My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘keyword research’

Many of us who build websites get in the habit of using the Overture “Keyword Suggestion Tool” to do keyword research. It’s convenient, and one of the few remaining such tools that is free. Be careful, though, because there are four problems you may run into with it.

1. Singular and plural forms are lumped together. I once optimized a site for “mountain hiking” based on the search traffic indicated by Overture. I later discovered that over half of that traffic was actually for “mountains hiking.” Unfortunately, the search engines don’t lump singulars and plurals, so those searchers didn’t find their way to my site.

2. Alphabetizing. I hesitate to mention this, because it only seems to happen occasionally, but that makes it worse. Sometimes Overture alphabetizes search phrases. If you see “bag lightweight sleeping,” you might guess that the searches are actually for “lightweight sleeping bag,” but what about “hiking mountains?” That could reasonably be searched for both ways. Look down the list to see if other phrases are obviously alphabetized.

3. Misspellings are not always seperated. I searched “perseverence,” on Overture’s research tool, an honest spelling error on my part, and saw good demand. I almost optimized a page for it before taking a second look and seeing that the results shown were for “perseverance.” You can be certain that searches are being done both ways, but how many each way?

4. Inflated figures. Overture often shows more monthly searches for a keyword than other research tools show for ALL search engines. Who is in error? Hard to say for sure, but given Overtures other imperfections…

Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool is a fast way to learn if there is some demand for a keyword, and it’s still free. For serious keyword research, though, it’s best to look to other tools.

When you first get involved with Internet Marketing you’ll discover there are unlimited opportunities for income. For example, there is the GoogleCash opportunity where you simply direct the traffic clicking on your ads to a merchant’s website and collect an affiliate commission. Or, you might choose to build a content-rich theme site over a period of many weeks and use it to earn Adsense income and to earn affiliate income. Or build dozens of “quick and dirty” Adsense sites in hours. Or you can build mini-sites for affiliate marketing. Or you can blog for money. You could profit from ebay in a variety of ways. You could write an information product, or choose to sell physical products. And this is only a partial list! Internet Marketing has something to suit (almost) everyone.

But the reality is that each opportunity probably calls for you to learn more than just one skill, and buy and learn more than just one software tool. For example if you choose to get involved with the Adsense opportunity you can end up using a keyword research tool to identify keywords to focus on, an HTML editing tool to build your site, graphics software to build the graphic header, the blog and ping technique with a junk blog to get indexed in a hurry, RSS to build-up the content on your site, perhaps a separate good quality blog to improve your rankings in the search engines, perhaps another software tool to build a site map, and so on. The different Internet Marketing opportunities have their own Tools of the Trade!

For each of these tools you need to research which one to use; buy it; learn how to use it; then to put into practice. Some individual tools, for example some of the sophisticated software to make automatic post to blocks have quite a steep learning curve, and it can genuinely take many hours simply to become familiar with the software, and many more to understand how to apply it correctly.

But if you’re human, and interested in making money (and why else would you be here?) it is all too easy to be tempted to explore other opportunities while you are still in the middle of making a previous opportunity work. In fact, you probably asked for it! Your research probably put you on the mailing lists of many Internet Marketing experts who send you news of the latest and greatest every day … and these folk are masters at turning-on your greed glands. From personal experience (me, my friends and my family) I suspect the majority of people who decide to dive into Internet Marketing but never succeed in making a serious penny simply get bogged down with partially implemented opportunities.

The solution is simple but unfortunately contrary to human nature (at least for many of us). It requires four steps:

Give yourself the luxury of exploring the opportunities … but with a specific time limit, during which you commit up-front to starting nothing and to buying nothing until that time limit is up. This research is NOT trivial. You are not just looking at the income potential of the different Internet Marketing opportunities … you need to look at the commitments in terms of initial time and ongoing time; whether income is fast or slowly builds up; whether there is out-of-pocket risk or just time-wasted risk; are you prepared to wander to the “dark side” a little (black hat SEO) or is your nature to stick to the straight and narrow; do you want to be dealing with individuals, or just nameless, faceless masses? Do you have a technical nature? Do you have access to someone who does if you need help?

Make the decision. Make it logically …. then test to see how your gut feels about it. When it feels right, commit. I mean, FULLY commit.

Pursue the chosen opportunity to completion, where “completion” means you fail beyond recovery, or you succeed in making a level of income that you considered to be a success for the technique. Learn what you need to; buy what you need to; then DO IT. And be prepared – this often means facing fears; fear of minor failure (starting a technical area where you are a novice), fear of rejection (asking others for links, knowing 90% will tell you “no” in the early days), and the big one … fear of project failure. Your mind can play odd games with you … if you move to another opportunity before you give this one your all, you’ve not really failed, have you? Whereas if you DO give it your all and it doesn’t work out … then you’d have to face your failure.

And while you are pursuing the opportunity discipline yourself not to pursue or even explore different Internet marketing opportunities. Unless you know you have superb discipline this means you do not read e-mail’s, newsletters, or sales pages from gurus promoting products that do not relate directly to your opportunity; and do not even read e-mail’s, newsletters, or sales pages promoting improved versions of products that are supposed to be improvements on those products you are already using in pursuit of your opportunity. Make what you have, work.

Even if, on completing one opportunity, you choose to go onto a second or even a third entirely different one, doing so in this focused manner means you will probably complete three entire opportunities to a satisfying level of success before you would have achieved even one to a partial level of success if you’d been attempting all three simultaneously. I’m serious; multi-tasking often means a factor of three or four times the elapsed duration to completion of any project. Internet Marketing is no exception.

Just as important, you will actually have mastered the individual skills involved in the opportunities you pursued to completion; this contrasts nicely to having only a fingertips grasp of a variety of different tools and techniques, as is the inevitable outcome if you fail to focus.

In Internet Marketing, this mastery has rewards; you can repeat your success more quickly. You can outsource tasks, from a position of complete proficiency (always a good position from which to outsource). And you can usually transfer some or all of the skills to another Internet Marketing opportunity in such a way as to make success in the new arena more certain, and more speedy. Not a bad combination!

Cruising along 6-lane expressway that skirts east of Kolkata, the city I grew up in, my mind wandered off to my childhood days. Kolkata was then a pleasant place, not overtly intolerant or arrogant. Life was easy, schools nearby, offices not afar, amenities close at hand. Yet, on occasions when we were to visit relatives outside city’s periphery, plans had to be readied in advance. Road connection beyond city was poor, and so moving about longer distance was cumbersome.

Today, many roads have cropped up, many are in making. Places that seemed inaccessible even a few years back, can now be reached without much of a fuss. If this is called rapid urbanization, I feel it has a parallel in the way Google has transformed AdWords. Just as I hardly thought swanky roads would ever come up in so large numbers in my city, it was similarly difficult imagining AdWords would one day be what it is today.

What it is that makes AdWords so dear? I’m not too frequent an advertiser, so I wouldn’t be commenting on campaigns, adgroups and suchlike. Instead, I’ll tell you how the keyword tool of AdWords will make you forget you ever used anything else.

How it started

For long an open secret, but barely touched upon till recent past is that keywords used by surfers have demographic variance to a largish extent. What this means is except for some obvious terms, surfers from different locales of the globe will most likely type in different search terms to look for information on the web. Even in big countries like US or India, search terms used by surfers vary from place to place. Search engines knew this for long, but it took them awhile to chalk out suitable products tailored to be effective in serving aggregate needs on the net.

Talking about Google, products like local search or, for that matter, the advantage of geo-targeting in AdWords campaign are all part of strategy accrued from search behavior pattern, accumulated and studied for nearly a decade.

What are ways to get you the most promising keywords? I’ll attempt answering this formidable question in 2 parts. In this part, we’ll discuss how AdWords’ keyword tool can help you get going. In the next part, we’ll compare AdWords’ keyword tool with some of the best out there. On to AdWords now.

AdWords opens up

Admittedly, AdWords is meant to maximize revenues to Google. What pleases the most is Google’s fatherly approach to ensure that AdWords maximizes returns to advertisers too. And how? Look at how easily you can fetch your choicest keywords from Google’s vast repertoire.

Start at AdWords Keyword Tool and after selecting the country and language you’d like to target (English and United States by default), slip below and select one of the 2 tabs, namely Keyword Variations and Site-Related Keywords. Now on, let’s go step by step to unravel a real wonder that the tool is.

Keyword Variations

If you select this tab (by default selected), just type in some keywords in the box, one in each line (pressing ‘Enter’ after each keyword to go to next line). If you want similarly meant keywords, do not forget to select ‘Use synonyms’. A good idea that, since it broadens your keyword search. For example, I found ‘top 10 ranking’, a very popular key-phrase, as a synonym for ‘top ranking’, which would have otherwise remained unknown to me. Another point stressed upon frequently by veterans is that it is better to begin your keyword search with general terms. As you progressively narrow down your keyword selection, you’re more likely to discover promising phrases along the way.

So you have a long list of keywords presented by Google based upon your few initial keywords. Watch closely, you’ll find Google saying that it’s a list sorted by relevance. What’s that? It’s Google’s way of gently prodding you to begin an AdWords campaign, for the keywords that appear at the top are the most relevant ones, should you consider ad campaign with them.

What would you do now? Well, you may start adding them as necessary, search for more related keywords (link at the bottom of the list), or even download them in your chosen format. But wait before you do anything of these. Look around and see how Google helps you with excellent tools to further fine-tune your list of keywords.

Refining your keywords

Move to ‘Show columns’ and in the accompanying drop-down list, you get to select eye-popping options. Wow! What a help! Choose the first option, ‘Keyword popularity’ and you’ll simultaneously see 2 adjacent columns of data. Click a column heading, the list re-arranges in decreasing importance. In the column ‘Advertiser Competition’, the list shows which of your keywords are hotly sought after. Similarly, the column ‘Search Volume’ gives you a measure of popularity of respective keywords. Still want more specific info’? The generous Google is there for that. How? Amble to far right of the columns and alongside ‘Match Type’, select ‘Broad’, ‘Phrase’ or ‘Exact’ and watch how the scenario changes. What are broad match, phrase match and exact match? Help is just there (a question mark). Click on it to know more.

We’ll now move on to third option in ‘Show columns’, which is ‘Global search volume trends’. This is a recent addition. When you select this, you’ll get to see an amazing display of how keyword popularity changes globally (not only US) through the year in the form of bar-charts. Once again, hook on to ‘Match Type’ (spoken above) and refine your search further.

Start an AdWord campaign?

If you do not contemplate starting an AdWord campaign, you may skip the other 2 ‘Show columns’ options. In case you do plan one, first select ‘Cost and ad position estimates’ and in the ensuing page, choose your currency and mention your maximum CPC. This is the maximum cost you agree to bear each time your ad is clicked on when displayed for your chosen search terms (note this is different from another oft-used term, CTR, the click-through-rate). As you finally hit ‘Recalculate’, your list will turn up myriad combinations of ad position and average CPC for your keywords. If your max CPC is too low, you may not see any value for average CPC.

The remaining ‘Show columns’ option is ‘Possible negative keywords’. This is a tool that assists your keywords to maintain a sharp focus in an ad campaign. Depending on campaign strategy, one has to decide whether or not to include negative keywords. To give an example, for my web marketing website, if my keyword ‘top ranking’ fetches other probables like ‘top 10 ranking’, ‘uptown top ranking’, ‘top ranking universities’ and so on, I might decide to include ‘uptown’ and ‘universities’ as negative keywords, but certainly leaving out the term ‘10’. This would mean that if I select ‘top ranking’ as broad match or phrase match, my ad will not show up for search terms that included negative words ‘uptown’ and ‘universities’. More often than not, expert campaigners will choose one-word broad match and then work on a long list of negative words to disallow unwanted ad impressions.

Site-Related Keywords

Till now, we’ve spoken about keywords you chose and ways of refining them. Suppose you are eager to know what keywords your competition is using! Well, why not? If indeed so, AdWords Keyword Tool comes to your assistance. To start, click the other tab ‘Site-Related Keywords’, enter the URL of your competition in the search box and hit ‘Get keywords’. Don’t forget to check ‘Include other pages on my site linked from this URL’. As you set Google to work, it dutifully comes up with a list of keywords, grouped by common terms with number of occurrences in the entire website within parentheses for each group.

Grouping keywords by common terms is a great help as you’ll find, and each group lists related keywords as in earlier case. If you uncheck grouping option, Google will fetch you a scrolling list of keywords, which may often be uncomfortably huge if you happen to spy on a giant competition. Once there, similar to Keyword Variations, here too you can start working on your keywords with abundance of tools at your command.

AdWords, a facilitator

Keyword Tool is great because it is very easy to use. No doubt Google intends it that way so as to make AdWords less and less daunting for potential ad-campaigners who are afraid to cross threshold for the fear of making unknown mistakes. Let’s remember, businessmen incline to take risks on known parameters, and not something that is difficult to comprehend. To that extent, the newly-designed keyword tool is a good facilitator.

In the next part, we’ll look at how AdWords’ keyword tool fares with other keyword finders.

Ah, keyword research: the foundation of every successful website out there.

Wow, that’s a strong statement, isn’t it?

Well, it’s true. For those of you who put little to no thought into, OR who don’t understand the high significance of keywords, the keyword research you do before getting one single web page up will have a tremendous impact on how well you market to your target audience.

No pressure.

So, why is this keyword research so darned important, you ask?

Let’s say you and I are standing behind a curtain. You are probably the most revered speaker in your area of expertise. I pull back the curtain and motion for you to go up to the podium and speak in front of an audience of about 200.

No problem. You pull some notes out of your pocket, confidently place your hands on the mic and speak ever so compellingly for about 35 minutes.

After you are finished, the crowd claps nicely…almost out of obligation. You don’t understand. It was actually one of your best presentations yet! You were compelling, but not too sales-y. You presented the problems, outlined the solutions available, and then unveiled your perfect product to fit the bill.

So, what happened?

This audience wasn’t waiting for you…they were actually waiting on someone else who was going to talk about a totally different subject. They don’t even know what you were talking about.

So…..this wasn’t YOUR audience. This was not your target market.

You had everything prepared…you had everything all perfectly laid out to be a “slippery slope” that led right to the obvious solution…your product. But….you were talking to the wrong people.

How does this relate to keyword research?

The visitors you get to your site are a direct relation to what keywords your site is known for. If you are telling the search engines that your site is known for “niche widget solution” or using other keywords such as your name, the name of your business…..that’s not the stuff your market is out looking for.

The keyword research you need to do is to determine what phrases people are searching for that have the problem for your solution. They are searching for “perfect posture” or “correct golf swing” not “Xtreme Putter.” They don’t even know your Xtreme Putter even exists!

And, unless you do effective keyword research, they never will.

So, how do you do the right kind of keyword research? Put yourself in their shoes. If you were someone out there with the problem your product solves, what would you be searching for?

“How to train my dog”

“Popular 30 something hangouts in L.A.”

“Seattle modern art”

“Ping golf clubs”

These are the things prospective buyers are searching for….you just need to have the right keywords as bait to catch them before they go surfing by.

So, take a little time, spend a day being a customer searching for a solution. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to do keyword research when you come at it from this angle. And you’ll be much more effective this way as well!

Aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners are often misled or misguided on the topic of how to properly conduct market research that uncovers a profitable niche.

The path most unsuspecting entrepreneurs take is by ending up at keyword tool or database to begin their search.

As a keyword research expert and founder of one of the leading keyword research services on the internet, I can say with firsthand experience that keyword databases are not the first place to look nor should be even considered. Here’s why.

The primary keyword databases that are currently available to the general public only give search counts on a limited amount of data that accounts for 1% – 2% of the actual searches people do around the entire world. They can only predict (emphasis added) the real majority of searches that are being done on the big five search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com which hold 97%-98% of the keyword data.

Most importantly, keyword research only shows what keyword phrases people are using in the search engines to search for answers, not what people actually buy on the internet. Just because a group of people search for specific terms or brand names does not mean that’s what they purchase. That’s a key distinction many entrepreneurs and business owners tend to gloss over.

When looking for a profitable niche marketplace, your primary focus should be looking for proof of a group of hungry and rabid buyers that want to exchange their money for a service or product (information, physical or digital). Without this crucial qualifier, you may have the greatest product in the world, but you may be lacking a market to sell it to.

This article will present a number of great sources to look at which will give you a running start to uncover a truly, profitable marketplace exists before you go for the gold and put all your resources into a website, product creation or expenditures toward some sort of online property.

Once you establish that you have located a market that contains signs of adequate commerce moving through it, you then have a worthy reason to look further into a keyword research service to find out what keyword phrases people use to find the market you have chosen.

Let’s begin looking at how to identify a profitable market.

MAGAZINES

One of the best ways to find signs of a truly profitable marketplace is looking for a magazine in that industry. If a publisher has enough money to print and circulate a full color magazine, there are most likely advertisers that support the funding of the magazine’s ability to circulate all the copies which most likely means there are sales being made by those advertisers.

Now, this may bring you to question whether there is too much competition in a marketplace with so many advertisers selling in a magazine.

In fact, it’s a great sign to have competition which means there is an adequate amount of customers to sell to and a portion of a sizable pie to be had in that marketplace. If there is very little competition, you may (1) not have adequate product being sold in that space; or (2) not have a marketplace to begin with. The larger the competition is, the larger the piece of revenues you will be able to grab.

Without having to leave your seat, you can hop on over to Magazines.com and looking through the number of different categories to find a profitable topic or industry in which to start an online concern.

One of the things you’ll want to focus in on is the number of subscribers each magazine has and how long the magazine has been in print for stability purposes.

Make a list of magazines you want to look into and then go hunting for them at one of those large dedicated newsstands that covers just about every magazine on every topic.

To get a better look at what people are buying in the online world, you will need to ultimately decide whether you wish to represent physical or digital products.

PHYSICAL PRODUCTS

There are two incredibly huge marketplaces that are massively trafficked, move a lot of product and are great places to find what people are really buying.

Let’s start with the first huge marketplace…

eBay

At eBay, you can look through a list of the most popular products people are buying through auctions or from eBay stores that vendors have setup. To see a visual path on how to locate the most popular products, please use the reference below to view the extended version of this article.

Amazon.com

Another really big marketplace is Amazon and it’s not just for books. You can find just about any product and name brand that is a mover and shaker. Again, look at the most popular products in those categories that catch your attention.

DIGITAL PRODUCTS

If you wish to sell products of the digital nature which does not require inventory and which usually carries high profit margins for affiliates, you’ll want to check out the Clickbank digital marketplace that ranks product sales from highest to lowest sellers in each category.

Just browse through categories at Clickbank.com and you’ll instantly find the top sellers of digital info products, software and subscription services which are located right at the top listings. See also reference section below for a link to the extended version of this article for visual aids and more detailed guidance.

Once you gather the adequate market research, you can do one of the following:

• Create an online store that ships out physical products and merchandise (requires inventory)

• Sell merchandise through eBay auctions or their online stores (requires inventory)

• Create a site that represents vendors as an affiliate (requires no inventory)

• Create your own product, service or software for a digital product (requires no inventory)

Having used at least two of the four places above, you can be assured that you have conducted proper market research to uncover “proof positive” what people are buying and, thus, a profitable niche market.

You can then quickly build out a non-complex site with a simple product offering, find some low cost keywords to use in a Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click campaign with a minimal spend of $50 to test the market and see if you have a winner.

If the initial test results pan out, meaning that you pulled a profit from your test, you can invest more energies, conduct more extensive keyword research and expend more advertising dollars. If the test results do not pan out, find another market until something sticks.

I believe this should arm you with enough information to get you moving toward finding a market with bottomless profits.