Traffic Sucking Keywords

One of the most confusing points for internet marketers is the discovery of a good keyword set. I personally have heard just about every recommendation on the planet and half of them conflict with the other half!

I've been performing analysis for some time and I'm sure that I'll change how I do things from how I explain them here in short order too. For me keyword analysis is a growing talent, imho.

Anyhow, let me cut to the chase on how I search a niche, find traffic sucking keywords and I'll gladly answer questions in comments from you on this thread.

1. I will usually come across an idea like, let's say, table lamps. (Just off the top of my head - looking at my table lamp, lol.)

2. I'll think about the primary keyword noun, table lamps, and make sure that I've thought of stronger alternative. I'll stick to what I have here.

3. I've downloaded a free tool from 100% Free SEO Software | Traffic Travis, Traffic Travis, and I use it's SEO keyword tools to hunt for 2,000 keywords. I'll warn you that I purchased the professional version, so you may have a limit of 200 keywords. I'm truly not sure.

3a. Why 2,000? Well, it's the limit that traffic travis will do and I like this tool to hunt and peck around for alternatives. Sometimes the profitable niche is a subniche or like niche that you'll come up with. Also know that you'll come up with a lot of 'dud' keywords. That's fine, we'll sort them out soon enough.

4. I like to remove any keywords that are less then 2 keywords. I use traffic travis to do this. (Yes, you'll have to experiment with the app to figure it out).

5. Next, I'll use the traffic travis keyword sorter to sort thorough the keywords. Now, I just look at all the keywords and look for interesting subjects from the list. I'll do a broad keyword search in traffic travis (tt from now on), and just sort them out. As I pull out lists, I remove the keywords from the original list.

6. I started by looking for 'table lamps' - 400ish matches.
Then 'table lamp' - another 100ish matches.
I saw tiffany, so I search 'tiffany' - 270ish matches.
antique lamp - 43 matches.
antique lamps - 16 matches.
floor lamp - 29 matches
floor lamps - 38 matches
wrought iron - 13 matches ( you can see that I"m looking for nouns that have searches in the list)
stained glass - 26 matches
----I'm going to stop here as it pretty much illustrates the point. I'd normally keep on until I use up most of the keywords. You can see how I went from table lamps to stained glass... seems random, but I've found some great and profitable niches doing just this.

7. I now use a pay for tool that displays broad competition, broad daily searches, exact daily searches and broad adwords pay per click cost. The tool I use is Market samurai (MS for short).

8. I'll just plunk about 200 of these keywords into MS and run searches on them. Why don't I use MS to do the keyword searches? I find that I can find keywords and niches outside with TT where MS doesn't. And I'll normally search all the keyword groups that I come with from TT. But for now, I'm just going to focus on the group from 'table lamps'.

9. In this case, I'm checking about 400+ keywords. It will take maybe about 5 minutes in MS. Next, I'll prune this keyword set by removing anything that has more then 200,000 competitors, has to have at least 20 SEOT searches and has a broad to phrase match of less then 10%. (The broad to phrase match of less then 10 is usually useless keywords.)

10. This prunes the list from over 400 to around 34. Here's where the interesting stuff starts. I'll look at this greatly shorten list and look at a good combination between the broad search, exact search, competition and adwords cost per click.

From these statistics, I can normally find great niches within the keywords. Let me tell you some of the keywords I would persue to the next step.

dale tiffany table lamp 325 broad searches, 16 exact searches, 3200 competitors, adwords cost per click of $2.23.
Couple this with:
dale tiffany table lamps 79 broad searches, 24 exact searches, 2920 competitors and an adwords cost per click of $1.97.

I would persue this stream of thought, looking for more info on what keywords revolve around dale tiffany table lamps. Now, they may end up in a dead end, as I cannot find at least 30 good keywords to build a set of articles around, but that would be the next step.

Now, why do I consider broad and exact daily searches? I've had times when I've taken the broad searches to heart. I'd think, wow! I have found a keyword that is searched over 300 times per day. I would build a site around this theme and when I'd get ranked for that keywords, I would see maybe 5 visits a day on that keyword. And that is in the #1 spot in google.

I was frustrated with this, so I started looking at the exact search numbers and found out to my surprise that they were showing maybe 10 daily searches on the exact phrase when it had 300 broad daily searches.

Now, I look at the competition simply because I always want to get the low lying fruit first. Anything under 30,000 competitors. But I will persue keywords with competition as high as several million competitors, ONCE, I've established the site and I have google and/or yahoo's interests.

As to the adwords cost per click, I want to see competitors willing to spend money on this niche. If I don't see at least $1 for most keywords and several dollars for some, I'll not bother either. Experience has shown me that these keywords are not worthwhile either.

With that combination in hand and if I can find at least 30 traffic sucking keywords, I'll move to the next step and start building a website! I personally have had some excellent success with this method. A little unorthodox, but works very well.

So, if you have any questions, feel free to ask.