Finding profitable niche markets to pursue online has always been a key problem for many a budding (and even the more experienced) online entrepreneur. In fact, finding profitable keyword terms to target within your existing niche market can also be difficult without the right tools.
If you’re targeting the wrong keyword terms, then chances are you’re wasting a lot of time and resources and diluting the overall effectiveness of your total marketing campaign. Well, to be completely honest, often if you target the wrong keyword terms you’re wasting your time full stop.
Whether your fine tuning your existing niche market, or looking to enter new niche markets for additional affiliate marketing campaigns, here is the CRITICAL data that really need to know when it comes to search engine optimization…
- What keyword terms people are actually searching on related to that niche – and how many searches are conducted each month.
- Which of those keyword terms other businesses are actively using in paid advertising campaigns (and what they’re actually paying to bid per click).
- Exactly how many other websites are “specifically targeting” those keyword terms in their own search engine optimization.
Without that information you might as well be shooting blanks into a barrel of fish (if you like fishing with guns).
Let’s take a look at each one individually…
1) Keyword terms people are actually searching on, related to the niche market, and more specifically, the actual search volumes for those terms.
If you don’t know what keyword terms people are actively searching on then how can you realistically optimize your website and hope to generate traffic?
If you target keyword terms that no one is looking for, then sure, you’ll be able to generate decent search engine rankings with ease – but the trouble is no one will find your website regardless, because no one will be looking for information related to those terms. That just doesn’t make sense.
In addition, what we really need to know is how many people are searching on those niche specific keyword terms. If there are a lot of people searching for those terms then chances are the niche market is highly competitive, which is great, but it’s also going to require a lot of additional resources and effort to rank well for the keyword terms in question.
Similarly, if there are less than a hundred searches per month for a given term (for example), it might not even be worth commissioning content to be created related to that term – at least not as a priority anyway. So knowing this information helps us to prioritize where we need to focus for maximum impact (increased traffic) in minimum time.
2) Which of those keyword terms other businesses are actively using in paid advertising campaigns (and what they’re actually paying to bid per click).
One we know the keyword terms people are actively using in the given niche market, and specifically how many searches each keyword receives each month, we then want to research how profitable those terms are likely to be. Are they “the money” keyword terms?
The easiest way to estimate this data is to find out how many other businesses are using those keyword terms to generate paid traffic.
It stands to reason that if a business is paying for clicks / visitors for those terms – then they’re probably worth paying for. The more advertisers the better because it shows us there is healthy competition and they likely hood that those terms generate revenue is increased.
In addition to this it’s very helpful to know how much those businesses are paying per click.
The higher the cost, the more profitable we can assume the keyword to be. If they’re only paying a few cents per click, then chances are those terms don’t convert as well as other terms that advertisers are paying a few dollars per click for.
This data can is also extremely useful if you generate a large proportion of revenue from Google’s Adsense program. It will also show you the keyword terms that are going to earn you more bang for your buck and help you tailor your content generation (and respective search engine optimization) around those key terms.
3) Exactly how many other websites are “specifically targeting” those keyword terms in their search engine optimization.
The last piece of critical niche market information we need for our keyword terms is to know exactly how many other websites are “specifically targeting” those terms in their search engine optimization.
Now I don’t mean generally or inadvertently targeting them – by that I mean that they come up in the search results as a natural progression of having reasonably related content.
What I mean is they are specifically targeting them. We can check this by seeing exactly how many other websites / pages have that keyword term as an exact match in their page title. For example if a page has the term “Call Of Duty Xbox 360” in the page title, we can be pretty confident that they’re targeting that term specifically for search engine optimization purposes.
When we know this additional information, we can then make a reasonable judgment as to how realistic it is to obtain a decent search engine rankings.
We can then also further prioritize our focus on the keyword terms that are going to stand a better chance of producing maximum impact in minimum time. For example; a keyword term whereby only 50 other websites / pages have it specifically included in their page title tags, is going to be much easier to rank for than a term that has 5,000 competing websites / pages with that term in the title tag.
Now the above might all sounds like common sense to you – and I guess it is.
However you’d be amazed at how many people get this wrong when trying to define the most profitable (and more easily SEP accessible) keyword terms in their niche markets. Generally not because they don’t understand this, but more often than not because they don’t have the right tools to find the metrics for all this data and then efficiently filter out “the money” terms.
You’re talking about a lot of data here and trying to do this manually (using the free Google Keyword Tool for example) is near on impossible.
Fortunately, there are a number of niche marketing tools available to us that can get the critical information we need within mere minutes.