As you probably know, keywords are essential to online marketing and publishing. Particularly when you create web content that emphasizes quality writing over images and branding. Finding a niche is good. But if you don’t research keywords, you’ll be far less likely to create effective related content that drives and receives traffic.
For the purposes of online marketing and publishing, we can think of keywords as simply the words or phrases that people type into search engines to retrieve results, and that search engines use to help categorize and classify websites. As you proceed to creating content for your website and promoting it on other websites, you will use keywords to optimize your site for greater traffic and higher search engine rankings.
In fact, keywords are so important that they can even tell you whether marketing your business or niche is viable. If you find, for example, that all keywords related to your business have tremendous competition, you might have a very tough time penetrating your target market and making enough revenue to balance your marketing expenditures and achieve your set objectives.
In such case, you might want to consider another business or niche. Seriously.
Choose effective keywords and phrases
One of the most important—and most fun—exercises you can have after finding a niche is determining your keywords. It’s kind of like a treasure hunt, where you’re looking for the biggest pot as well as for treasure that others may have missed. Here’s how to find your treasure:
- Begin with a brainstorm. Write your niche down on a piece of paper. Brainstorm related words and phrases. For example, if you were selling stereo equipment, you might add words like “speakers” and “amplifiers.”
- Review competition. Search for your niche on Google and see what sites come up. Visit them and try to determine what keywords they’re targeting. Sometimes, you can do this by reading their copy and pulling out words and phrases that appear to be repeated often.
- Use a keyword research tool. Take your brainstormed keywords and competitive keyword research and visit a keyword research tool. Google offers the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool (and there are other tools you’ll have to pay for). In Google’s tool, enter your keywords and Google will return a list of related keywords, displaying search volume and advertiser competition for each. You can also point the tool to competitors’ sites to have Google generate related keywords ideas.
- Choose primary and secondary keywords. Ideally, you want keywords with high search volume and low competition. But so does everyone else, so unless your niche has little competition, you’ll need a different strategy. Typically, you’ll need a strategy combining primary keywords and secondary keywords. Your primary keywords are those related to your niche that people search for most often, but that often have the most competition. Your secondary keywords are those that have less search volume, but also less competition. With your primary keywords, you’ll often get a smaller slice of a larger pie, while with secondary keywords you’ll get a bigger slice. It’s good to have a balance. For example, “dog grooming” might be a primary keyword if you ran a pet salon. But you might also find some search volume for “doggrooming,” a typo or purposeful misspelling, and can strategically target that secondary keyword to capture its traffic.
Done your brainstorming, analysis, research and selection? Great! Now list your results and put them somewhere safe. Then we’ll take those keywords and use them to choose a domain name.