Finding Good Keywords for Your Niche

Previously I have written about conducting long tail keyword research using free tools that are available on the Internet. In this post I would like to expand on the whole idea of keyword research in general for any niche that you might be entering into. I make the assumption here that you have already done market research and have decided upon your niche, and are now looking to find good keywords to target.

What Are Good Keywords?

There are two main considerations that people make when deciding what are the good keywords out of the infinite list of possible keywords:

1. The keyword should be searched on, so has the potential to drive traffic
2. The keyword should not be too heavily targeted already, to give you a chance to rank for it

The second point varies much for each person. Your ability to rank for a keyword is determined by the domain on which you are trying to rank and your skills. This post is not about ranking so I’ll leave it up to do to decide what is an appropriate level of competition for a given keyword.

So this stage of the process boils down to finding keywords that are actually searched on enough times to have traffic potential and to be competitive enough to give you a chance to get a fairly high ranking so that you can compete.

However, this is just the basics, there is more to it than that.

How Will Your Keywords Be Used?

There are many ways in which to use a keyword, and its use can influence the kinds of phrases that you consider to be good keywords or not. Allow me to elaborate.

Keywords Used in Writing

Arguably most people would start out by writing about a keyword. Consider the following forms of writing that you may partake in:

• A blog post
• An article
• A forum post
• A comment

For all of these activities you would want to use your keyword prominently. Being able to write about a keyword means that it must make sense within the context of a sentence. When you look through keyword lists you will often find keywords that have great numbers but are difficult to work into a proper sentence.

This is particularly the case with those multiple-word long tail phrases. For example, “speed reading for senior citizens” is a great phrase to write about and could easily form the title of an article. On the other hand, “trial software speed reading free” is not.

Also, if you intend to write about a keyword, you need to be able to come up with good enough content to write something! Or at least be able to hire somebody to do so. Sometimes you can fall into the trap of finding phrases that look like good keywords but when you come to content creation, the mind draws a blank. Keywords that you want to write about should be researched more fully. See my post on finding fresh content for ideas.

Keywords Used as Tags

I can think of at least five places where I might be able to add a tag to a piece of content:

• Using Technorati tags on blog posts
• Tagging a social bookmark entry
• Tagging an image such as in Flickr
• Tagging a video such as on YouTube
• Tagging a webpage such as a Squidoo Lens

There are probably lots more places where you can tag things and this is great news because unlike written content, tags don’t need to make sense. This means you can pick up all those long tail phrases that are difficult to write for and use them as tags associated with your main content.

Furthermore if your tags incorporate your main phrases, you can add extra weight to those phrases that you are trying to rank for in the copy. Going back to the speed reading example, lets say you write an article about “speed reading software”. If you talk about trial programs in that article you might want to tag it with that awkward long tail phrase “trial software speed reading free” that you couldn’t write about. It’s not an exact match for “speed reading software” but all the words are there so it helps the main phrase rank.

Lastly, tagging a piece of content takes very little effort. This is a great use of those keywords that you couldn’t come up with content to write for.

Keywords Used in Anchor Text

Once you’ve written and tagged your content, you will also want to develop some backlinks to it. This is where anchor text comes in. Anchor text are the words used in the title of a link. For example if I mention the cross linking strategy that I wrote about, the anchor text I used in that link is “cross linking strategy”. The chosen anchor text helps the target page rank more highly for that phrase.

I see two main reasons for links:

• To help the linked page to rank higher
• To drive traffic to the linked page

Now if the link you are creating is ONLY being created for the purposes of rankings, then you can use any anchor text that you choose, and in this case you should simply use the keyword that you want the page to rank for. Ideally you would create lots of links and vary the anchor text so this is another opportunity to use those awkward phrases that you can’t write about.

However, if you are linking in order to drive traffic then you must consider how the link looks to the readers and it should entice them to click the link. Some of these long tail phrases look simply spammy and if viewed by a human reader are unlikely to be clicked on.

An example of this is when leaving comments on another blogs. By leaving a comment you can usually choose a name and a website to associate with the comment, and the website is linked using the given name as the anchor text. For example I could leave a comment back to this blog with my name and that link has the anchor text of “Caroline Middlebrook”.

Now having my blog rank for my name isn’t a bad thing as it’s the name of my blog! But it doesn’t help me rank for any other keywords. However if instead of my name I used “make money online” it would look a little spammy wouldn’t it? It would also look somewhat generic and wouldn’t stand out.

Keywords for a PPC Campaign

So far I have made the assumption that you are looking for good keywords for optimization purposes – on and off page SEO. However, if you are looking to drive traffic directly via PPC then SEO doesn’t matter at all. The criteria for good keywords changes here because now the most important factor is conversion. You don’t need to worry about ranking so you can choose to bid on the highest traffic keyword going, but of course it is likely to cost you a fortune and if it is not targeted towards your offer, you may not recoup that spent money.

Ross Dunn at the Search Engine Guide has put together a great article about doing keyword research for PPC.

Further Reading

The first step is usually to fire up some free tools to start your research. In my own article I give a brief tutorial of the process I use with GTrends and if that does not give enough information, head on over to Marketing Piranha and check out this roundup of keyword research tools, many of which I had never heard of. In addition, Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm shows us how he Uses the Google Adwords tool for keyword research and Tellman Knudson has a nice writeup of SEOBook’s keyword tool.

Once you think you have found your list of good keywords, you might want to check that you are not making these common keyword research mistakes that Josh Spaulding talks about.

Steven from the Affiliate Marketing Diary is keen to point out that it is not just about keyword research and he states that you are not “competing against the search engines, but competing against those ahead of us in the results”, a very good point! He then goes on to to show a detailed account of how you can analyze those competitors and outrank them.

Assuming you do find some good keywords, start ranking well and generating traffic, your own logs then become a very valuable tool in examining visitor behaviour. Hamlet Batista has a great article about understanding your visitors by doing keyword research of your own logs.

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