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Newbie keyword research question

by mattrix329
3 replies
A while back I started a blog in a certain niche that gets over about 20,000 searches/month for its main keyword.

The phrase match competition is only around 2700 so I jumped on the keyword. However, being a noob I only concentrated on the keyword in its phrase matched form (my mistake...) and spent several hours every day for about a week developing content and backlinks.

The broad match results fluctuate a lot for some reason depending on the day I search... some days it's 333 million, others its 3.8 billion.

I've been doing a lot of reading on the forums about phrase to broad match ratios. Since i only have 2700 "truly competing" pages but since my pbr is less than 1%, i was wondering whether or not this niche is worth pursuing? I'm sure you all can understand my reluctance to abandon this site .

p.s. because i'm still learning the basics of internet marketing, i have only been basing my research with google search volume figures .
#keyword #newbie #question #research
  • Profile picture of the author bigbearmarketer
    You will find that the google keyword tool or any keyword tool is not a 100% accurate, but the most accurate keyword tool is actually adwords itself. In order to find how many searches that keyword is really getting you will want to set up a campaign for that keyword, but when you set up your campaign and write your add copy you do not want to spend any money this is just to test how many searches that keyword gets daily so what you do is write a horrible add or one that is not even relevant to your keyword. This will tell you how many real daily searches you could be getting for that keyword.

    With that being said, if there is alot of traffic for that term and it is a buying keyword you do want to persue it, a quick tip is any niche you get into set up 3 blogs within that niche also if there is some heavy traffic and it converts you will want to run some PPC adds too because you will be capturing 90% of the traffic. When writting content you want to use LSI(latent semantic indexing), this is using other keywords within your content or article that are relevant to your main keyword so google knows what you are talking about. Google is pretty stupid so you literally have to tell and show it what you are talking about with LSI.
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    • Profile picture of the author mattrix329
      Originally Posted by bigbearmarketer View Post

      You will find that the google keyword tool or any keyword tool is not a 100% accurate, but the most accurate keyword tool is actually adwords itself. In order to find how many searches that keyword is really getting you will want to set up a campaign for that keyword, but when you set up your campaign and write your add copy you do not want to spend any money this is just to test how many searches that keyword gets daily so what you do is write a horrible add or one that is not even relevant to your keyword. This will tell you how many real daily searches you could be getting for that keyword.

      With that being said, if there is alot of traffic for that term and it is a buying keyword you do want to persue it, a quick tip is any niche you get into set up 3 blogs within that niche also if there is some heavy traffic and it converts you will want to run some PPC adds too because you will be capturing 90% of the traffic. When writting content you want to use LSI(latent semantic indexing), this is using other keywords within your content or article that are relevant to your main keyword so google knows what you are talking about. Google is pretty stupid so you literally have to tell and show it what you are talking about with LSI.
      Thanks for the tips! Trying it out now.
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      • Profile picture of the author Revenant
        Ok, summed up you have these stats:
        ---------------------------------------------------
        1) 20,000 searches/month for your main keyword.
        2) The phrase match competition is only around 2700.
        3) The broad match results 333 million+
        4) PBR <1%
        ---------------------------------------------------
        1) Ok, that's a good demand.
        2) Phrase match gives you 2700 results? If yes, that sounds good. Which is a micro niche.
        3) Yikes, that's huge competition!
        4) much too low...should be 15%+ or higher.

        How strong is your broad match competion (first 10 results in Google)

        A few questions you can ask to analyze your competition:
        - What is the domain age of that site?
        - what is the pagerank of that site?
        - how much backlinks does it have to the main page?
        - how much backlinks to the entire domain?(all pages)
        - is it in Dmoz?
        - is it in Yahoo?
        - does it have .edu or .gov backlinks?
        - does it have the main keyword in the url?
        - does it have the main keyword in it's title?
        - does it have the main keyword in the meta description?
        - does it have the main keyword between header tags?(<h1>-<h6>)

        A few pointers to see if your competition is too strong are:

        1. look for is whether more than one competitor has a yes for a yahoo backlink, title, url description, and header. If there is more than one site, we should pass on this keyword and move into the next one. It means that the competition is highly optimized for a certain keyword.

        2. look at the Pagerank of the each of the websites and make sure that there are at least two sites with a Pagerank of 3 or below in the top 10.

        3. look at the number of backlinks that each of these pages have pointing to them and check that there are two sites with less than 50.

        One more thing you can do to determine to see if a keyword has commercial value is to see if there are Adwords advertisers.

        You can also check the OCI(Online Commercial Intent) of a keyword. For short, visitors can visit your website for 2 reasons:

        1) to look for certain information
        2) to buy something.

        So, if you picked an info-looking keyword...then you may have to reconsider(anyone else can tell more about this?)

        Check the OCI on the Microsoft site(sorry! can't post links yet...since I am new here)

        Just type: OCI microsoft - in Google and then the 1st result.


        For now...other wise it will be too much to digest. Feel free to ask me anything!
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