O`Bannon's Leap

Keyword Research

December 6th, 2007 | by Scott

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This is part 2 of 10 in the Niche Network Marketing with LAMP series.

Before getting into my methods of keyword research for a niche network it should be said that there are many ways to go about researching keywords and I don’t claim that mine is the best by any means, its simply how I do it because I’ve found it to be effective and am comfortable with the tools I’ll mention. If you already have your own preferred methods and tools for keyword research and think they work best for you, then you should use those.

The important element to this step of the process is to create your keyword lists. How you get them is up to you and I only describe my methods here as an aid for anyone who hasn’t done much keyword research work in the past, or who doesn’t feel confident in the methods and tools they’ve been using already.

Another point I should make is that I take a slightly different approach to keyword research for a niche network than I do when building a single web site.

If I’m only building a single site or mini-site, then I only want keywords with fair or high search engine volume and low competition. When developing a niche network there’s a need for 3 types of keywords, which I’ll create 3 keyword lists from and I’m going to explain that process and the reasoning behind it here:

List #1: Keywords for On-Site Use - these are going to be similar to the type of keywords I would use if just building a single niche site. Fair to high search volume and low to medium competition, and will be used on the primary niche web site, as well as on some satellite niche mini-sites added to the network later on.

List #2: Keywords for Off-Site Use - these are the keywords that I’ll target in articles I write and submit to article directories and on Social/Community sites such as Yahoo! Answers and etc.

List #3: Longtail Keywords - the term “longtail” gets thrown around and overused a lot these days, but basically this list will be keywords that get very low search engine volume and also have very low competition. These are the keywords I’ll use on 3rd party publishing platforms such as Squidoo or Hub Pages.

So, that’s the 3 keyword lists needed for building a niche network. I want to make a point right now, since I’ve mentioned sites like Squidoo and Yahoo! Answers, that I do not and will not suggest creating spammy pages or postings on any web site or community ever!

I do use 3rd party platforms because they are a great resource which allow anyone to expand their reach online, but I respect the resource while using it and ensure that everything I post or publish to them will also be of value and a resource to visitors who read it.

When using a 3rd party platform, and actually through all 10 steps of the niche network building process there is no room for cutting corners or taking short cuts. Remember, you’re working to build something that’ll hopefully make you a lot of money eventually, but if you don’t build it right the whole thing will fall apart on you and only be a waste of time in the end.

The Research

To get the best keywords and all of the information like search volume and competition numbers fast I use Niche Detector. It isn’t free (though it does have a free 7 day trial you can download that’s fully functional), but it saves me hours and hours of time on every niche I enter over what it would take me to use free tools and prepare the collected data properly to be useful for me–so its paid for itself over and over again in my opinion.

I am going to show you how you can use free tools to build your keyword lists, but I really urge you to invest in Niche Detector, even if you can’t afford it today, then later down the road when you have profits rolling in I hope you’ll remember it and get it. You’ll be glad you did.

The free tools you can use are Wordtracker and Google. Wordtracker is actually a pay service, but they kindly make a free tool available that is a little limited but can still give you some good results.

To build your keyword lists you’re also going to need some sort of spreadsheet program. Either MS Excel, Open Office Calc (free) or you could use Google Documents (free) which has a neat spreadsheet tool now.

If you’re using Niche Detector now is when you would simply plug in your top keyword and let the program begin building a list for you. Here’s a screenshot I just made using the “Pittsburgh Steelers Autographs” keyword phrase that I mentioned in part 1 of this series:

In less than 30 seconds I had 3,724 good keywords for my list, and in less than 10 more minutes I could have Niche Detector collect search volume and competition data, then sort the keywords into my 3 lists I need for the network. That’s the power of this program and why I’m such a fan. Doing the same thing with the freely available tools will take hours and hours, and still won’t give you all of the information that 10 minutes with Niche Detector will.

If you don’t have Niche Detector then follow the steps below for the free method.

You have to have at-least 1 primary keyword in mind for your niche to begin. The more you have the better because we’re going to need 3 keyword lists for the network–we want lots of keywords, so the more primary keywords you can start with the better. Unfortunately, using the free tools its going to take you a bit of time to accomplish this.

Having 1 or more primary keywords to start from, go to the free Wordtracker tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com and type in your first primary keyword.

Here is where some of the free tool limitations show up right away. If you type in the keyword phrase I just used in Niche Detector, “Pittsburgh Steelers Autographs” Wordtracker won’t display any results at all, it says: No results found for ‘pittsburgh steelers autographs’. Please try again.

When using the free tools you have to understand their limitations and become creative. Instead of “pittsburgh steelers autographs” try just “steelers autographs” or “pittsburgh steelers” and then scour through the results to find keywords that you can use for your network.

You’ll notice that the keyword results are all links, that’s good because you can click on any one of them and get more results that are related. Doing this over and over you can begin to build your keyword list.

Something to note about the numbers next to the keyword results in Wordtracker is that they’re not very accurate for our needs. They’re based on real data, but don’t include all of the search engines out there, so if Wordtracker says a term gets 50 daily searches, odds are its a little more than that in most cases, however it could be lower depending on the term. So don’t worry too much about the numbers on Wordtracker at this point, just collect the terms you can use and place them into your spreadsheet program.

Next we’ll take our keyword list and go to Google’s Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. From your spreadsheet you’ll want to copy all of your keywords in groups of 50 at a time to the clipboard (select the keywords and hit Ctrl+C), then paste them into the form on Google’s page and press “Get Keyword Ideas”.

Google will now give you search volume data for all of your keywords, along with suggestions of other keywords you might want to use and the search volume data for those as well.

At the bottom of the page are links for downloading all this data, use the CSV link to download it in a format that you can use in your spreadsheet program.

Keep repeating this process with 50 keywords at a time until you’ve used all the keywords from your original spreadsheet. When downloading the CSV’s for each group remember to give them unique filenames, otherwise each download will overwrite the last download using the same default filename Google applies.

Now close the spreadsheet you’ve been using (no need to save it), and import the CSV files you’ve just downloaded. They will have all your keywords plus the ones Google suggested, and the search data for them.

Since Google added some keyword suggestions you’ll want to go through the list and delete any rows you don’t want to include, then save your spreadsheet.

The next step is to get the competition levels for your keywords. Create a new column in your spreadsheet and name it “Google Competition”.

Go to Google’s main page (www.google.com), and one at a time search for each of your keywords, making sure to surround them in quotation marks. EX: “pittsburgh steelers autographs”

Use the quotation marks because this tells Google to return only the pages that are known for that exact keyword phrase. In the upper right corner of Google’s results you’ll see something that looks like this:
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,340 for “pittsburgh steelers autographs”. (0.24 seconds)

That tells you the competition level for your keyword phrase is 3,340. There are 3,340 pages right now that Google believes are focused for your keyword. Repeat this process for all of your keywords.

Once done be sure to save your spreadsheet. I usually make a backup copy at this point too–just to be safe.

The final step is to separate your large keyword list into the 3 lists you’ll use for your network. Create 3 new sheets in your spreadsheet program, name them: “On-Site”, “Off-Site” and “Longtails”.

WARNING: If you have less than 1,000 keywords on your main list right now you’re probably going to have problems later. Remember, you’re building lists for a whole network here, not just one site, so your main list really needs to have 1,000 or more keywords on it before you start dividing them into the 3 lists or odds are you won’t have enough keywords for each list after we divide them up.

The largest list is going to be the longtails, so go to your main sheet that holds all of your keywords and sort the rows by the “Avg Search Volume” column.

Now select all of the rows where the “Avg Search Volume” is below 0.30, copy them to your clipboard and go to your “Longtails” sheet and paste them in. Go back to your main sheet and the rows should still be highlighted, delete them now (this is why we made the backup!)

Next you want to sort the remaining keywords by “Google Competition”. Select all of the rows which have a number lower than 50,000 and copy them to your clipboard. Go to your “On-Site” sheet and paste them in. Go back to the main sheet and delete those rows.

Now just copy all of the remaining keywords and paste them into your “Off-Site” sheet. You can now delete the entire main sheet as your keywords are broken down into the 3 lists you’ll be using.

Okay, now is when you have to go through your “On-Site” list and make some adjustments. Just having a competition level below 50,000 isn’t enough, these keywords should also have an “Avg Search Volume” above 0.40 according to Google.

Any keywords on this list that have a lower search volume than 0.40 should be moved to your “Off-Site” list because even though the competition level is acceptable they just aren’t going to generate enough traffic to be focused on with your primary site in the beginning.

If at this point one of your lists is empty or only has a couple of keywords on it (most likely this would be your “On-Site” list), then you didn’t have enough keywords to begin with and need to add more.

Once you’re done cleaning up your “On-Site” sheet you will be ready to start planning how to use your keywords on your primary site. We’ll get into that in the next step.

A Few Notes to Wrap this Up

I know while writing this that some people are going to want to use different search volume or competition levels to divide their keywords by. That’s up to you and I encourage testing and experimentation. Remember that this series should be viewed as a guide, not a set of commandments. However, in writing it I’m giving you the methods and barometers that I personally use, and know have worked for me.

If you think competition levels of 50,000 are too high for your primary site keywords and want to cap them at 25,000 that’s up to you. There are reasons that I use the levels and tools that I do, for instance I use 50,000 for the “On-Site” keywords knowing that some will be very hard to rank for early on because of the competition, however with the understanding that as my network is developed and grows my primary site will become trusted among search engines and those higher level competition keywords will begin to rank better for me then. If I used them for “Off-Site” purposes early on out of fear of the competition, it would be harder to add them to the primary site later because I’d actually be competiting with myself at that point, and even if I got the keywords to rank for my primary site then it could hurt the Off-Site content that I originally used it on, breaking a link in the network chain.

I guess you have to be a little “gutsy” is what I’m saying, and look at what effects the things you do early on will have on your network later. Don’t be afraid to go after some competitive keywords on your primary site, remember that you’ll also have some lower competition keywords there to rank for fast and then you can strengthen your site for the harder keywords.

That’s it for part 2 of the Niche Network Marketing with LAMP series. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments below and I’ll try to answer as fast and best as I can for you.

Part 3 of the series should be available in a day or two so please check back, or better yet subscribe to my RSS newsfeed and be sure to get it as soon as it gets published.

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