“RESEARCH IS THE PROCESS OF GOING UP ALLEYS TO SEE IF THEY ARE BLIND.”
MARSTON BATES
There’s an essential formula for keyword research success
HIGH DEMAND + LOW SUPPLY = KEYWORD SUCCESS!
But that’s only part of the story. Keyword research can be a very creative experience. It’s problem solving, logic, and creativity all wrapped up. The formula is the logic, creativity and problem solving happen when you look outside of the box.
For example, let’s say you love everything about beer and know that you want to build a business around this passion so you start doing keyword research on beer. Initially what you’re going to find is that “beer” has both high demand and high supply and the folks at the top of the search engine results are big players.
Now it’s time to get creative – niches! Niches can have very high demand and low supply. For example, during your keyword research you may find “Michigan brew pubs,” has high demand and low supply.
Once you have a few good keywords and keyword phrases then you can begin to explore the possible opportunities to build a business.
Keyword research is one of the things most people are aware of but really don’t know why they’re supposed to do it or how to do it well. Hopefully, you’ve already done a bit of keyword research to investigate the supply and demand for your website topic however if you haven’t we’ll go over the basics.
In addition to demonstrating the viability, supply and demand, for your topic keywords will also help you optimize your site for the search engines and as we’ll discuss in the chapter on content, it’ll help you determine what content your audience is hungry for.
Essentially, with keywords, you’re looking for the words or phrases that everyone is searching for and few websites are providing. It takes research, quite a lot of research, to find these golden nuggets but once you do, you’re set. For example, let’s say you want to have a website on pets. If you Google pets you’ll see that there are millions of websites striving to meet that demand. Too much competition! However, with a little research, you may find that exotic pets or how to raise exotic pets has high demand but little supply meaning there are few sites, which address this topic, then you know you have the potential for a winning and profitable website business.
Makes sense in theory, right? Let’s look at how it’s done.
UNDERSTANDING KEYWORDS: THE SECRET TO DRIVING MORE TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE
In order to effectively drive more traffic to your website, it’s important to understand the concept of “keywords.” Keywords are the main component for both optimizing for search engines.
CHOOSING YOUR KEYWORDS
Choosing the right keywords to optimize for is the first step to driving more traffic to your website. Most people make the mistake of either choosing the wrong keywords or choosing keywords that are too competitive.
One way to start is to choose a main topic you’re interested in building a business about. For example, perhaps you’re passionate about martial arts. Start by taking your main topic and finding its most popular version. Which related keywords receive the most searches?
Once you have your main keyword, then it’s time to find some lower competition keywords. At first, you want to optimize your website for lower competition keywords. It’s only after you’ve started to rank well for the keywords that you’d want to start optimizing for higher competition keywords.
OPTIMIZING YOUR WEBSITE
The next step is to optimize your website for these keywords. This has a huge impact for both paid and unpaid search engine traffic.
Now let’s take a look at what keyword tools to use to find these magic keywords and how to use them.
KEYWORD TOOLS AND HOW TO USE THEM FOR MAXIMUM BENEFIT
In this section, we’re going to take a look at several keyword tools. Each tool will help you:
IDENTIFY YOUR MONEY MAKING MARKET
You may already have a market in mind. If you do – fantastic! There are a few steps that you’ll want to take to make sure that it is a market that will make money. There’s no point in building a business if it isn’t going to put cash in your wallet.
So, maybe you have a passion for nutrition and are interested in a business that sells information and products related to nutrition. If this is the case, there are a few things to do to narrow your niche or create a sub-niche. The more targeted your niche, the more money you’ll make.
A sub-niche doesn’t necessarily mean a highly targeted topic it can be a highly targeted demographic too. This is where keyword research can be extremely useful
DETERMINE SUPPLY AND DEMAND
Once you’ve chosen your primary and secondary keywords you’ll want to research supply and demand to make sure they’re viable and profitable keywords – this means there are a lot of people looking for your information and few businesses providing it.
To research viable niches, supply and demand let’s explore and explain five keyword research tools individually.
Before we start using these keyword tools, you need a list of keywords to research. Write down your list of business ideas.
For example, if you are passionate about personal coaching and want to offer personal coaching services then personal coaching and personal coaching services may be your keywords. If you know that you want to offer personal coaching services to a specific demographic like single parents or aspiring entrepreneurs then adding those keywords will help you narrow down the viability of your business idea.