Criteria for profitable keyword

What should the criteria for a profitable, but low competitive keyword be?

My plan for finding a keyword is going to the following website: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
My keyword must have at least 300 searches a day in either Wordtracker or Overture.

Then, I see the pageranks of the top pages in Google with the following tool:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/
I figure I can conquer the keyword if the pageranks of the top pages are less than 4-5.

Finally, I go to the Adwords website and go far enough to where there is an estimate CPC for the keyword. I usually only go for the websites that have an average CPC of $1 at least.

Would this be a foolproof plan to find a profitable keyword or are there some problems with it? Should I increase how much page visits should be seen on Wordtracker and Overture? Perhaps 300 is not enough?

 

The serps are not sorted in pagerank order so don't use the current top 10site's pagerank as a measure of if you'll be able to outrank them.

 

I have a tool which grabs the backlinks of all the top results in Google. Would that help to measure the competitiveness of the keyword? Or what tool should I use to do this?

Also, I heard that Wordtracker and Overture overestimate the number of daily searches a keyword receives. Does that mean I should rethink these keywords that receive 300-1200 searches daily? Should I go for something that receives more?

 

I use a similar strategy. It has worked ok, probably about as good as possible. Also try to include how many backlinks the top sites have as well as how many results there are for the keyphrase as these are both signs that the phrase is competitive. Last 300 searches a day is pretty high, don't forget the little ones. A lot of little phrases is just as good as one big one.

 

Personally I wont touch a keyword that doesnt have an overture search for the main keyword of over 100,000.

Then I drill down and niche my keywords from there. This provides an immediate ammount of traffic from the smaller keywords. Whilst working towards the goal of the main keyword.

Short term satisfaction combined with long term payoff.

Works great.

Brad

 

So, let's say a search for "george washington" gets 100,00 searches. You would make websites about "george washington teeth", "george washington biography", and "george washington clothes" for niche keywords?

I don't want to create a niche website and find out it is so "niche" nobody visits it.

 

That tool on the website of SEOMoz works pretty well for analyzing competiton.

 

Yeah, I agree. This works!

 

Personally, I'd think a profitable keyword would have to involve something you feel passionate about.

If you're building a site from scratch, adding content and backlinks, was well as learning seo at the same time; it's a long slog.

If you're really passionate about money, then by all means target "personal injury lawyer" or niche variations such as "spinal injury ..." or whatever.

But to start with I'd think about cutting your teeth on something have some enthusiasm for... there's plenty of quality traffic out there!

Cheers,
Paz.

 

Well, I'm not that passionate about money. I'm going to do something specializing in aquariums or gardening because those subjects I know about, and they continue to interest me.

It's practically impossible for me to look for non-competitive keywords, though.

My criteria is the following:
Less than 30,000 results in Google
Average CPC of $1.00+
Top pages in Google have PR 4 or less(in the above posts, it says this is not a good way to determine competition, though)
An overture search of 100,000 seems pretty hard. It will no longer be a niche market anymore.

Wouldn't the top SERP's determine competition rather than pages ranked lower? Or the pages ranked lower would be at the top?

 

Hi,

I'm sure Brad won't touch terms less than 100,000 searches a day because he knows he has the resources and experience to crack them. If you're on a budget, then it takes time.

Don't be afraid of competitive searches though - they could well bring lots traffic if you work hard enough and/or find a niche. Also your method for finding easy markets based on the number of serps results is somewhat bogus in my view.

As you say, there could only be 30,000 serps results, but if the top 10 sites are well-established, popular sites with tons of backlinks you would have to work just as hard as any competitive search term.

A better method to find a search term that would bring you more traffic for the same amount of work would be to use word tracker, and the number of serps results combined, to find a popular search with the fewest number of pages. There are online tools that will do this for you, but they're based on publically available search data, which aren't too reliable.

Whichever keyword phrase you target, you gonna have to work some to get there!

Cheers,
Paz.

 

Don't decide things based on PR .
Have a look at back links and also if possible the strength of those back links .( The establishment of linking site, how important it could be etc.) You can easily beat a site which has back links only from few directories but it is difficult to beat a site which has links from established nitch sites.
You can also target typos of some well searched word/phrase.

Regards
jeet

 

Alright, to tell you guys the truth, I'm dead scared of competitive keywords because of my past websites that have targetted pretty hard keywords. This was before I did any research. I'm be ranked 20,000,000 on Google on my past websites. The best I could do was submit to directories for backlinks which failed miserably.

I will look at the backlinks and how strong they are.

 

an interesting point of view...

Do you work on one big website/domain or do you make a forrest of small niche websites?

 

I'm checking the backlinks on the first ranked page on Google, and the page only gets 6 backlinks, yet it's in the first rank? But, it's an .edu domain, and the backlinks of the main website total 25,500. So, does a .edu really affect a page getting to the top? This is a keyword about a plant, by the way.

Then, lower down, there's a website with only 50 backlinks in the whole page, but it's ranked 8.

There's one of those product finder websites, also, with no backlinks to that one page about the keyword, but tons to the main website.

Would it be easy to beat the product finder website?

 

Argh, I think I'm stressing too much about this. Should I just go about and make a website? It seems like I've been researching nonstop for the last two weeks. I need to get something done. I'm just trying to prevent myself from researching an impossible keyword.

What are the best tools to determine backlink strength of the highest SERPS of a keyword on Google?

 

You can make a 3x3 matrix and then invest on keyphrases. Market has to be defined with relevancy and just not total number of search results. You can see the document mentioned with the signature. I have put all my experiences that has helped many with keyphrase analysis.

 

Well the way I figure is this.

To SEO a smaller site, you are doing the same type of work as for a bigger site, just on a smaller scale.

Not only this but by targeting the larger search keywords and niches, you can give yourself some "instant" traffic from MSN until Google and Yahoo pay you a bit more respect.

Also it gives you alot more options with lesser keywords for more instant traffic.

Some sites I build, I dont even fully intend on developing them properly for about 12 months. I just like to get the ball rolling, develop some PR and some backlinks. So that when I do launch it, most of the hard bit is done.

I dont always go for the main keyword of any particular niche but when SEO'ing will always keep it in mind and enter different variations of it in my articles etc.

This way you can slowly build for the main keyword, whilst also hitting the smaller keywords.

Its a Win Win situation. Otherwise you can throw thousands of visitors away and miss out on alot of extra income.

There are many ways to do this, but this is the way that works best for me.

Brad

 

So, would you create a website based on a bigger keyword, but have the individual pages targetted for specific lesser keywords that deal with the bigger keywords?

This seems like it would be hard if the keyword is too saturated. Is there anything I should look for to make sure a "general" keyword isn't too saturated with large corporations? Well, is there something I should watch out for? I'm trying to stay away from products.

I don't have much of a budget so the most I can do to raise backlinks is submit to directories, submitting to RSS feed directories, and submit some articles to article directories, and perhaps trade links with generous website owners.

 

Exactly, once established you only need to mention smaller keywords and the site will begin to rank for them. Examples include about.com, wikipedia.com, and digitalpoint.com to a certain extent.