Input sought on possible goldmine keyword phrase I found...

[carlos123]

Hi everyone,

I have been researching keywords with a view to creating a site to capture search engine traffic.

All well and good but I am wondering if someone can give me input to give me some reassurance that I am on the right track with what appears to be a keyword phrase goldmine.

I do know a fair bit about SEO related topics (mainly that it's mostly hype LOL) but I can certainly learn more.

While I won't give away the goldmine that I seem to have found here is the gist of it.

The keyword phrase is like "air mattress deals" or some such. This keyword phrase is searched for about 50,000 per month through Google (according to Google's keyword tool). The number of sites that are serving this keyword phrase is 209,000 (again in Google).

Now the thing is that the top ten sites that show up of those 209,000 seem to be easily beatable. What I mean is that all they have on their pages is a list of items and prices and little in the way of real content.

Correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that if I (assume I am selling air mattresses) build a site that contains advice on air mattresses. What they are, how to pick a good one, how to get deals on them, whatever...that my site will outrank these other sites that do little more than just list prices and model names.

In other words my site will have content. Valuable content. Not just a bunch of prices and model numbers with little blurps under the model names.

Does this sound like a winning strategy to beat those in the top spot for this phrase? I mean to build a content site on air mattresses that has a lot more indexable content than the sites that are presently at the top have?

What do you all think? Am I on the right track?

Any and all input would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Carlos

[procoach]

Hi Carlos,

Hi Carlos,

You indeed seem to have found a niche that may turn into a goldmine.

Did you see paid ads when you did a google search? How many? Less than 5 may indicate that the market is hard to monetize. More than 15 and you have serious competition.

As you likely know, there's on-site SEO (domain name, content, meta-tags, title and h1 tages, etc.) and off-site SEO (backlinks). You'll need to do your on-site SEO right, then build a few backlinks. Ranking in the top 5 when there's only 200,000 competing sites is fairly straight-forward.

I rank #1 for "Pierre recommends"; and achieving this was easy. Of course, this is a non-competitive keyword with only 137,000 "competiting" sites.

Pierre.

[Christian Fox]

Originally Posted by carlos123

Hi everyone,

I have been researching keywords with a view to creating a site to capture search engine traffic.

All well and good but I am wondering if someone can give me input to give me some reassurance that I am on the right track with what appears to be a keyword phrase goldmine.

I do know a fair bit about SEO related topics (mainly that it's mostly hype LOL) but I can certainly learn more.

While I won't give away the goldmine that I seem to have found here is the gist of it.

The keyword phrase is like "air mattress deals" or some such. This keyword phrase is searched for about 50,000 per month through Google (according to Google's keyword tool). The number of sites that are serving this keyword phrase is 209,000 (again in Google).

Now the thing is that the top ten sites that show up of those 209,000 seem to be easily beatable. What I mean is that all they have on their pages is a list of items and prices and little in the way of real content.

Correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that if I (assume I am selling air mattresses) build a site that contains advice on air mattresses. What they are, how to pick a good one, how to get deals on them, whatever...that my site will outrank these other sites that do little more than just list prices and model names.

In other words my site will have content. Valuable content. Not just a bunch of prices and model numbers with little blurps under the model names.

Does this sound like a winning strategy to beat those in the top spot for this phrase? I mean to build a content site on air mattresses that has a lot more indexable content than the sites that are presently at the top have?

What do you all think? Am I on the right track?

Any and all input would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Carlos

Here is a little help 4 u

Use Google inurl:"keyword" intitle:"keyword" (use them at the same time) for a more accurate look at actual competition. Also DL seo quake (FF plug in) so you can check PR, domain age, backlinks (and more) of the top 10 domains for the KW.

It will take time to rank a new domain there is no getting around it...

Also pay attention if those results are broad "phrase" or [exact] it can make a HUGE difference.

Good Luck

[itcoll]

i do not think it is nice to leak out your keyword here.Better to remove it before too many people see it.When you do posts like these,just give u details about the keyword competition and that is fine

[carlos123]

Thanks for the input procoach!

Comments follow below yours...

Originally Posted by procoach

Did you see paid ads when you did a google search? How many? Less than 5 may indicate that the market is hard to monetize. More than 15 and you have serious competition.

With the top 3 sites that show up.

The 1st has about 5 paid ads on the site of some sort or another. None are Google ads.

The 2nd has 4 regular "Ads by Google" and four plain text link ads by Google + one banner ad.

The 3rd does not have any paid ads as far as I can tell.

Again none of these 3 or most any of the top ten have any content to speak of.

Ranking in the top 5 when there's only 200,000 competing sites is fairly straight-forward.

Hmm...that's interesting. One of my site pages recently got into position 5 and beat out 59,000,000 other sites. Thing is I didn't do a single solitary thing to even focus on trying to get a good ranking. No meta tags, no title in the HTML, no keyword stuffing, the domain isn't even about the subject of the page. I didn't do a single solitary thing to concern myself with search engine traffic for that page. Yet it made it to position 5 entirely on it's own.

The only two things I did were create the page with great content for my readers (not the search engines) and get a few, very few backlinks to it from off of forums like this one (though not this one). That's it.

No article marketing. No nothing.

Makes me wonder if much of the SEO stuff is just...well...hype. A bunch of fluffy hype.

I rank #1 for "Pierre recommends"; and achieving this was easy. Of course, this is a non-competitive keyword with only 137,000 "competiting" sites.

Cool! Incidentally I think your neck of the woods is becoming much more competitive. Google shows 880,000 for that phrase now .

Carlos

[carlos123]

Hi Christian,

Originally Posted by Christian Fox

Use Google inurl:"keyword" intitle:"keyword" (use them at the same time) for a more accurate look at actual competition.

Hmm...never seen that before in my SEO reading. Interesting. The number of web sites competing in this keyword phrase goes down to 2,500 instead of over 200,000. I take it that means this keyword phrase is red hot then?

I mean given that it's searched for about 50,000 times a month (according to Google).

Also pay attention if those results are broad "phrase" or [exact] it can make a HUGE difference.

Absolutely Christian. Wouldn't do my keyword research any other way .

Thanks much for the input.

Carlos

[RyanRingold]

Originally Posted by carlos123

Hi everyone,

I have been researching keywords with a view to creating a site to capture search engine traffic.

All well and good but I am wondering if someone can give me input to give me some reassurance that I am on the right track with what appears to be a keyword phrase goldmine.

I do know a fair bit about SEO related topics (mainly that it's mostly hype LOL) but I can certainly learn more.

While I won't give away the goldmine that I seem to have found here is the gist of it.

The keyword phrase is like "air mattress deals" or some such. This keyword phrase is searched for about 50,000 per month through Google (according to Google's keyword tool). The number of sites that are serving this keyword phrase is 209,000 (again in Google).

Now the thing is that the top ten sites that show up of those 209,000 seem to be easily beatable. What I mean is that all they have on their pages is a list of items and prices and little in the way of real content.

Correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that if I (assume I am selling air mattresses) build a site that contains advice on air mattresses. What they are, how to pick a good one, how to get deals on them, whatever...that my site will outrank these other sites that do little more than just list prices and model names.

In other words my site will have content. Valuable content. Not just a bunch of prices and model numbers with little blurps under the model names.

Does this sound like a winning strategy to beat those in the top spot for this phrase? I mean to build a content site on air mattresses that has a lot more indexable content than the sites that are presently at the top have?

What do you all think? Am I on the right track?

Any and all input would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Carlos

Carlos,

Some of them look like you could beat them with some effort. Your on page content strategy is good, but it is only 20% of the SEO game. 80% will come from off page factors, like good link building. Some of the sites in the example you give have good authority with good Page Rank. A couple of them that I glanced at also had thousands of incoming links.

If you have a good on page AND off page strategy, you should be able to compete in that space.

[carlos123]

Originally Posted by itcoll

i do not think it is nice to leak out your keyword here.Better to remove it before too many people see it.When you do posts like these,just give u details about the keyword competition and that is fine

Thanks for the input itcoll but the keyword I indicated in my original post was made up. It is not and was not the actual keyword phrase I am researching and talking about.

Of course...maybe I should have looked up "air mattress deals" before I mentioned it. That might be a good one in it's own right. But since I care absolutely not the slightest bit about air mattresses, if it is a good phrase...well...my gift to this fine forum and for the great input I am getting LOL.

There seem to be enough great keyword phrases left to give each of us a piece of the pie.

Carlos

[Jeff Hollyhand]

As a final check on the traffic.
You may want to run a 24 hour AdWords Campaign for your keyword phrase on [exact] match and see how many impressions you get.

[carlos123]

Let's assume for a minute that I have found a keyword goldmine phrase.

I have a follow up question.

Is it better to go for the jugglar and try and get people to call me on the phone to discuss what I want to sell them right up front?

Or is it better to simply wet their appetitite for what I am selling, get their email address, and then slowly pre-sell them over a short series of autoresponder follow up emails. Before I get to the talking in person stage?

I see some benefits to both approaches but am wondering which one seems best to you all and why or why not.

The product being sold cannot be sold other than by talking about it on the phone with prospects. It's a great product but it's very high end and costs a bit of money.

If I get the traffic what is the best way to introduce the idea of a phone call? Up front right off the bat or as gradually as I can through some follow up emails first?

Just in general?

Thanks.

Carlos

[carlos123]

Thanks very much Ryan but as I mentioned before, somewhere in a post, the keyword phrase I indicated in my OP was made up. Sounds like you may have discovered that even my made up one might be okay.

I guess I am a natural at this. What can I say LOL.

Incidentally if SEO is 20% content and 80% off site stuff how do you explain the fact that I beat 59,000,000 sites to rank number 5 with a fair bit of content and almost no offsite stuff at all?? Does anyone ever reverse engineer search engine rankings?

It seems like so much SEO stuff is just regurgitated as truth when it...well...may not be. I mean you could be right Ryan. I'm just wondering though in view of the page that I ranked 5 in.

I'd be happy to show you the page and link to it here if that is allowed for further analysis. It's in a long tail keyword phrase but I really did not even try to rank for it. I just focused on giving the page excellent content and got a few links at one forum asking for advice on it. That's all I did. Honest.

Originally Posted by RyanRingold

Carlos,

Some of them look like you could beat them with some effort. Your on page content strategy is good, but it is only 20% of the SEO game. 80% will come from off page factors, like good link building. Some of the sites in the example you give have good authority with good Page Rank. A couple of them that I glanced at also had thousands of incoming links.

If you have a good on page AND off page strategy, you should be able to compete in that space.

[carlos123]

Originally Posted by Jeff Hollyhand

As a final check on the traffic.
You may want to run a 24 hour AdWords Campaign for your keyword phrase on [exact] match and see how many impressions you get.

That's very interesting Jeff. You mean I can set up an AdWords Campaign without even having a web site??

So that I pay for the impressions but such that the clicks go nowhere?

Of course the other problem is that the AdWords placement will not neccessarily mirror the natural ranking placement at all which would sorta defeat the purpose of such a test it seems to me. With respect to being a test of real world, as in real ranking, results.

Carlos

[carlos123]

Originally Posted by Christian Fox

Use Google inurl:"keyword" intitle:"keyword" (use them at the same time) for a more accurate look at actual competition.

You know I was thinking about what you suggested some more Christian and I am not sure it's of much value. I have read of instances recently where it is very clear that keywords in a domain and in the title are not nearly as important as it is commonly believed.

The above technique completely misses sites that do not have the keyword in the url or title but which might nevertheless form some very strong competition for a given keyword phrase.

Carlos

[Jeff Hollyhand]

Sorry I was not so clear.

I was just talking about double checking the number of searches each day in Google for your exactly keyword phrase before you register the domain or build the site.

I found a keyword a while back about model trains, I forget the exact phrase, the Google keyword tool showed a lot of searches, even on exact match .
But when I ran 24 hours Adwords Campaign I only got about 15 impressions.
Did not cost me but a few pennies cause I only got one click, but it keep me from my wasting time building the site.

If you want to run a test
Just use it for the site in the #1 position for the test.
Bid high enough to get on the first page, but not the top 3.

You may want to check out the “Adsense / PPC / SEO Discussion Forum” section of the Warrior Fourm.

Good Luck
Bed Time For Me

[itsliz]

Carlos,

There's a great free tool you can use to get everything you need to know about your competition in the search engines, so you know if you can beat them or not. Here it is: SEO for Firefox Extension: Free SEO Toolbar Firefox Browser Plugin

[Christian Fox]

Originally Posted by carlos123

You know I was thinking about what you suggested some more Christian and I am not sure it's of much value. I have read of instances recently where it is very clear that keywords in a domain and in the title are not nearly as important as it is commonly believed.

The above technique completely misses sites that do not have the keyword in the url or title but which might nevertheless form some very strong competition for a given keyword phrase.

Carlos

It's not just domain it's url. Anyone who knows anything will have the kw in both the url and title. So It's a much better number of people who are really targeting your keyword.

example.
Ideally you want www.redwidgets.com/redwidgets/
But this is better than nothing in any case.
www.example.com/redwidgets/
Along with a relevant
title example 'redwidgets are great buy them here!'

As said don't forget the H1 tags and KW density etc.

Use WP IMO it's a big advantage SEOwise...

So in your case the LESS you find using both the better. Also Domain DOES matter on Bing and Yahoo and no one will not include a KW loaded domain if it is an option. I have several KW domains top ranked on Bing out of 50million because of this.

Oh and that high ranking term with no work, give it time it will most likely do the rank and tank and then head to the Google dance and end up who knows where.

Title is one of the most important factors, next to the url IMO. Check for the top 10 results and see if you see the KW in the title and or URL... Yes Google is scaling that back and relying more on relevant links etc but it is still something you had better not ignore.

Hmm...never seen that before in my SEO reading. Interesting. The number of web sites competing in this keyword phrase goes down to 2,500 instead of over 200,000. I take it that means this keyword phrase is red hot then?

Yes this is your 'real' competition the ones who are serious about owning YOUR kw...

[Lothar Evers]

You are up to now missing a lot of important factors when it comes to beating other websites.
Pagerank and age of domains and backlinks to the domains that you compete with are the most important one. So decision is: try anderror or study a bit more...

[Christian Fox]

Originally Posted by Lothar Evers

You are up to now missing a lot of important factors when it comes to beating other websites.
Pagerank and age of domains and backlinks to the domains that you compete with are the most important one. So decision is: try anderror or study a bit more...

Very true but they would still likely have the KW in their url and title if they were serious about the KW. That is why either seo quake or the firefox seo plug in are important, They will give you all of that data and it's free.

Seo is IMO not easy at first, then once you 'get it' it becomes a lot of work and a lot of waiting...The on page is the easy part...

Google in particular really values domain age.
But that could change tomorrow.

[Christian Fox]

Originally Posted by carlos123

That's very interesting Jeff. You mean I can set up an AdWords Campaign without even having a web site??

So that I pay for the impressions but such that the clicks go nowhere?

Of course the other problem is that the AdWords placement will not neccessarily mirror the natural ranking placement at all which would sorta defeat the purpose of such a test it seems to me. With respect to being a test of real world, as in real ranking, results.

Carlos

It will give you true search data and that is invaluable. Google KW search can be off.... Waaaaaay off so until you run this test you won't REALLY know.
Your not concerned with placements only impressions. Your add will show if someone searches for the KW the position of the add is irrelevant as you are not after clicks but only impressions.

And yes you can send clicks to Wikipedia if you want. You need to write relevant ads that wont get clicks. Takes a little practice but it's not hard.

[KateD]

Hi...

I guess I'm a little confused about something. How can you call this a "goldmine" when you state that your competition is over 200,000 results.

Not to say that you can't rank well for the phrase. But 200,000 is a sizeable number. And really, the competition stats outweight the search stats.

Which would be a better goldmine:

1. A keyword phrase that gets 50,000 monthly searches and has 200,000+ competition.

or...

2. A keyword phrase that gets 10,000 searches but only has 50,000 competing pages.

Not trying to rain on your parade. I definitely want you to take some action. But I see thousands of keyword phrases each day in my freelance work, and it makes me cringe to see someone put so much value on a single keyword phrase.

Not to say that your keyword phrase isn't a good on, but the clients of mine who are converting their keyword lists into income tend to focus on terms with much less competition (ie. less than 50,000 competition, sometimes less than 10,000).

It's the whole low hanging fruit concept, you know?

KateD

[LegitBlogger]

Originally Posted by carlos123

Correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that if I (assume I am selling air mattresses) build a site that contains advice on air mattresses. What they are, how to pick a good one, how to get deals on them, whatever...that my site will outrank these other sites that do little more than just list prices and model names.

In other words my site will have content. Valuable content. Not just a bunch of prices and model numbers with little blurps under the model names.

Does this sound like a winning strategy to beat those in the top spot for this phrase? I mean to build a content site on air mattresses that has a lot more indexable content than the sites that are presently at the top have?

What do you all think? Am I on the right track?

Carlos

Hmmm, sadly, that's NOT the way the search engines
work. It's not just the CONTENT but also the LINKS
that point to the particular sites. Even if you
have the best of content but those sites have
more backlinks pointing to them than you do, they
will continue to beat you.

To beat them, of course, write more high quality
content but ALSO BUILD MORE BACKLINKS to your
high content site!
.

[Intrepreneur]

Originally Posted by procoach

Hi Carlos,

Hi Carlos,

You indeed seem to have found a niche that may turn into a goldmine.

Did you see paid ads when you did a google search? How many? Less than 5 may indicate that the market is hard to monetize. More than 15 and you have serious competition.

As you likely know, there's on-site SEO (domain name, content, meta-tags, title and h1 tages, etc.) and off-site SEO (backlinks). You'll need to do your on-site SEO right, then build a few backlinks. Ranking in the top 5 when there's only 200,000 competing sites is fairly straight-forward.

I rank #1 for "Pierre recommends"; and achieving this was easy. Of course, this is a non-competitive keyword with only 137,000 "competiting" sites.

Pierre.

Get those redirect links out of your signature!