Posted on 11 November 2009
I came across an interesting forum post today. The guy was wondering if he could just skip keyword research and just go ahead with writing about his topic. His logic was that if he ignored keywords, he would still naturally include good target keywords. Although this may produce slightly better content, he would be missing out on many potential keywords and opportunities for more related content. Essentially he would be losing some traffic.
Missing Potential Keywords
When you write about a topic, it is not realistic to expect all of your keywords to naturally be included in your writing. Just because you might know a lot about a topic, it does not mean that you use all the different terminology that exists in your niche. You likely have preferred names for things and you write a certain way.
Your visitors use a very wide range of keywords to find what you are writing about. They do not all use the exact same vocabulary and spelling, especially if you are targeting multiple geographical regions. People use search engines differently too. One person might prefer to search for one or two word phrases. Another person might like to type entire sentences or questions.
If you do not take the time to find out which keywords are more popular, you are only targeting the people who think like you. If you’re lucky you might accidentally target some other keywords too. Think of all the other keywords that you are probably forgetting.
Missing Related Topics
In addition to searching differently, your target visitors may be looking for a wide variety of things related to your topic. Some people may only want broad information or images. Others may only be interested in a very specific subtopic of your chosen topic. If the person is looking to shop, they might only be looking to compare products or they might be trying to find a particular product. Without doing proper keyword research, you might not think of some related topics that people are also frequently searching for.
If you are an expert in your field with years of experience, you probably can accurately predict a lot of the related topics that people might be searching for. Still you might be wrong about the preferred terminology. There could also be related topics that are brand new that you didn’t even know about. Trends change over time and new keywords can become popular overnight.
When you research related keywords you might realize that there is an important topic that you have not covered with your website content. This may warrant a separate article or even a whole new section of your website. By covering many topics related to your niche, you develop an authority website that answers all of your visitors’ questions. Plus you get more traffic from a wider variety of keywords.
Summary
So before you start writing your next article or blogpost, make sure you first research all of the possible keywords that are used within your niche. If you want a successful website, you don’t want traffic from just a few keywords, you want traffic from every important keyword related to your topic. You want to target people who think and search all different ways.
By: Jeremy Biberdorf
Posted on 04 October 2009
Having your website up and running is the first step, but one thing that I learned from Michael Cheney is that you need to optimize your website for your specific keywords, so that you can start climbing in the search engine ranking.
Keyword research will make SEO so much faster and PPC so much cheaper. And you can do this research for FREE with the tools I’ll show you!
Here are some of the tools that I use for my keywords research:
- Market Samurai (free!)
- Google Keyword (free!)
- www.spyfu.com (free!)
- www.wordtracker.com (free trial)
- www.hexatrack.com (free!)
- www.KeyCompete.com (free trial)
What you are doing with your keyword research is you are narrowing your market into your specific niche. You are using a laser beam instead of a flashlight.
So instead of a broad market like?computers, you could narrow it down:
Computers → Laptop computers → Apple Laptops → iBook
See how you have just taken a broad market search term with a ton of website and competition, down to a specific niche with fewer websites and less competition.
You are targeting your specific customer this way too.
You are essentially carving your own slice of cyberspace on the internet with your keyword, that you will then create websites, articles, videos and other content around your keywords.
The coolest thing about the tools I’ve shown you earlier is that as you are searching for your keyword, you are arming yourself with a TON of competitive intelligence and know how to set up your website the right way the first time:
- Competition- who is using you keyword?
- Volume- how many searches a day?
- Trends- are they steady, increasing, declining, or seasonal?
- Commercial intent- how likely is someone to buy something from you based on searching for your keyword?
The commercial intent is one of the coolest things for you and me?because who do we want? Buyers!
We want them to buy from us because of the content and the value that we are giving away.
You want to do your keyword research not only to figure out where the niche is.
You want to make sure that as you’re building pages you’re using that keyword research data and figuring out through PPC which ones are converting the best to then go and build out your websites.
This will tell you what keywords to write articles about or what keywords to go build Squidoo pages around.
By: Adam Spiel
Posted on 20 September 2009
Bret asked:
1. research for needs in a particular marketplace
2. keyword, search volume, & competitor research
3. demographics research
4. How do you determine a niche? What’s the max number of competitors that you’re willing to settle for? How large of individual competitor(s) are you willing to take on to consider it a niche? What is the minimum amount of search volume you’re willing to settle for?
