All, I am interested in opening up an e-Commerce website selling a certain type of food product. But before I do, obviously I need to do my homework to make sure this is something that would be profitable--that there is a demand for this online (i.e, people are actually searching for it) and that the supply isn't overwhelming. So how do you guys figure supply and demand of a given product/market? I think I've got a good handle on demand...what I do is simply look at the Overture published results for how many times a particular keyword phrase was searched in the last month. Any other ways to guage demand that people use? But what about supply? I'd really like to understand how you can get a good idea of how saturated a market is before you enter it. I know I can enter the keyword phrase into Google (with and without quotes) and see how many pages are indexed for that phrase, but there has got to be a more accurate way. But on the other hand, is this even a relevant thing to consider? Here's what I'm wondering: Is it perhaps just as valid (or even more valid) to simply see who your competition would be for that keyword phrase on page 1/2 of the SERPs and then analyze *those* pages by looking at their onpage and offpage SEO? I guess I'm getting more and more convinced of how SEO trumps everything...I mean, if you think you *can* get into page 1 of the Google SERPs for an extremely competitive keyword phrase, then shouldn't you go for it regardless if the market for that phrase is "saturated"? Incidentally, for my main keyword (Overture reports 208,000 searches for it in March) the site that ranks #1 has about 5,000 links. Oddly enough, #2 has almost 75,000 links. #3 almost 20,000 and #4 around 6,000. I was surprised to see the guy with 5,000 links at #1 compared with his competition. I'll be analyzing this with some link checker software, but any ideas off the top of your head on why this might be the case? Look forward to your comments... Thanks, -datadugout
http://fastpaths.com/Tools/Keyword_Supply_Vs_Demand/ Devedx launched this site today. Anyway I don't have knowledge on this subject, I think this tool is interesting.
If you can get into the top three, then no matter what you're selling, you stand a good chance of being successful (assuming the product is actually something people will buy). Good luck, I hope it works out well for you.
One of the things you can do is check the keyword difficulty (link in my sig). That can give you a good idea of how tough a term is to rank for and how much competition is out there. Make sure you double-check your Overture data with Wordtracker - a big discrepency probably means some bad data.