2,000 or 25,000,0000? Somewhere in between?--What is a good Ratio for Keyword Searches?

[Sean A McAlister]

Hey Cowboys and Cowgirls


I am sure there is a thread somewhere about this
but I could not find it....

What is a good benchmark for search volume when
identifying niches?

Are there any specific tips here?

Would the Competition be too fierce for
a long tail keyword that has
high results and high adword competition?

Any rules of thumb?

thanks
Sean

[Scott Million]

Originally Posted by The IM Reporter

Hey Cowboys and Cowgirls


I am sure there is a thread somewhere about this
but I could not find it....

What is a good benchmark for search volume when
identifying niches?

Are there any specific tips here?

Would the Competition be too fierce for
a long tail keyword that has
high results and high adword competition?

Any rules of thumb?

thanks
Sean

Sean, you should search for your terms in quotes. That will show you your real competition.

Dog Food Time has 82,000,000 Results, but "Dog Food Time" has only 3,000 (according to my Google...but apparently results will vary depending on which IP from Google you're accessing.)

Anyway...for a brand new website anything under 50,000 in quotes is pretty achievable. If you're doing article marketing or using Web 2.0 platforms then I'd go for 30,000 or less.

A lot will depend on the strength of the top competing websites, but if you notice You Tube, Squidoo, Wordpress, Blogger, Hub Pages, or any Social Bookmarking listings for your term then you can definitely outrank fairly quickly.

Hope that helps...

[Scott Million]

Originally Posted by Scott Million

Sean, you should search for your terms in quotes. That will show you your real competition.

Dog Food Time has 82,000,000 Results, but "Dog Food Time" has only 3,000 (according to my Google...but apparently results will vary depending on which IP from Google you're accessing.)

Anyway...for a brand new website anything under 50,000 in quotes is pretty achievable. If you're doing article marketing or using Web 2.0 platforms then I'd go for 30,000 or less.

A lot will depend on the strength of the top competing websites, but if you notice You Tube, Squidoo, Wordpress, Blogger, Hub Pages, or any Social Bookmarking listings for your term then you can definitely outrank fairly quickly.

Hope that helps...

LOL - I think I completely missed your question. Be careful about judging based off of Adwords listings... use Hexatrack to track them over a couple weeks (I hope it's still free) or analyze a competitor using Spyfu (GREAT TOOL)

I always go for MEGA NICHES and just grab a small piece of the pie. I messed around with a niche that claimed to get over 1000 searches per month and I ranked #1...but there wasn't much to be had there.

I think the easiest way to scoop up sales and rank well in a sure-fire niche is to target product keywords in niches that have massive amounts of traffic. You'll encounter very little competition and grab mostly deep product researchers A.K.A Buyer traffic.

[Simon_Sezs]

I think that people get confused when they are searching for niches. Stop looking for niches. Start looking for markets.

My first niche that I went after had roughly 300,000 competing pages and was in the forex niche.

The easiest way to get in the top 10 in google for niches that are less than 500,000 for most markets is to use the keyword snipe technique. This is where you build 5-10 pages and specifically go after that individual keyword.

1. You make your domain name the keyword
2. You make all the pages point to one main page of your site with the keyword anchored.
3. On the page that you are anchoring all the internal links to, you make the title tag your keyword.
4. Build backlinks with your keyword and a variation of the keyword.

I have dumbed it down a little but if you were to google keyword sniping, I imagine you will find some good information.

Whenever people ask me about SEO and where to start, I always point them to this method because....

• It is easy and it works...in most cases you can rank within a couple months...sometimes sooner.
• Someone who doesn't understand SEO can quickly learn how it works and THEN they can start to build on their SEO foundation.
• Once they feel confident that they can rank in a small pool of competitors, they can start to then enter the more difficult niches with more confidence.

BTW, I don't use quotes when I am determining niches. I like to think like a searcher and what searcher actually uses quotes? As an example, that forex site I was talking about earlier is number one with the quotes but only number 3 without it. I use also mention that I haven't touched this site in months....