Finding Those Highly Valuable Low Competition, High Search Volume Keywords

Keyword research is essential part of every marketing campaign whether you are Blogging, Article Marketing or just setting up a PPC campaign.

There are many tools on the market that can generate a ton of relevant keywords for you to target and often times these tools don't give you a real indication of how much competition you are facing without going into great depth and checking phrase matches in Google etc.

So I am going to share one of my favorite "quick" ways to gather a ton of low competition, high search volume keywords to target in your marketing campaigns.

Google has one the absolute best tools available that is often overlooked or many people just don't know about yet and that is their Search Based Keyword Tool available here: http://www.google.com/sktool

Here is the exact step by step strategy I use.

1. Leave the domain as "example.com" as we want to use the entire keyword catalog

2. Enter 3 of the broadest terms for your market. For example if you were in the "Dieting" industry you could enter "Weight Loss","Dieting","Lose Weight" etc.

3. After you hit search you will get a list of 800 (the results limit) keywords found.

4. Go to the side bar and check the categories and select the deepest level category that is suitable to your market that still has (800) results. This cuts out non-relevant keywords to do with Apparel or Finance etc and makes sure your keywords are targeted.



5. Go to the "Filter" and turn off "Medium" and "High" competition. this is the important step that people who use this tool don't even realize is there. Then make sure you set the "Monthly Searches" to at least 1000.



6. If you still don't get a lot of keywords returned that are "High Search Volume" with "Low Competition" you can either :

• Add more generic terms at the start (step 2)
• Go less specific on the categories drill down (step 4)
• Reduce the "Monthly Searches" to 500 or so
• Include "Medium" competition back into your mix

7. Export your list and start making some money with the keywords you can dominate easily.

the reason this technique works so well is that, in general, if there is low PPC competition for that term there is also low natural competition too.

For example in this test with the keywords I used the highest searched term was "Low Residue Diet" which got 5400 searches a month which only had 176,000 results returned (51,000 in quotes).

Now, if you want to verify your exact competition I want to take the usual "Put it in Quotes" method a bit further using Googles built in data mining tools.

1. Obvious a general search
2. Put it in quotes
3. Use inurl such as inurl:"keyphrase"
4. Use intitle such as intitle:"keyphrase"
5. Use both intitle and inurl in the same search: intitle:"keyphrase" inurl:"keyphrase"

The last one is really good for discovering who is laser targeting the phrase you are going after and who actually knows a thing or two about SEO. Those are often the guys you have to beat and gives you a good idea out of all of the results how stiff the competition really is.

That being said, if you hang around the Warrior forum long enough you will have plenty of techniques and tricks up your sleeve for decimating the competition.

Also here is the top 20 list of keywords that are low competition and high search volume for one of the most competitive industries out there:

Keyword Monthly searches
low residue diet 5400
ulcer diet 5400
hallelujah diet 4400
obesity diet 4400
low potassium diet 3500
barf diet 2800
caveman diet 2800
1800 calorie diet 2800
fibre diet 2800
dr bernstein diet 2800
martha's vineyard diet detox 2300
low purine diet 2300
diet calculator 2300
ada diet 2300
bob greene best life diet 1800
2468 diet 1800
500 calorie diet 1800
master cleanse diet recipe 1800
prevention flat belly diet 1500

Total Monthly Searches 55000

Hope you find this simple technique highly useful and if you have any questions or comments, feel free to ask.

Regards

Sean Donahoe
The Manic Marketer