Focusing On Keyword Research And Competition

In my last post I wrote about finding the right niche, I talked about the readily available recourses you can use to carry out this research, Google Keyword Tool, Amazon, Clickbank etc.

It seems the Google Keyword Tool has recently become unavailable from Google so now you are left with the Adwords Tool.

Keyword research is the first vital building block of Niche Marketing, so this is an area which deserves a lot of attention as is SEO optimization which will have a big impact of how your site is likely to perform against other players in the search engines.

This is not an article on Pay Per Click advertising as this is not an area I am too familiar with, nevertheless this post may still be useful to PPC advertisers as many of the same principles apply.

The Adwords Tool gives you an extensive range of information with which you can shape your Ad Campaigns, whether setting up an Ad Words campaign or choosing a niche and associated keywords with which to build your niche site.

This tool gives a wide range of data

Keyword Tool – specific keywords with alternatives, features included are

Competition: displayed in a graphical format of a sliding scale, which is useful but its difficult in my mind to quantify what that graph means in numbers.

Global Monthly Searches

Local Monthly Searches

Local Search Trends

Traffic Estimator – Once You have settled on a specific keyword – for example a long tail keyword with a reasonable amount of traffic with preferably less competition then you can move on to the the Traffic Estimator

In this you can narrow down to country and language which will give you an estimated number of clicks and an Estimated Cost Per Click and number of daily clicks. This feature is particularly applicable to events that are perhaps religious based like Christmas in the western world – with each event there will be an inevitable amount of demand for certain products or services.

Placement Tool

The final part of this jigsaw is giving you the sites that certain keywords are placed on. This is a place you can do some serious homework by looking at sites which contain the ads you are interested in, looking at their Alexa Ranking and their content.

Ad Words Tool Summary

Overall, I think that this tool is very useful for obtaining basic information which most people would probably be satisfied with.

Other Options for Carrying Out Research

Depending on the specific Niche you are in, I would suggest that if is a highly competitive niche this data alone may not be enough.

You might want to look closer at competing sites and get valuable information like how they are set up.

That being the case I would look at some third party software such as Traffic Travis.

If for example you wanted to search for keywords across the 3 main search search engines (not just Google) with a keyword sorter this software enables you to sort keywords into focused Ad groups for your specific sub niches or Ad Campaigns.

- For example, you might want to look at top sites for specific keywords and see what their back links are

- Or you might want to analyze the top sites that have certain keyword phrases and find out what directories their sites are linked into, the types and quality of back links they have or the specific SEO friendly elements they have in their sites.

Armed with information it should be obvious to conclude where to concentrate your own efforts in order to improve your own site rankings.

You could also evaluate your own site with this tool which will give you specific pointers of elements that could be changed, such as headers, tags, links etc.

I value this software as it covers all the above in one user friendly interface with associated video tutorials making it clear to use to even someone like myself with a short attention span.

Overall this is for me a great integrated package of being able to simply work out keywords and associated competition including how they are set up, and it comes as a Free or Paid package depending on the level of functionality you want.

If anyone else is using Traffic Travis, leave a comment below and let me know what you think and how you have applied it to your own campaigns.

Till next week

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