Troy,

You are absolutely right - and what you just said is something that I've been preaching for a little over a year now.

Number of sites inside or outside of quotes means absolutely nothing. Sure, it might give you a good guideline to go by, but in the "big picture" it means nothing.

I shot 3 different videos this morning on the topic of keyword research, each about 20 minutes long and I tossed them all.

The rest of the day went all down hill from there.

There are so many ways to go about it, and I have so many methods and angles depending on what I'm trying to accomplish.

My product I'm trying to put together is not all about keyword research and I began to realize the video to cover this one topic alone would be like 24 hours long. lol

No, you are not wrong. Well, not about this anyway.

I love it when highly respected marketers come out and say things in public that I've been whispering in dark corners for months.

Here's the analogy that I like to use.

It doesn't matter how deep the water is, because you're only using the top of it anyway.

If you're out swimming, does it get harder to swim when the water is deep? Of course not. Water is water. Swimming is swimming. Nothing changes.

And every parent has heard it repeated over and over again: it is entirely possible to drown in less than a foot of water. Parents always take this as "don't leave your children alone in the bathtub!" which is precisely the point, but it applies here, too: you can fall over and die in the SERPs even if there are only five other competitors.

And, of course, when there are sharks in the water it's a much worse idea to go swimming there.

When you read that kind of stuff, not you personally, Troy, you know better, but when we read those kind of numbers we have to keep in mind the numbers are just guidelines and are usually based on one person's experience. That's a good point for newbies to understand - guidelines are subjective and not absolute when it comes to marketing cutoff points. They may work well for one person, but not for another with a different skill set.

Another good point you make is that with any technique, you may not be getting the whole picture. The marketer may not even know the whole picture, he or she may have just gotten lucky a few times and wrote up a method to sell. The truth is, a person can succeed and not know why they succeeded. Just reporting the steps taken can be deceiving. The point about the strength of competition illustrates this well. Someone could follow those exact guidelines and do well, or fail, because they don't take in strength of competition, SEO, or other factors. So the lesson is, always look for ways to improve a method and gain an edge.

I guess another lesson is if you try one marketing method and don't succeed, the marketer who sold you his system isn't necessarily a scam artist. He may have succeeded doing exactly what he teaches, but he succeeded because of factors he's not aware of so he couldn't write about them.

[DELETED]

Hey Guys,


I believe that keyword research is moving into a multi-step process. Sure, you want to find as many relevant high search/low competition keyword phrases that you can for you niche.

However, if you are going to use a certain keyword phrase in your domain name or your site/blog content, it's becoming a very wise decision to see what the first page competition is for that keyword phrase (ie. the top ten listing that show up in Google's search engine results).

Even if the potential keyword phrase has low competition, you are still going to have trouble ranking for it (effectively) if the first page competition is filled with powerful authority sites.

Checking the first page competition is becoming a neccessity.

Much Success,

KateD

So what you are getting at Troy, is you can find low hanging fruit on the apple tree in the back yard, and also the ones in the large orchard. Just make there are not too many other people picking the apples.

But, don't you also agree with John's point, there is a bit of undertow with the volume of sites? While you can reach the front page with proper effort by focusing on beating the sites in the top ten, it may take you longer to get the high ranking position than when you shoot for the lower volume categories.

The important thing I take from your idea, don't overlook phrases with higher numbers of pages, and search volumes, evaluate the strength of the competition. You could be overlooking major opportunity.

wow 20,000....I personally think event that i to high. I usually stay below 5,000....3,000 if I really want to rank fast. Now, to answer your question....the comp. is just ONE step of the keyword formula. You also want to check for number of links and also even the amount of ads that there are being advertised on this keyword...this will let you know if people are even advertising in this keyword, if not...then there is probably a reason.

You can of course do a lot of this research with just a few clicks if you can afford to purchase the software...example is Market Samari.

My point is, you will need to do your research on more than just the level of competition before just moving forward with that keyword. As I have always heard and repeated myself, a successful campaign is setup with good keyword research!

Happy hunting..

Regardless of how you do your keyword research, if you want to be in business and you want to make a profit, then quit shooting yourself in the foot trying to get the least amount of traffic that you can get away with.

You want to go where the river of money is (for those analogies above) and jump in.

Learn how to swim. If you can't swim, get out of the water.

Here is how you compete.

Go into a profitable market (plenty of searches) and you create a niche.

I will use offline examples since most Internet newbies have at least some experience with these businesses.

Market - clothes, Niche men's clothes, Sub Niche big and tall men's clothes.

Now create a USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

price - (lower than competition, discounts for seniors, students)
service - (special fittings, hours, tailor on call)
package - (variety of hard to find colors, bonus vest)

Mix and match - lower price + hard to find colors

You have just entered into a competitive market and created a niche with your USP and trimmed the competition away.

Now you "target" your market audience - students, seniors, and anyone that wants variety.

Matt's Big and Tall "Student and Senior Discounts Everyday" "We also have styles and colors you can't find anywhere else".

Now you have just entered a very competitive market and you own a corner of it.

Does this mean that you will only get students and seniors? No. You will get other big and tall customers but you have virtually no advertising competition.

Caliban, that doesn't make keyword research overrated. It makes it essential! Nobody says it's enough just to find keywords that get X searches and X competition. They have to be keywords that are likely to produce the right kind of visitors, too. As Matt nicely illustrated by making us all think about Britney and her amazing body. Well, before she went insane anyway.

For the record I'm with Jeremy and Caliban on this one. Overrated.

As Caliban pointed to my Britney example would you rather have the "Britney Spears" traffic or the "Britney Spears Curious" traffic.

Using another analogy I made a while back, would you like to have 100 people a day walking into your ice cream shop asking you where McDonald's is or would you rather have 10 people a day asking you what flavors of ice cream you sell.

Just looking at numbers can get you into trouble.

High or decent amount of daily searches and lower amount of competition are just basic parameters for beginners.

As far as I'm concerned, seeing authority sites like web 2.0, social bookmarking and article directories always show me that the keyword is profitable - there is money in it.

And since every problem has a solution, you just devise a means to overcome the authority sites, if they are a problem, or look else where.

EDIT: The authority sites are really a problem but you can solve it.

Hey Troy you're right. Low competiton terms aren't the best ones. With article marketing it doesn't really matter how much competition there is, as long as ezinearticles is on the first page! If the article has bad SEO, the better it is for you. You can easily outrank them. Though I would still try to avoid keyword terms with over 1.000.000 competitors. I think it's hard to rank for them with ezine.

The other side of the coin would be Adsense and similar sites that sell advertising. Again, you would think that you are doing better to go for the low hanging fruit but why?

The usual answer is the competition is too hard to get on the front page for "Britney Spears" so it is better to find a longtail like "Britney Spears can sing beautiful songs while dancing". This method would give you a greater chance at getting on the front page and as a result, more traffic.

But going back to the search user data and the 12% that go to the second page results. Wouldn't 12% of the Pacific Ocean be far better than 100% of the Mississippi River?

So this is another time when the numbers can get you into trouble. Sometimes it is easier and more advantages to be on the second page for a broad term than the low payoff for the front page for the longtail.

This is so refreshing to read a well-argued, polite and good natured thread about such a debatable topic.

It has been airing and debating some things I had started suspecting for myself about the various methods of keyword research vs. plain old common sense (and why they do not always synchronise).

For instance I do not really get the point of searching with " " to find the 'actual' competition as I see this as irrelevant. There are still the original number of search results that appeared without the " " to compete with anyway (if there were not, they wouldn't have shown on the search in the frst place) and who the hell serches with inverted commas? So it really doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Just my 2c.

It can work well both ways. I think the key is finding the best fit for your own proclivities. I know myself well enough to know that I would need to be fitted for a straight jacket if I had to build up a large site and spend weeks and maybe months backlinking to rank for heavy duty keywords. The payoff may well be worth it for many others, but I'm not in business simply to make money. That's my main objective, of course, but if it's just about money then what a shi**y life to lead. I want to have fun and enjoy these years, too. I left corporate America to get away from all that other nonsense, not to swap it for the same feelings in my own home every day.

I understand Matt's and Caliban's points. Instead of disagreeing, I'd say I agree but would not limit it to an exclusive agreement (if that makes sense). It's a roundabout way of saying there's more than one way to skin a cat. Sorry, I'm a dog person so that saying always gives me a chuckle. I'm evil that way.

I just know that at as long as my business model relies to a significant extent on free traffic from Google, it's my duty to discover the words that people use to find stuff in my niche and put them in my pages so they rank high enough to snag some of that traffic. And I know that in almost every instance, I'll convert a lot more visitors into buyers if they come to my site from a search for "where to buy blue widgets" than I will from a search for "widgets." And finally, I know that in almost every case the amount of work I will need to put in to rank my site high for a phrase like "where to buy blue widgets" will be much less than the work needed to rank for "widgets."

John

Sara

Might be a good niche IF I find a good fishing spot. However, what type of keyword research would I do to find a keyword to start getting traffic? The keyword that gets 590 searches a month? Or another word altogether?

Sara

Wow , look what you get for sleeping lol.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread .

There is some real nuggets here .

To the poster that commented on our civil debate ... thank you .

When I first came here, I knew I had the perfect system. The only one that would work.

Didn't take me long to realize ... there is a lot more to IM than meets the eye .

Just becausee something is perfect for me doesn't mean they will even work for one more person.

Once one can cure their tunnel vision, certain marketers on the WF can and will give away nuggets , completely 180 degrees from your current mindset , that if applied , will see your profit margin elevating to heights once thought unattainable .

That is why I never count anyone's opinion out on here .

Nice read. I enjoyed it ",

Just curious. What will happen when A has term of "Britney Spears can sing beautiful song while dancing", sit on first page, and B has the SAME term also. What outcome it would be?