Find Niche Keywords That Pay

One of the most fundamental aspects of SEO is being able to pick keywords that are going to give you a return on investment. Niche keywords are those with a high search volume but low competition, you can rank for these very quickly, however first you have to be sure that you are going to make a return.

Before we get into the meat of this post I want to clarify that the techniques I am going to discuss are no secret and many internet marketers use them to find niche keywords, I obviously add my own tweaks to the process as experience tells me certain figures and measurements work better.

Also let me make it clear this process is far too time consuming for optimising posts and other deep pages, this research is to use when you start a new site based around a niche topic for the sole purpose of converting the traffic.

There are two things I want to make clear in this post;

A – How to find niche keywords

B – How you can tell if a particular keyword is going to be profitable

First thing I need to stress is that if you’re thinking about targeting the ‘make money online’ sphere, forget it. I consider myself an accomplished SEO and would not even consider starting down that path for two reasons; 1) competition is fierce 2) even though I could beat them I think my energy is spent better elsewhere and so is yours

Some Guiding Principles

We have already established that niche keywords are those with traffic but little competition, however how on earth do we know if they will be profitable. The truth is you never actually do however there are a few things we can do to narrow down the process.

First of all any niche keywords need to be “buying keywords”, keywords that searches input in order to buy a particular product to buy. Whether you are monetising with adsense, affiliate links or actual products this principle is fundamental, if the visitor hasn’t come by way of a buying keyword they are not going to click or purchase.

So it makes sense to me, to start our search for niche keywords on sites like Ebay or the mighty Amazon, here you will find hundreds of products to target, scroll through some and then let’s move to the next step.

Using The Google Keyword Tool

Yes it’s my favourite, the good old Google Keyword Tool and we are going to use it to work out which keywords are going to give us a good profit.

Here’s a quick example on the keyword ‘bracelets’, I don’t target this niche nor do I intend to, this is simply an example.

There are a couple of things you will notice from the picture and I want you to set up your keyword list in the same way.

1) Change the Match Type to Exact – This shows the amount of searches for the exact keyword on Google

2) Lose every column except the CPC price and the monthly global search

3) Order your list by the largest to the smallest search volume

4) Once this is in order download the keywords using the .csv (for excel) link

You should have a list of keywords that looks like this (You can order the columns as you wish)

Now what we need to do is estimate the income column.

Estimating Keyword Income

I must warn you at this point, we need to make a number of guesses and use a little math to figure out how much ranking for a particular keyword could be worth.

The only way we can work out potential income is by taking the Cost per Click into account and presume were trying to make money from adsense on our sites, this is not accurate but in my experience it is the ‘most’ accurate way to understand keyword potential.

So to do the Maths we do the following;

1) Multiply the Estimated Avg CPC by .25 – We are presuming that Google pays around 25% of the cost per click to the adsense publisher

2) Then multiply this amount by the monthly search volume

Now even if we get a no.1 ranking we are not going to take all the traffic and my experience you will only see about 35% of the traffic figure, so….

3) We multiply the amount by .35

4) Finally we multiply the running figure by .04 (This is presuming we can generate a 4% click through rate and most adsense optimised sites will exceed this percentage)

On your spreadsheet the sum will look like this;

Once we tap enter it will give us a monthly income figure for the first line like so;

That’s right people a number one ranking for the keywords bracelets could be worth about £4782.40 in adsense income or $7651.84. If you doubt that much money can be actually made ask yourself first, have you ever had a number 1 ranking in Google? For a product related keyword??

Of course the figures are not pin point accurate but I believe they give you a great idea about how profitable a niche is, this is how internet and affiliate marketers make money

Now of course you might not want to spend the next two years of your life attempting to rank for bracelets, however there are lots more keywords to go at with less competition.

Just look at some of the other keywords you could pursue and be ranking for in the next 6 months given the right SEO strategy.

I have not competitively analysed these keywords so I do not know what kind of competition they have, if you like the look of these keywords you will have to check out the top five on Google, below I’ll give you some guiding principles

Understanding the Competition

This is the main part people tend to get mixed up.

If you want to target a heavy niche then forget this part and just be prepared to work at it for a few years for a big return.

If you want to target lots of small niches do the following;

1) Search the chosen keyword on Google

2) Check the PageRank of the top 5 sites if any are a PageRank 4 or above move on, unless they do not use the ‘exact keyword’ in the title tag

3) Check the link popularity using yahoo links count (download the SEObook plugin SEO for Firefox) Any pages with ‘page’ link popularity of over 1000 then move on, unless the keyword is not in the title tag

What we are aiming to do here is target niches that we can rank for very quickly and start earning within 4 months, hopefully ranking in the top 5 after 6 months SEO work.

So there you have it!!!!

If you want to create a profitable niche you must first make sure the keywords are capable of pulling in the money.

Disclaimer – I have to say at this point that the above is not accurate and click value may differ depending on multiple factors, this is a system I and many other internet marketers recommend

I can’t finish this post without giving credit to the internet marketers that I know use this system.

Court and Mark at the Keyword Academy teach pretty much the same methods for locating profitable niches, they have a membership site which goes into a ton more detail, so if you are interested in this form of SEO you should check it out.

The methods I use, even though are very similar to others, differ slightly, as you do this more and more you will find out what works and what doesn’t. It can be a painful process but you make fewer mistakes the more you do it.

This is not a ‘make money online’ site

I am mindful that this sort of posts ventures into the ‘online money’ realm, I am mindful that I want SEO wizz to remain an SEO blog, however there is no getting away from the fact SEO is closely related with generating an income online. The make money arena is not for everyone, still even if you own a different sort of site this is great method of checking the potential of the keywords you are targeting.

Anyway hope everyone got something from it.

Tagged as: niche keywords, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Advice, SEO Blogging