The Foolproof Method for Keyword Research

I’ve discovered my own “foolproof” method of keyword research. Obviously that’s my opinion and I’m entitled to it. However if you stick with me, I think you’ll agree this method actually is foolproof.

First things first, unless you’re brand-new to affiliate marketing, you know that keyword research is an important step in having online success. You simply must know what keywords people are searching for, and what the competition is for those keywords.

After all, what good is it to have a blog or a BANS site about “blue widgets” if you don’t optimize your site for the keywords people are searching for? If people search for “small blue widgets” and you’re optimized for “tiny blue widgets” then you’re going to have a harder time showing up in the search engine results.

Since keyword research is so important, there are hundreds of tools to help you perform keyword research, and thousands of e-books, blogs, articles, and you-name-it devoted to the subject. Along with the hundreds of tools and thousands of sources of information, there are a gazillion different opinions on what’s the best way to perform keyword research.

After using dozens of those tools and reading countless entries about keyword research… through months of trial and error… I feel I’ve found my own “foolproof” method of research.

Now I want to throw out a few disclaimers here, especially for those of you that are new to all of this:

Niches are more important than keywords. If you don’t know what your niche is yet, then keywords won’t do you a bit of good. Check out my blog post on Micro Niche Finder if you’re having trouble coming up with a good niche.

People are more important than keywords. It’s so easy to forget that there are real, living, breathing people using the search engines and buying the stuff off your web site. Getting into the head of the people in your niche–and understanding them–is more important than keywords.

Okay so now that you understand that both your niche, and the people in that niche, are more important than keyword research, we can move on…

I call my method “foolproof” because it’s simple yet powerful. It utilizes the power of Google’s keyword suggestion tool, with Yahoo competition counts. Basically it asks Google for all the keywords relating to a niche, filters those keywords by search volume, and then analyzes the high traffic keywords to see which ones have low competition.

Here’s what it doesn’t do: it doesn’t rely on WordTracker. Yes I realize that people swear by WordTracker and have success with it, and I agree that it’s great. But WordTracker’s numbers are based on a very small percentage of all search traffic, whereas Google’s numbers come from over half of all searches. So who better than Google to know what keywords people are searching for?

Okay, so without further adieu…

The Foolproof Method for Keyword Research

(For the sake of this example, we’re going to assume our niche is “cordless drills.”)

I login to Nichebot.com and click on the Google Keyword Cruncher tool.

Once there, I enter a basic keyword for your niche. In this case, I’ll enter the keyword “cordless drill”. Next I choose my language and country. Finally I choose the number of results I want. If I’m doing initial research, sticking with the default of 200 is fine. When I do more in-depth research, I usually pick 1000 results.

Next I click the button to begin the search (it may take a few minutes to complete).

When the search is complete, it appears in My Keyword Basket. So I click on the keyword results, which will then display all of them in the window. In this case, Google returned 542 results for the base keyword “cordless drill”.

However I want to filter the list for the highest search volume keywords, so I click on the click here to filter link and enter a search volume scale minimum of “2″. (This will only show results that–according to Google–have a search volume of at least 2 out of 5, which is pretty good.)

After filtering the list to only show keywords with a search volume of 2 or higher, the list is now down to 129 keywords. These are the keywords for the “cordless drill” niche that get the most searches.

Next I’m going to get competition counts for those 129 keywords. Nichebot will query Yahoo and show me the total number of pages that have each exact keyword phrase in their web page title. (This is the most accurate basis for determining each keyword’s competition, as people who are truly optimizing their sites for the keyword will undoubtedly use that keyword in their title.)

So to get the competition counts, I click on the checkbox at the very top of the keyword list to select all of the keywords. Then I scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Get Competition Data button. After I click the button, this warning pops-up:

Yes, it might take awhile to finish, depending on the number of keywords you’ve selected. Trust me though, it’s much faster than manually getting the competition counts for each keyword by hand.

Once Nichebot has finished and displays the competition counts for each keyword, I go back and edit the filter again by clicking the View/Edit filter link. This time in addition to the search volume scale minimum, I’m also going to add “20000″ to the Competition maximum (not to be confused with Competition scale).

When I apply this updated filter, it will only show me the “cordless drill” related keywords that have a search volume of 2 or more and a competition count under 20,000 according to Yahoo. This means only the keywords with less than 20,000 other competing sites (with that exact keyword phrase in their web page title) will be displayed.

Note: Nichebot uses Yahoo for competition counts because Google would require an API key, which they don’t give out anymore. In my experience, Yahoo has more sites in it’s index for any particular keyword than Google does, so if anything, the competition counts are a little high.

In this case, after applying the filter I’m now down to 70 keywords. Ah yes… now we’re getting somewhere!

I sort the 70 keywords by the Competition column from smallest to largest, and have a great set of keywords to use on my site! For example, if I was going to create a BANS store about “cordless drills,” I would probably create a store page for each of the most promising keywords found.

Here are some of the keywords I was able to find using this method:

• 14.4 v drill
• makita ls1013
• cordless drill charger
• makita 18 volt drill
• panasonic cordless drill
• ryobi cordless drill
• 18v black & decker
• 24 volt cordless
• 18 volt cordless drill driver
• makita cordless impact
• makita combo
• heavy duty cordless drill
• black & decker cordless drill
• milwaukee 18 volt
• skil drill
• ryobi 18v

You can see what a great list that’s shaping out to be. Each of those are keyword phrases that get a decent amount of search traffic on Google, and have less than 5,000 competing pages optimized for the keyword phrase. So if your niche was “cordless drills,” then these are the keywords you’d want to target on your site.

I hope you can see how powerful and foolproof this method really is. You’re getting keyword suggestions and search volume counts from Google itself, and competition counts from Yahoo. Using this foolproof method, you should be able to optimize just about any site, in any niche, for high traffic/low competition keyword phrases!

PS. You can do all of this research for free just using Google and Yahoo, but I absolutely love Nichebot.com, because I can do the research with less time and effort. Nichebot offers a 14-day trial for only $1, so you really have nothing to lose by giving it a spin around the block. Click here to check out Nichebot for yourself!

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