search numbers 
  
Evaluate keywords  based on demand (estimated) and supply (from Google) 


Don’t worry if you are new to keyword research; I’ll be covering this material later on. 


However, for all the advice, how often do you find someone actually walking you through the whole process? I’ve always found that learning by ‘watching’ and ‘doing’  is far more effective than simply reading a rehashed page or two on what keyword research really is. 


For this article, I’ll pick a niche at random, pick a few top level keywords and run you through the whole process of generating a strong keyword list  that you can use for optimized web pages , pay per click advertising campaigns , or whatever you like. 


Before We Start 


Our chosen business is setting up an online soccer goods store. Since an online store does not have much in terms of content, we are building the keyword list for two purposes: 


  
To find out what people are looking for the most  – in order to maximize sales 
  
To build a big list for pay-per-click advertising 


It is crucial that you identify the purpose of your keyword list before you begin your research. Building a store requires that you pick more ‘commercial’  keywords whereas if you were creating soccer training website, you might put more emphasis on ‘informational’  keywords. 


To help you in picking keywords, try writing a short paragraph on the ‘objectives’  of your online business. What are you trying to provide (information/products), what will be your main income streams (sales, AdSense revenue), and what particular niche are you trying to research (soccer store instead of soccer news, for example). 


The First Step 


As a first step, we need to outline the tools  we need to use here. While there are several keyword research tools on the market that are available for free (just Google ‘free keyword research tools’), I tend to use either SEO Elite  (as part of building a complete website) or NicheBot , a web-based keyword research tool that combines several different tools (the WordTracker  free service, Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool (Yahoo Search Marketing) and keyword search results from Google). Latest additions to the technology include ‘save keywords’ and ‘export to Excel file’ features, making NicheBot very useful. 


Of course, you are free to use any tool you like. For this exercise, we are looking at four specific keyword factors (you’ll understand why we need them): 


  
Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) searches  – the number of times a keyword has been searched (according to YSM’s network (old Overture network)). 
  
Estimate Google searches  – an estimate of the number of times that keyword as been searched on Google (a multiple factor of the number on YSM). 
  
Google Results  – the number of search results for the given keyword. 
  
Keyword Efficiency (KE)  – A ratio of demand (estimated Google searches) over supply (Google Results). 


The usefulness of a keyword can be directly attributed to the volume of demand and its’ KE. 


Before we go any further, I’ll explain two very important terms mentioned above. 


Estimated Google Searches  – to put it simply, this tells you how many times a keyword has been searched for on Google in the last month. This is an estimate, since we don’t have direct information from Google. What we do have is search data from YSM, which we can use here. Common SEO practice is to multiply the number of searches on Overture by a factor of 8  to get the estimated number of searches on Google. I sometimes tend to be conservative and multiply by a factor of 7, which makes sense when you think about how many people there would be doing keyword research (just like you and me) and thus driving up  those search numbers. 


Keyword Efficiency (KE)  – This is calculated from the following formula: 


(Estimated Google Searches / Google Results) * 100 


This gives a ratio that we can use to measure the competitiveness  of a keyword. The higher the difference between searches and results, the greater the ratio, and thus the more competitive the keyword is. I generally aim for 100+ KE, although 50+ KE works just fine. Note that KE really matters in content-driven websites – i.e. whenever you are looking to build search engine traffic. For pay-per-click advertising, you would concentrate solely on keyword demand , and bid costs for each keyword. 


I hope that is clear. Let’s get back to building our keyword list. 


First, we list the first 5 keywords that we think best describe the soccer store. For example, I came up with the following list: 


Example: soccer store, soccer equipment, soccer gear, soccer training, soccer merchandise . 


The key is to keep your keywords as general as possible while relating them closely to your niche market. 


Now, we test each of these keywords in our keyword research tool (Overture or NicheBot). The thing about using Overture results is that you get a maximum of 100 different keywords based on one keyword search, a feature that is very useful in building up big lists quickly. 


So here’s what we do: 


  
Search through YSM for each keyword and dump the results – number of searches plus the keywords, into an Excel file (or use put your keywords in a “bucket” if you are using a keyword research tool). 
  
Each keyword will generate its own list  of keywords. Pick the ‘next 5’ keywords from each list, and repeat the above process. 


At this point, if you are using the YSM tool, things might have gotten messy (too many keywords to handle. You might be thinking: are these all relevant  (no, not all of them are), and how many duplicate searches  am I storing (several)? 


The answer is to use a keyword tool like NicheBot or WordTracker – it will automatically save keywords and allow you to export them in Excel, without any duplicates. As for the relevancy issue, I’ll get to it in a minute. 


First, understand what we’ve just done – take your idea, then blow it up by building a big keyword list. Once you’ve done this first step, it’s time to study the competition. 


Learn From Your Competition 


Type your top five keyword phrases (ranked by the number of searches) into Google and for each keyword search pick the top 3-4 websites. What are we going to do with them? 


Once you’ve built your list from the search engines, it is time find out from the competition what ‘really sells’ . In our example, I’d be looking at soccer stores on the Internet and try to find out: 


  
The range of equipment  they carry 
  
Whether they also sell related goods  (such as popular soccer team jerseys) 
  
Which products seem to be the most popular  (the ones made most prominent on the front page, or in the best selling / most popular list 


Use this criteria to build a second list  of keywords (use categories, product titles and equipment names as keywords or key phrases). Once you have this list prepared, compare  this list with your first list. Are you missing any keywords in the first list that show up in the second list? Most likely, you are. Repeat  the search process for each new keyword, and aggregate the results into one large list. 


Manage Your Keyword List 


There are three main problems with such a “gather before you discard” approach: 


  
Too many keywords 
  
Some/Many keywords may not be relevant 
  
Overlapping keywords means that you have duplicates 


For duplicate keywords, it is highly recommended that you use a keyword tool that helps filter out duplicates. WordTracker and NicheBot are both online keyword research services that filter duplicate keywords, and are also very helpful in ‘managing’ your list. 


The size of your keyword list should never be a problem. You may think that having 600 or 700 keywords is a lot but if you cut out the duplicates and the ‘irrelevant’ keywords, you’ll probably end up with a list of 200-300 keywords  (My final list for the “soccer store” came out to be just under 200, but here I hadn’t surveyed the competition, which should have increased the list by another 50 or 100), which is a reasonable target whether you want to create site pages or use the list for pay-per-click advertising. 


The biggest hurdle to managing your keyword list is to eliminate irrelevant keywords . You could potentially start off on the right foot by selecting only those keywords that are relevant, but I have personally found the ‘dump and sort later’  approach work a lot better on general keyword research tools. 


So how does one prune their list? First, you kick out the obvious losers – terms that completely out of your niche (e.g. “soccer moms” and “soccer pics” were popular keywords, but not in my niche). Keep referring to your objectives  (that I told you to create earlier) and reject any keyword that doesn’t match the profile even a little bit. 


The second step is to create two lists from your master list. The first list is your core list , which contains keywords that are: 


  
In high demand  (over 30,000 estimated searches on Google, or over 5,000 searches on Overture). 
  
Have a high KE  (anything over 50 is acceptable, although for really high demand keywords you might make exceptions). 


The second list is your ‘periphery list’  which contains those keywords that are: 


  
In high demand but have low KE. 
  
Have high KE but are in low demand. 
  
Keywords that have both high demand and high KE, but are slightly beyond your current objectives  (I placed “soccer jerseys” in the second list, because I was not prepared to supply that line of products just as yet). 


After all this, you should have a core list of 50 or so keywords that are in demand AND are competitive (high KE). You can use this list to start a content website from scratch, and add pages based on your periphery list as you go along. If you are looking to start a pay-per-click campaign, this split-approach works perfectly as you can focus on the periphery list of keywords to bring in cheap traffic  (low in cost-per-click) and the core list to bring in large amounts of traffic  (even by bidding low). 


The Road Ahead 


Building a keyword list is easy; it’s the “ doing it right ” part that stumps most people. Follow the advice in this article to build your habit of effective keyword research – using the right tools (that save your time) and the right approach, so that you build a big and competitive list. 


Good luck! 


Brad Callen 
Creator of the popular SEO Software program, SEO Elite 
( http://www.seoelite.com ). He is also a writer and Internet Marketing Consultant for Textlinkbrokers.com ( http://www.textlinkbrokers.com ). 

This article was written exclusively for Textlinkbrokers.com and has been edited and approved by the textlinkbrokers staff for accuracy and quality.  Any reproduction of this article needs to have an html link pointing to both http://www.seoelite.com and http://www.textlinkbrokers.com