OK, so I realize that this may seem stupid, but then again it may not. I have been writing here for DP members... oh for at least the last 3 years and I am getting bored with writing the same topics over and over again. That does not mean I am not going to continue on writing, but I would like to try my hand at the other end of the game now. As a writer, over the last 16 months I have seen my income drop in half. Most of it is because of the economy. Some of it can be directly affiliated with a lacking of wanting to pay my previous rates, while even more can be associated with a flooding of the market place by new writers. Any way you look at it, I have watched my income drop to a third of what it was 16 months ago and as such I am left having to do twice the work, spend less time with my family and have risked not having enough to pay the bills several times along the way. So I figure it is high time I actually get around to starting and completing a website project. Through my years of writing, I have learned a lot about what others want in their articles and how they use their order to market. Most of this is accumulated through the understanding of the various orders. No one actually says anything, but one can analyze the manner in which people ask for certain things to determine what their uses are. Ok, so that may sound a bit fuzzy, but it makes sense in my overly clouded mind which is filled to the brim with concepts and ideas that I need to do my daily writing. I thought about it for a while, and I have decided that I want to go with a blog. Not in the normal sense though, but rather as a means of promoting affiliate products as well as the use of contextual ads. It will not be so much a blog per say, but rather an ongoing advertisement for the products I plan on pushing. I cannot stand looking at long squeeze pages and I am sure a lot of people dislike them too. I would rather spend the time to take a particular feature or benefit of the product and post about it. Move on to another benefit or feature and post about that as a means of answering all of the potential questions one may develop about it. For me though, I have never even stepped foot into the whole keyword concept. As a writer, those keywords are sent to me in a list and I write about them. I even tell customers that they have to be fairly specific with the topic to ensure the best quality of article. I have never been any good at coming up with topics or even titles, but the actual writing comes fairly easy. So I took the time to visit Google and did some keyword research through the actual search engine in order to come up with the number of pages or the "Competition" in order to determine what might be a good keyword/phrase to go after in the niche I selected. I actually went through roughly 25,000 variations to come up with a list that is only 25 long. Most of these I am not even sure are any good. Now I know a lot of people will tell me, to look for keywords which get hundreds of thousands if not millions of searches but very little competition. However, the concept of what can be considered little has always been left obscured no matter where I check. So here is where I am at. I will not state the actual phrase or keyword, but will just give some numbers. All I am asking is for a little bit of feedback because I know that there are many people out there who are probably asking the same question, "What is the difference between a competitive and non-competitive niche?" Keyword 1 According to the search engine, there are 2,540 results for this phrase. Using the Adwords Keyword Tool, I came up with 22,200 average global searches a month. If I take the number of average searches and divide that by the number of pages seen searching for that same phrase, I am left with a little more then 8. Meaning that in a perfect world, each one of those results should get 8 of the 22,200 average monthly searches. With that said, I know that the first 5 results will actually get 99% of those searches and then can hopefully convert them. I see this first keyword as a viable choice which could allow me to dominate those monthly searches with ease. Keyword 2 The search engine reports 4,800 results and Google states there are 1,600 average monthly searches for this term. using the same formula I come up with 0.3. Considering the lower number of searches and the higher number of competitors, I cannot see going after this particular term unless I was expecting to make large sums in commission per conversion. Keyword 3 This one was really bad in my book. I have 5,490 competitors and only 260 monthly results which gives me less then 0.05. I realize these numbers may seem confusing, but I am basing it on the concept of number of competitors versus the number of searches and the number is actually each competitor's share of the searches. As such, the higher the number, the better it is. I am going to skip several of my keywords because I do not want this post to get too long, and I do not want anyone getting bored of reading it. On to the keyword of choice which I am planning on going after... Keep in mind that while the average monthly searches globally are not all that big, the competition is next to nil and the potential for conversion may be fairly high. Keyword 9 This particular keyword only shows 4 results in the Google search engine when enclosed in parenthesis. Upon comparing it to the average monthly searches, I find that on the average month it is searched for 390 times globally. Just to make sure someone was not trying to inflate the number, I went through and looked at the bar graph to see if there were any weird spikes over the last 12 months and it was in fact fairly steady which to me looks great. Using my simple calculation, I came up with 78. To me this means that every competitor for this phrase, can have the opportunity of getting 78 highly targeted unique visitors every single month. If they can convert those visitors at 10%, they would clear almost $100 a month for that keyword. At a lousy 5%, they would still clear $50 per month. To me, this is the ultimate key phrase to target. I should expect unique visitors for other possible variables of the keyword, but by targeting this one in particular, I feel as if I can make a descent amount versus the actual work needed to get the traffic. I then went through and checked for incoming links to the results using the link: search function and found that the number one result only had a single incoming link; the rest had none. None of them actually used the phrase in the title of the page, but rather show up in the page itself or as a navigation link. Would I be wrong to surmise that a single page with multiple incoming links and a dedicated domain would dominated this one single key phrase? If so, then I would not have to do much work to maintain control over it either. Anyway, I am sure that everyone else has more important things to do. But I just wanted to ask the question with regards to how a new comer could spot a possible low competitive keyword. Any thoughts or suggestions on this? Thanks, WorldWide
Your analysis has value but misses a very critical item. How good is the quality if your competitors in those phrases? How many backlinks do they have? What is their PR? Where do their links come from? How well are the pages optimized for on page factors? Are they listed on Yahoo, and DMOZ? Do they have a high number of Government or Education links? Those factors are going to make a huge difference on what you choose. If your terms you believe are good, are already highly optimized on page, and with great incoming links, you will have a major challenge on your hands getting your site to rank above them. If they have not optimized well, do not have a lot of links to the page, then you have a very strong chance of getting yourself to rank above them, getting the traffic.
That is scary stuff guys, i think you are trying to hard, go with what you feel is right if its not working then change it.
Actually, none of the pages except for the first are even linked to... They just happen to contain the keyword on the page. The first result however, has one inbound link from a personal web page utilizing the phrase as anchor text. Other then that, it does not appear as if there is any optimization done for that particular phrase. A stop off at GoDaddy finds that the phrase without hyphens is available for all of the TLDs. I was looking at getting the COM, NET and INFO domains and building three different sites to promote the same thing. All three would be optimized for the key phrase. The only competition I really see is the first result which has one inbound link, but one that comes from a personal homepage. The three TLDs for that phrase, each with different content and layout, in my opinion could easily force the other 4 results down. I mean, I realize that an average of 380 global monthly searches is not a lot, but highly targeted visitors means greater conversion for that key phrase. Mix in several nice articles; 5 different optimized 750 word articles for each site placed on 5 different article directories should be more then sufficient as long as I make sure that the spiders find the 15 articles. Since this is a highly competitive product that pays out a substantial amount per action, I do not mind going after such a small monthly average, nor spending the extra time needed to improve the sites' rankings. To me, I simply look at the lower end. If I can make position 1 with one of those website on that key phrase, and out of that 380 average monthly searches, 1/3 visit my page and gives me a 1% conversion, then the first month pays for my efforts and most of my costs. On the upper end, from what I have read and heard, more then 2/3 should visit my page if it is #1 and because it is targeted, if lay everything out right, I could get a 10% conversion rate which equates to a little more then I make a month writing... Less then I made per month before the recession though. While looking at the lower end though, I am also making sure to continuously search for other high potential phrases too. I have a total of 8 of them so far. All which gets less then 1,000 searches on average per month (According to Google Keyword Tool) and which have no more then 250 competitors. Each of them has the phrase available in at least 1 TLD and none have more then 5 inbound links. I will need to pay closer attention to optimization though by checking out the top competitors for each keyword/phrase. I don't even want to really call them a keyword or phrase as they are what I like to refer to as the accidentals. In writing, when done naturally, variations of the main key phrase are often added along the way. They are not really planned, just accidentals. For me when I write, this happens a lot and on a regular basis my customers are thinking me for "unique" keywords and phrases. I just use the same concept when I am looking for low competition words and phrases to go after (Bad English there, but its too early to fix it... need my coffee first). WorldWide
I use under 100,000 competing pages in google with a phrase match as a rule of thumb. Good luck with the transition.