How BAD is my KEYWORD?

Stop with all the self abuse

we all try different domains and keywords, some work out like gangbusters some work out like crap

its part of the process
you cannot be successful without having tried things that DONT work
thats part of the learning process

any successful business has a TON of misfires
they learn from those, try to see WHY that happened, and then they dont repeat the same mistake

thats the only way to learn
its a numbers game, the more you do the more you learn

Thank you for the self reflective comment there. I need an expert to tell me what he thinks.

It would be best.

A knock out keyworld would have been online chess. the problem with that is that it would have taken ages to rank for.

so yea, the expert is being sought out

14,500 broad search a month, but how many exact searches a month.
When doing keyword research, you should look at the exact searches, I made the same mistake building my first site looking at broad searches and seeing about 20,000 searches only to find that it gets about 250 exact searches a month.

However, I would say it's kind of different for your site. Your site is an instructional site offering a service rather than adsense or affiliate products. Make your site known in the chess players community. Join forums, try PPC, make a facebook page, make a twitter account and market your product. You don't have to rely on Google searches.

I am aware of the exact searches.

Those 14K could be for chess or training or school and the combination of those terms, but I am guessing that very few of them are for chesstrainingtool. GKT is not working for me or I would check. Never make decisions for these terms on broad match. Any word in the phrase will produce a match. Very deceiving.

I have seen terms that come up with 100K plus in broad match, and when I change it to exact match, it has been 1K or less.

I wouldn't worry about your domain, I would start writing articles targeted to better keywords though.

You can easily salvage that domain, I'm not a fan of EMDs (Exact Match Domain) for this very reason that your experiencing now, you feel like your keyword trapped, am I right?

Keep everything like it is & add internal keyword landing pages.

It doesn't matter what URL the traffic lands on in the SERPs, as long as you make a sale.

Stop being stuck on the Index page (EMD), rank as many internal pages as you need, as If those landing pages were multiple Index pages.

Look around the SERPs, does Wikipedia rank every single keyword for their Index page? The answer is no they don't, they rank internal pages.

Chess training gets 1300 exact searches a month. Chess school gets 480.

So yeah, these two keywords are pretty useless unless there is something selling for a pretty high price relating to these. If your site is an Adsense site, you might see 2-3 clicks a month, if you rank #1 for both terms.

Never ever base a decision of the broad search results.

The power of the domain alone isnt going to get your rankings. You are not a loser at all, you have made a very nice website! If i was more into chess id become a customer.

Now 'chess training' and 'chess school' do get a decent about of exact searches, 5,400 and 3,600 respectivly. That is a great starting point. Usually you want to target words with at least 2000 exact match a month. And having a look at competition you are in the right place as its pretty low competiton. So with your link building start dominating those 2 terms. You will see a great increase in traffic. and because they are not too long tail it means you will see some other rankings for other terms too. keep tracking this with google webmaster tools. Now just did a quick search for more keywords here are some others which would be of interest:

Keyword Global Monthly Searches Local Monthly Searches (United States)
"how to play chess" 40500 22200
"chess strategy" 33100 18100
"chess openings" 49500 22200
"chess strategies" 12100 6600
"chess lessons" 6600 3600
"learn chess" 8100 3600
"chess trainer" 3600 880
"chess training" 5400 1600
"chess school" 3600 1000


now as a tactic you can offer some free material on your website. like seperate landing pages as -almost- previously suggested. Dont focus everything based on 2 keywords and exact match domains. The domain holds only a little bit of weight. I have ranking in SEO related terms with quite high competition and my domains dont mention 'marketing' online' or SEO - hope that helps!

welcome, and remember be patient! your niche seems to be fairly low competiton (as its not play chess online etc) so you will get your ranks. focus on your original terms first get your top3 rank while building a little bit for some others and then once your up there for the first go more aggressive on the others. make a plan for it and you will get there!

Yes. There is absolutely hope. Any keyword based domain name can be salvaged.

Don't think in terms of ranking for the terms "chess training" and "chess school".

What you should be doing is thinking about ranking all of what will be your interior site pages for long tail keywords based around those keywords. There will be tons of them. That is where your $$$ will be.

Think "low hanging fruit". Don't spin in circles chasing your tail hyper-focusing on short-tail keywords. Rank for the long tail keywords and eventually you will rank for the short tail keywords naturally.

This is a numbers game and it requires endurance.