Conducting Keyword Research for Your Site
After building a list of potentially profitable niches, you need to take your research to the next level and look at keywords.
Keywords are the key
Keywords are the terms that people use to describe the information they are looking for online. Whenever you type a word or a phrase into Google or Yahoo to look for something, that’s what I define as a keyword.
Fortunately, these search engines record information on popular searches so you can tell how often people are looking for information on specific topic.
Research Tools
Using keyword research tools you can find out how many people are looking for information on a niche and what specific keywords they are using to describe that niche.
There are many keyword research tools out there. Some are free and some cost money to join.
Since we’re trying to keep things low cost in this system, the best free keyword research tool to use is SEOBook’s Keyword finder. This tool pulls results from the major search engines and gives you an in depth view of keyword term usage.
Start with general terms
To start doing your keyword research, put a general term for your niche into the keyword finder. For example, solar energy is pretty popular these days and many people are looking to use solar panels. By typing in solar panels into SEOBook, we see several different variations of the term.
When you look at keyword lists, you want to try to find related keywords within your niche keywords in order to make your site targeted.
Be targeted
If you’re creating a site on organic gardening, it’s best to focus on one aspect of organic gardening – like vegetables or flowers. This way all of your marketing will be very targeted and you’ll reap the rewards of targeted traffic.
So for our keyword list for solar panels, we see several terms that have to do with making your own solar panels or installing them yourself. This is certainly a good sub-niche within the niche of solar panels.
Write down the related terms for your sub-niche. In this case, it would be:
- “diy solar panels”
- “make solar panels”
- “cheap solar panels”
- “how to build solar panels”
- “build your own solar panels”
- “make your own solar panels”
- “building solar panels”
- “home made solar panels”
- “do it yourself solar panels”
- “making solar panels”
These terms all have at least 30 searches per day based on the search engines reporting.
Gather you keywords
Obviously it’s best to stay with keywords that have more searches per day but you always want to get a long list of keywords to create your blog posts and your article marketing articles. At this point, you’ll want to rank your keywords in terms of their searches per month.
Create a document file on your computer and list your keywords in this order.
Start with 30 to 50
Try to find at least 30 to 50 keywords for your initial research list. If you need more keywords, you can go back and enter in one of the terms into the keyword research tool to find additional variations. For example, “make solar panels” produces several additional keyword phrases that would be good to use on your site.
Go through each of your top keywords and create a list of at least 50 keywords that have at least one search per day.
One or all at once?
Now, there are two schools of thought on this research. You can either work with one keyword off of your list at a time and, or you can do all of your keyword research at once.
If you go through your whole list at once, you’ll spend more time doing research on the front end, but you’ll have a ready list of niches to work.
It’s a personal choice, but it may save you time to do them all at once. If you can’t find enough keywords or the search numbers are really low for a particular niche, cross it off your list and move on to the next.
For the purposes of this guide, we’re going to pretend that we went through our entire list and have selected the do it yourself solar panel niche to work with first.
Affliate guide
Articles in this section:
- Finding the niche, products and keywords
- How to do keyword research
- How to research the competition
- Where to find affiliate products