SEO Tips: Selecting a Topic for Your Web Site

Selecting a good topic is the first step to building a successful web site.

You should select a topic which you find interesting, as you will be devoting thousands of hours of your life to this topic. It does not necessarily have to be a topic where you are deeply knowledgeable today, but it does have to be a topic in which you are interested in becoming deeply knowledgeable.

It should also be a topic in which other people are interested. No one wants to build a web site only for themselves. Your topic should be broad enough to appeal to a good audience, but narrow enough for you to be able to cover it comprehensively. Many successful web sites initially focus on a very small niche’, grow to dominate that niche’, and then branch out from that niche’ into related topics.

It should be a topic with economic value to an advertiser. Some topics are very interesting as hobbies, but do not do well at generating income. For example, the War of 1812 is fascinating, but is not something which will interest many advertisers.

Finally, the topic for a new web site should be one which is not too competitive. If there are already a hundred great web sites on your chosen topic, you should choose a new topic where you will be able to add something new to the Internet.

How to Determine if Other People are Interested in your Topic

One easy method of determining if other people are interested in your topic is to use the Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/). This tool will show you rough numbers which represent what people on the Internet are searching for. These numbers come from the Wordtracker and Overture tools which we will discuss in the section on keyword selection.

Enter possible topics into the Keyword Suggestion tool and you will be able to get a rough idea how popular your topic is – as compared to other topics. The actual numbers are irrelevant; the important thing to note is how the numbers relate to one another.

Today, the term “arizona” scored 265 on Wordtracker and 492.4 on Overture. The term “chicago white sox” scored 511 on Wordtracker and 755.1 on Overture. From this data, we can see that more people search the web for information on the White Sox than on the Cardinals.

How to Determine if Advertisers are Interested in your Topic

One of the best methods for measuring advertiser interest in a topic is to find out what it would cost an advertiser to purchase a PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisement on that topic. This can be done using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

Enter the topic you are thinking of as a keyword and click “Get More Keywords”. Change the value of the “Show columns” dropdown list to “Cost and ad position estimates”. Enter an unrealistic value as the Max CPC -- $50 should work fine. Click the “Recalculate” button.

When we try to search for “white sox”, our search fails. This is because AdWords does not allow advertisers to key on Trademarks. Therefore, we search for other terms which will be found on our web site. For example, a search for “baseball” shows that “baseball” currently has an average CPC of$1.07. This is a good CPC and tells us that this is a site idea that we might be interested in.

How to Determine if your Topic is too Competitive

NicheBot (http://www.nichebot.com/) is one useful tool for roughly determining the competitiveness of a keyword. Enter your prospective keyword and click the “Search” button.

If we search for “white sox”, we see that “chicago white sox” was searched for 40,537 times. That is excellent. Lots of people are interested in this topic. However, we also see that 19,100,000 pages on the Internet include the phrase “chicago white sox.” That gives us a ratio of 471.17. 471.17 generally means that a search term is very competitive. I recommend competing for search terms with a ratio of less than 10.

However, if we look down the list of suggested keywords, we see that “white sox jersey”, “white sox jerseys”, “chicago white sox jersey”, “chicago white sox jerseys”, “chicago white sox jacket” and “chicago white sox hat” all have ratios below ten. This tells us that a web site dedicated to Chicago White Sox clothing could potentially do very well.

Checklist for Topic Selection:
__ I am interested in this topic
__ Other people are interested in this topic
__ Advertisers are interested in this topic
__ This topic is not too competitive





This is the fourth post in a series of SEO Tips. The other posts in this series are SEO Tips: On Page Optimization and SEO Tips: Link Building, and SEO Tips: Keyword Research.

 

Thank you Will for sharing the tips!

 

It's like find topic first and then create a website.

What about have a website and topic already.. this is really tough to find the best keyword in that topic.

I just wonder do we just find the best keyword for only one page/section of website or we do find the best keyword for the whole website?

 

If you already have a website, check out SEO Tips: Keyword Research.

You should find as many keywords as you can and create two pages optimized for each keyword.

 

"CPC of$1.07" the greater the CPC the best? Right?


Sorry by the dummie question LOL

 

For web publishers, higher CPC is generally better.

The only caveat to that is that any keyword published on a "high paying keywords" list is probably so heavily spammed that it's not profitable to compete for.

 

Today is my first day with AdWords. (still waiting to see if I get a promotional code before clicking!) Your tips are great. Thanks for taking the time to put them down for us. I certainly appreciate it.

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but if I use your sugestion and check the ratio of those keywords in the nichebot site, and if the ratio is low, then this is a good niche to go. right?

 

In NicheBot, a low ratio is better. The caveat to that is that some search terms will have a low ratio but will still be ultra-competitive. This occurs in two cases:

1. The search term is just so incredibly popular that, even though the ratio is good, the total number of pages optimized for that term is still very large.

2. The search term is so profitable that the top contenders for the search term have all invested heavily in optimizing for that term. Your site may be great and yet still be stuck on page five. This occurs even if there are few competitors, if those few competitors are very good.

NicheBot is good to give you a general idea though.

 

I obviously respect your opinion. I happen to have a product, which I have just decided to try and sell online.

I just started an AdWords campaign today with some of your tips at my disposal. I will let you know how that is working after some time has passed.

There are 2 words associated with this "item". I already own the direct name of my product which is these two words, plus one other.

When I search these two words on Nichebot.com (today is my first time using that site) I see that the 1st 4 results are obvious and with a ratio of 192, 171, 1125, 217, and then 0.26 !!!!

The pages start at 16,200,000 and for the 0.26 is 7,800,000.

Initially this seems like a great opportunity for me to go after. I am now trying to reckon that with your caveats. Can you provide any further insight.

Thanks.

 

The best thing to do it to try it out and see what the results are. You don't even need a new web site for this, you can just optimize a page on your existing site for that keyword.

 

Okay, can do.

I have had the 1 domain for a year or so, but just put online last week.

I have just started to optimize, and I will focus on those words and see how I do.

Also, I tried shoemoneys domain suggestion tool, and it suggested 1 domain name. So I may take that and see if I can make a companion site with some related information more focused on those words than my product.

Again, thanks for the help.

 

thanx for nice info. very useful for me.

 

hi Will.

Thnks for sharing you SEO niche information, good read.

I am trying to recreate your google-adwords baseball example, but all I get is a $0.05 cpc. (tried some different keywords and still I get $0.05).

What am I doing wrong???

 

Hmmm... Are you sure that you entered $50.00 as the Max CPC?

I just checked again and I got $1.07 for "baseball" again.

A few more interesting ones:

sports tickets $4.14
fantasy basketball $3.79
sports trivia $2.96
batting cage $2.82
batting cages $2.12
pitching $1.86
sports training $1.80
baseball bats $1.74
baseball jerseys $1.43
lou gehrig $1.40
baseball jersey $1.29
baseball hat $1.27
sports wear $1.25

 

I think you are better looking at how many and the quality of links competing sites has rather than looking at the number of results. This will provide more accurate clues to how competitive the keyword

 

This is true and will be the topic of a future article.

 

Well said. KEI analysis is not a good indicator at all.

 

I wouldn't go that far. KEI isn't the be-all end-all, but it is a useful indicator.

 

ah I see what I have done wrong. I didn't select all language and all areas (don't know if this is the translation).

Thnks again