Choosing Keywords for Niche Sites
photo credit: andy_carter
The only way you can get it wrong is by not getting started.
I want you to go back and reread the statement. Go ahead~ I’ll wait.
This is so true. The only way you get it wrong is by not getting started, not moving forward, not publishing something.
With that said, there are some things you can do to make it go better, but remember this is a marathon, not a sprint. You can always course correct along the way, and one bad post, keyword, whatever doesn’t ruin the whole thing. So just take ACTION… TODAY.
Today we’re going to look at choosing keywords for a niche blog.
What is a niche blog?
When I talk about niche blog I’m talking about a relatively big site, maybe 50 to 100 posts. Each post will relate and be relevant to the overall topic of the blog.
The purpose of the blog:
Create specific keyword targeted posts to drive traffic to not only the blog overall, but to the specific keyword targeted page. From that page you can sell a product or get adsense clicks.
Where do I start?
Do you have a problem you deal with? Do you have a hobby you love? Do you have an activity you love to do?
My suggestion is to start digging there.I suggest this because it will be much easier writing content (and there’s a lot of content to be written) on a topic/subject you have some investment in. Whether it’s curing a pain you have, or telling people how to do a specific activity that you love to do, or overcoming some problem. All much easier when you have an interest.
If you don’t want to do that or you can’t think of anything my favorite thing to do is go to an affiliate network (commissionjunction.com, shareasale.com, linkshare.com) sign up and start looking around. You’ll find there are merchants (stores) that want you to promote their stuff. You will find a lot of these merchants are pretty specialized, and sell one niche of things or target one problem solving area. This is a fantastic way to get an idea to get the ball rolling. There’s no right/wrong way to do this ~ we’re just getting ideas here, we’re brainstorming what we can build our niche blog about. You have to have a place to start the treasure hunt for keywords right? Why not start with a topic/idea that you know has an affiliate program.
This is very similar to what we did at Amazon looking for ideas for Christmas cash lenses ~ only now we’re looking for a bunch of related keywords ~ and we want a whole niche of stuff to look in ~ thus looking at a whole store instead of one product.
So let’s look at an example:
I love to bike. (If you haven’t checked out my biking blog stop by. Road to Bike Across Kansas) (this is not a “niche blog” it’s more of an authority type site ~ just so you can see the difference) Since I love biking I thought I’d look around and see if I could find any biking keywords that might make a good niche site.
I want to make sure I’m looking for buying keywords so let’s try putting something about bikes for sale in the keyword tool. What I’m doing is looking for a niche from an idea.
My idea is selling some kind of bike. Now let’s see if I can find a real niche within that idea.
I had an idea (selling some kind of bike) and from this search I found a few possible niches.
vintage bikes
mountain bikes
road bikes
children’s bikes
beach bikes
All of these are possible niches I could do a whole niche site on. The next step is to see if they are viable or not ~ which simply means is there enough keywords out there to make a whole niche site around? Let’s see.
It seems the mountain bike niche will provide us with plenty of keywords.
*** An aside *** When I’m searching for keywords for niche sites I look for search volume above 300 (and this is really kind of an arbitrary number I made up for myself, but it has worked for me) ~ but realize you really can’t do this wrong. As long as you find some keywords that are related and relevant you can always add more/fix it later. If you find a keyword with no competition, but it only has 30 or 50 searches a month go ahead and put it on the list. For every keyword your site ranks for the more authority it will have and the easier it will be to rank for keywords that are more competitive than we would normally pick. For that matter if you find a keyword that has lots of searches but is a little higher than you would like in the competition area go ahead and put that on the list too ~ as time goes by and your site gets bigger you’ll be able to rank for more competitive keywords. You can just put the tougher ones at the bottom of the list. ***
Now we just need to find out if the keywords that are showing up in the keyword tool are going to be within the range of competition that will make them doable ~ when I say doable, I mean make it easy enough for us to rank in the search engines for them.
Let’s take a look.
In that video we’ve gone through and checked the level of competition for some of the keywords coming up in the adwords keyword tool. So for my mountain bike niche I checked hardtailed mountain bike, specialized mountain bike, Giant mountain bike ~ all of which were good when it came to competition.
I checked the competition by taking the PR of each of the 10 sites on the first page of google and adding them together. I’m looking for a number below 30. I want to do this for all the keywords I can find related to my topic. YES… it can be time consuming doing it by hand.
I also show at the end of the video how much easier all this is with Micro Niche Finder. You can check the level of competition right from the search page, save your keywords in a project folder and print the whole list out once it’s complete. VERY helpful tool to get and will make the process much faster and easier.
When I find a keyword that fits the competition level I go ahead and write it down. I want to make a list of keywords that are directly related to my main niche idea.
For example: my niche is mountain bikes for sale. I want to stick with specific types of mountain bikes, and keywords that are specific to mountain BIKES. I don’t want to veer off into mountain bike parts, or mountain bike shoes, or mountain bike clothes ~ just mountain bikes. That’s the niche and I want to stick to it.
I may take a look at any of those other things and they may be viable niche sites on their own ~ but I’d have to do the necessary research to find out. I don’t want to dilute this niche site with keywords and information that is not directly related to mountain bikes for sale.
I hope this makes sense and I’d be happy to answer any questions you have, just ask them in the comment section.
You know your business only grows when you take action so I thought I’d add an action step to my posts to help you get moving.
Today’s Action Steps:
1. Brainstorm some possible niche ideas.
2. Look to see if your ideas have related keywords.
3. Check for search volume on your specific niche related keywords.
4. Check competition for your keywords.
5. Write down the good ones and start a list of niche related keywords.
6. Try to come up with at least 30 ~ better 50 or 75 niche related keywords and write them down or gather them in a project folder at MNF and then print them out
In my next post we’re going to look at choosing a domain name for this niche site of ours so stay tuned.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 6:33 am and is filed under Startup Guide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
