How to do a keyword research to determine your niche

In my first post for the How to Build a Niche Site Series, I started off my niche site with the keyword research.

The reasons I started my niche site with this keyword research are:

• To set a direction for the site.
• To get some idea in generating contents.
• To determine my potential traffic.

Once you decided what keyword to strike for, then you are pretty much ready to deploy the site.

Where to start?

There are many keyword research tool out there but I never really have the time to check them out and most of them are pretty expensive. So, instead of buying a keyword research tool, I use the free tool from Google which is the Keyword Tool.

From there, I usually set the following before I begin my research:

• First, I will check the selection to only display search which is related to my keyword – The check box “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”.
• Next, I will filter to search all around the world where the location is set to All – Just below the option above.
• Third, at the bottom of it, I will switch to “Keyword Ideas” instead of the default “Ad Group Ideas”.
• Lastly, I will uncheck the default Match Type “Broad” and use “Exact” instead.

Broad, Exact & Phrase – What are they?

The 3 types of Match Types will affect your search queries and usually, the Broad search will have the highest query followed by Phrase and finally Exact.

I selected the Exact Match Type and why?

Take this current keyword ‘cloud storage’ as our case study and let me explain how these 3 Match Type can have such a huge different.

The Broad Match Type – The broad match type will accumulate almost all the queries regarding ‘cloud storage’ such as:

• ‘cloud storage‘
• best ‘cloud storage‘
• ‘cloud storage‘ tips
• ‘cloud‘ computing ‘storage‘

The Phase Match Type – The phase match type will accumulate only the queries that relates to ‘cloud storage’ phrase such as:

• ‘cloud storage‘
• best ‘cloud storage‘
• ‘cloud storage‘ tips

The Exact Match Type – The exact match type will only count whatever the search user type and hence, there isn’t any accumulation needed. That is why you will see a huge difference when you bring the Match Type to Exact.

Note: I learned all these from this Noble Samurai source.

So now, with these numbers, what you are going to do with it?

Calculating your potential traffic

Alright, now you look at the bottom of your Keyword Tool, you should see something like mine as well.

You are going to generate contents based on these keywords – as much as possible at least. Usually, the most queries is the hardest to rank but bear in mind that this is not the case always.

From here, you can calculate your estimated visits per month and from my point of view, this is a potential keyword because there are many keywords that has at least 1,000 exact a month.

So, if you can’t get a good amount of queries for your niche, try to look for other niche or other keywords within your niche and do the research until you are satisfied with the overall traffic accumulated.

One more thing to note here: Based on the research from SEOMoz, normally the CTR is about 50% for ranking first on Google. So which means in this case, for the keyword ‘Cloud Storage’, out of 60,000 queries, I am expecting about 30,000 visitors to land on my site if I rank number 1.

Wait, what about the ‘Competition’ column?

The art of demand and supply in this tool

Do take note that the ‘Competition’ column represents the competition for advertisers, not the competition for SEO marketers to rank well. Many people misunderstood about this ‘Competition’ column here and they tend to skip keywords with High Competition but it is totally wrong.

Instead, you should even go for that keyword due to the demand from advertisers.

This is how I see the Google Keyword Tool:

• Demand – Advertisers (the competition column)
• Supply – Number of search queries
• Middleman – You

So the basic of economy says that if the demand is high, the potential is there and if the supply is there as well, it means PROFIT!

As a result, the competition ‘High’ means it is a good signal and your niche has a lot of potential.

Final Say

Sometimes, keyword research can take a lot of time but be patient with it.

It is how you want to plan for your blog and there is a saying that ‘if you fail to plan, you plan to fail’.

Make sure you have a good plan for your blog first, then only move on to writing, marketing and optimization.

So back to you now, what is your keyword research experience?

Feel free to share below. Be sure you check out the next post as well on how to build effective backlinks.

You might also want to check out:

How to choose a niche that never runs out of writing idea How to submit your blog to web directory after Post-Penguin Are you going to make money with your blog? Simple SEO setup for your blog post