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Protected: Video 1 – Finding Our “Niche” And Analyzing The Competition

by Paul on January 25, 2012

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  • Ahmed

    Hi Paul,
    Great information and I’m really looking forward to this as I believe I will learn a lot.

    I have a question concerning search count, what is the minimum search count if I’m planning to monetize with AdSense? I mean if I have a really good main keyword and that’s it, all other related keywords range from 100 to 700 local US searches are they worth going after?

    Another question what is the minimum number of keywords or pages that I should create, I mean you’re targeting 30 can it be 10 or 15? If I were to use your categories method what is the minimum number of categories and the minimum number of pages in each category? Also what are the alternatives for this categories or siloing method? Is it good for adsense?

    Thank you,
    Ahmed

    • http://goalyard.com Paul

      It all depends on how difficult it is to rank for a keyword. Let me give you an example. If I have a keyword I feel can rank with without doing a lot of backlinking (because my site has some credibility), then I would be willing to build pages that target keywords as low as 100/month. I’ve done the math on this 100 times, and considering articles are $5, over time it’s well worth it.

      The key is to finding those that don’t require a ton of work.

      As far as how big your site should be… This is entirely up to you and difficulty of your keyword. The method that I’m using here, the “siloed” approach if you will, is starting with 5 main keywords (the categories) and 5 pages supporting each of those keywords. So It will end up being a 30 page site, but really only targeting 5 keywords.

      Now, overtime I may decide to start targeting additional keywords, or a new category. It will depend on if the site is making money or not.

  • Christina

    Great video. I think people always struggle when looking for niches–I know I do. My biggest issue is finding one with low competition and high enough monthly local searches for it to be profitable. Do you have some hard and fast rules that you apply when looking for niches to go after? Minimum monthly searches, max backlinks for competitors, minimum CPC for adsense (if you are building an adsense site).

    • http://goalyard.com Paul

      Hi Christina,

      Not sure if you’ve seen this yet, but here’s how I determine how difficult it will be to rank a keyword. http://goalyard.com/seo/how-to-analyze-the-difficulty-of-ranking-for-a-keyword/

      Once I have a feel for it, it simply comes down to whether or not I think the ROI will be there for a site.

      To be perfectly honest I have sites that are in competitive niches, targeting competitive keywords usually. Why? Because that’s where advertisers spend their money. So I’m more willing than most to go after some tougher keywords, with the understanding that it will take time.

      As far as minimum searches go. If I were building true micro sites (and actually I am, 100 of them and it sucks!), then I target a minimum of 1,000 exact monthly local searches. I generally try to $2 CPC, but anything over $1 is fine.

      There is so much that goes into determining what your actual CPC will be that I don’t worry about it much.

      I never worry about the number of backlinks my competition has, I’m much more concerned about the following:

      1. How optimized is their page for the keyword
      2. How optimized is their backlinks for the keyword (meaning is it specifically used as anchor text)
      3. What’s the quality of their links. If they have 10,000 profile links, I don’t care. If they 8 real links, from real sites with a PR of 7, then I know I’m going to need the same to out rank them.

  • Robert

    Do you have any concerns that the content that will be written and contained in each “category” will be too similar and not unique enough based on this approach?  I mean you are keyword stuffing but instead of it being one article it is over several.

    I have seen WF posts that expressed concern after someone’s site was de-indexed that the content was too close in nature I think the example they used was “nail fungus in men over 30″ and “nail fungus in men over 40″. It was suggested that the information should be combined and make one large informative post instead of two posts. One could take it a step further and suggest a post/article for age 31, 32, 33, etc.

    How many times can you talk about benadryl dosage charts, or something of that nature?  Do you have any reservations that this doesn’t provide the user enough and may not necessarily be able to hold up to a manual review which means game over?

    • http://goalyard.com Paul

      Good question Robert. I don’t have any concerns that the site could be de-indexed, but there is certainly some possibility that Google decides that I have pages that are too similar and they might devalue 1 or both of those pages.

      Ultimately I decided that if a page answered the user’s query, then it doesn’t really matter if I have another closely related page. For example, if someone types in “can I give my dog benadryl for allergies” and another “can I give my dog benadryl for a bee sting” and I have page ranking #1 for each of those… and they provide really similar content, as far as dosing, etc. I can live with that and I think Google or a manual reviewer could as well.

      It’s certainly a chance I’m willing to take. I think anytime you build small sites that laser focused around a small group of keywords you’re going to run into this.

      Great question.

    • Robert

      Now I am wondering if I should have waited to ask this because Of this quote from your main article “I will tell you that in video 2 I already changed my mind about how the is going to be structured.”. I don’t know what you were referring to as being changed.

  • Robert

    I have to get open office working for keyword research I had difficulty first importing the CSV files and second trying to filter on specific keywords like your example of dogs and Benadryl. After banging my head against the keyboard for an hour or so I gave up for the evening and will take it back up tomorrow afternoon.

  • Robert

    Paul,

    Any settings or defaults you can recommend in SEO spyglass? I kept getting asked to complete captchas. I don’t know if we should be analyzing backlinks from all search engines or just focusing on google?

    I have watched the keyword research video several times and I noticed that you were less concerned with how to monetize the site and instead focused it on finding a keyword that could be ranked easily that has a significant amount of searches per month.

    Being new and primarily focusing on AdSense I’m still in the infantile stages of my keyword research. I am finding trouble researching keywords because I maybe over thinking the process. By overthinking I mean that I am taking into consideration the actual keyword and whether or not I think that AdSense could possibly be successful using it.

    Are you planning on doing any other sites as part of this training or do you have any suggestions as to how I can focus my keyword research to be successful with the idea that the monetization method will be primarily Adsense based for now. I would like to focus on one monetization principal while I’m learning the various other techniques and strategies on how to create the website itself (back linking, search engine optimization, etc.). Maybe that’s what makes other people successful using AdSense is that they are only concerned with the keyword and whether or not it could be ranked and they leave the question of how successful AdSense may be for monetization purposes up the fate.

    • Robert

      Up to fate…dragon got me there!

      • http://goalyard.com Paul

        Glad to see you using it!

    • http://goalyard.com Paul

      I’m not always less concerned, but if I can find a group of keywords like these that literally appear to have zero competition, then I’m fine with figuring the monetizing part out later.

      I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll do a little research tonight, and I’ll make an adsesne site for everyone to see. Will use the same principles, but I’ll focus the videos around what I think is important for adsesne. This Benadryl for dogs site might be okay for adsesne, but I’m not going to monetize it that way.

      So I’m going to start another site (hopefully it won’t take long). And I’ll just build out one category to start (so probably 6 pages). But I’ll do the research and everything for the long term.

      That way you guys that are into adsense can see.

      • Robert

        Thanks Paul.

        I’m using the free dragon app on my iPhone it is a bit quirky and you can’t just completely speak freely with it for 20 min. at a time but it does work and it has cut down on some of the things I am trying to accomplish.

        As far as AdSense is concerned I’m not trying to derail the project. The majority of what you’re doing is applicable no matter what type of monetization method is being used. I know that I have a number of questions regarding specific steps to back linking and things of that nature so I have no issue at all following along with your current project instead of sidetracking you by having you create an AdSense project while working on your current project.

        • http://goalyard.com Paul

          That’s the app I mentioned in one of the videos. It’s strange how it randomly just stops and processes, but I guess the iphone can only handle so much. I haven’t used it much yet.

          I’m almost positive that the built in voice recognition is powered by the same company. So in reality you can dictate using the built in iphone (just click the mic on the keyboard) and do the same thing.

          I’ll hold off on going down the adsense rabbit hole for now…

    • Robert

      I found my answers to most of the questions in the link you provided above in regard to what you do with traffic Travis and what defaults are used. I was looking at the video that generated the 22k exact match keyword and not this video which goes into more detail…

      http://goalyard.com/seo/how-to-analyze-the-difficulty-of-ranking-for-a-keyword/

      • http://goalyard.com Paul

        Yeah, they deal with with two different things albeit closely related!

  • Frank

    I have a question.

    You mentioned SEMrush can generate 10,000 keywords. I suppose there’s still a root keywords for all those, like in Google Keyword Tool, right?

    What your strategy on locating the root keyword. Or did you just use any word then browser through the 10,000 results to find good ideas?

    Another question is, in those 99,200 keywords rooted from the same keyword(10,000 – 800), are there a lot of good keyword like this one, benadryl for dogs? With low competition, high CPC, and very good search volume? If the answer is yes, I think that $70 a month isn’t expensive at all. Because we all know how important the role finding keyword plays in this business.

    Thanks,

    Frank

    • http://goalyard.com Paul

      Frank,

      Here’s how I use it. I’m kind of a geek though. I went online and found a list of SINGLE words that is over 1,000,000 words long. I’m paying a contractor $1.50/hour to perform 3000 searches/day in SEMRush. After 2 days I have a keyword list that’s over 10,000,000 words…

      Believe me, there are tons of great keywords out there. I’m good at analyzing a lot of data so this works for me. But using this method I’m finding more keywords than you can imagine. I actually gave Ahmed an extremely good keyword with an exact match domain available because he was struggling. Took me less than 2 minutes to find it. (and I gave him about 50 other keywords related to it, if memory serves me right).

      So, If you’re into that kind of thing then I think the $70/month for SEMrush is well worth it. Even if you only use it for a month and build a giant database of keywords.

      However, for most people starting out that’s a lot of money to spend. The same thing can be done with the google keyword tool. It just takes way longer.

      • Frank

        that’s very interested to know your strategy. Personally, I like keyword research myself. I think a good keyword selection is 50% of the success, if not more. I have used micro niche finder to filter all low competition keywords including ‘review’ and ‘reviews’, which is when I found most high volume good keywords are occupied. Guess everyone is using Google keyword tool for this kind of thing that’s why it’s like that.

        I always knew there’s vast range of good keywords out there but didn’t figure out a way how to find, Thanks so much to share your method.

        Would it possible if you could share a few keywords with me, healthy or pet related? I’m into both niches. :) )

        Thanks for the great course,

        Frank

        • http://goalyard.com Paul

          Now Frank… I’ll be happy to share, but you really should take the time to build your own database. P.S. – There’s plenty of room for a little competition about Benadryl For Dogs. :)

      • http://www.CRAZYEASYPROFITS.com Patricia

        Paul — I thought your keyword video was fabulous. BUT, it stopped short, IMO. I’d love to know what you do to pare the list down, for example weed out things that aren’t even remotely relevant. And if you’re only using the google keywords tool, what are you looking for — is it just competition alone? — that makes it a good keyword to you?

        BTW, I combined .csv’s using your little .bat file trick and am convinced it’s magic. Now if we could only find how to find dupes in Open Office. :D

        • http://goalyard.com Paul

          Here’s what I do. My method is to compile a huge database of keywords. I showed some ways in the video to get related type keywords. I personally use a service called SEMrush which is overkill for most people. But it allows you download 10,000 keywords at a time instead of 800, and it gives 2 different reports. Anyway, none of that answers your question.

          My personal database has about 9,000,000 keywords right now, and I have a contractor working full time to continue to fill up my dropbox with CSV files from SEMrush. I’m getting to your answer I promise…

          I use my database 2 ways.
          1. To find “niches” I put that in quotes because 99% of the time it’s used incorrectly in this IM world we live in, but whatever. For example, it’s how I found the all inclusive resorts in puerto rico that I posted yesterday. I found that keyword in all of 30 seconds probably.

          So here’s how… I do a lot of filtering. When I’m looking for a “niche” that I want to be easy to rank for, with decent search volume, and decent CPC, lets just assume I want to build an adsense site.

          I will use excel, set it up to filter, and then I will typically filter for word length greater than 3. Then I’ll typically filter for CPC greater than $2, and Searches/month greater than 5,000.

          This is way higher than most people target, but remember we have built a huge database of keywords (if you’ve put in the work to do so, or paid someone like I have to do it for you ;)

          Now, excel holds 1,000,000 rows, and this actually gives you a mangeable list typically. I then start skimming the list. (super fancy I know) and I see if anything sticks out. Oh, forgot to mention if I was doing an adsense site I would also filter on the competition category and probably set it greater than .4 or something so I know there are advertisers. I could care less about how many pages there are for a keyword. It just doesn’t matter.

          So as I skim my list (which depending on how YOU want to filter it could be pretty small even from a list of 1,000,000 keywords) and I see if something peaks my interest. Like the all inclusive example earlier. IMO that’s an awesome keyword. You can build a really valuable site around a site like that. One that is actually helpful to users, and the travel market generally has tons of advertisers and affiliate programs.

          Let’s just stick with the all inclusive theme for now…

          On to step 2 – Now that I have my “niche” I want to get a better idea of what kind of keywords are out there. So I reset all my filters. Then I filter on the keyword column and set it “contain” all inclusive.

          Now it returns every keyword in my list that contains all inclusive. Sort that data as you feel appropriate. A general rule of thumb, not always true, but a lot of the time, is the more words in a keyword phrase, the easier it is to rank for. So I’d typically sort by number of words, and add a second level for number of searches.

          Now I’ve got a huge list of keywords all related, in fact very specifically related to all inclusive stuff.

          Then it’s just a matter of figuring out how to want to structure your site. Let’s say I want to make a site similar to the dog site I’m using an example. Something like 5 categories, with 5-10 pages each.

          I’d look for the highest search count words. I’m doing this off the top of my head, so I have no idea if this is true…

          But let’s just say that the following are all really highly searched.
          All Inclusive Vacations For Families
          All Inclusive Vacations For Single Men
          All Inclusive Vacations For Single Women
          All Inclusive Vacations In Florida
          All Inclusive Vacations In Puerto Rico

          I’d then take those keywords and run them through the Free version of traffic travis like you’ve seen me do and see what the competition is like. Let’s just assume they all look okay. Then I’d check them in SEO spyglass. Again, lets assume all looks well.

          Now It’s time to layout the site.

          In this case, I wouldn’t buy an exact match domain. I’d find the highest search keywords related to all inclusive vacations (which I assume is exactly that) and I’d buy a domain like All Inclusive Vacation HQ .com

          I’d make everyone of those keywords above a category, then build my posts under each. I’d continue to filter to find good keywords for my supporting posts as well. You might find:
          How To Find A Mate On an All Inclusive Vacation For Single Woman (There’s an article)

          Okay, I’ve written way to much I think. Does that help answer your question?

          It’s kind of hard to give general answers because everyone has a different need for a keyword. For someone building an adsesne site, something like CPC is important and they want it high. If you’re doing affiliate marketing, or maybe even creating a product you’d rather see that number very low. WHy? Because it might give you the opportunity to buy traffic.

          I realize this method of keyword research isn’t for everyone. But believe me when I say I’ve used almost every keyword tool available, and nothing compares IMO. They all just fall short.

          The only thing missing form my method is the ability to check in huge quantities the on-page factors that I think are important. And in fact, I have a job posting on odesk to have that application to be built as we speak.

          So a couple weeks from now I’ll be able to do my filtering, export a huge list (maybe 5000 words) into this tool, and it will return all the on-page stuff that tells me at first glance if a keyword is worth going after or not.

          Whew — sorry for the long winded answer.

        • http://goalyard.com Paul

          Patricia, I just wanted to let you know I’ll be doing a blog post on how to remove duplicates in CSV files prior to importing them into the spreadsheet. It’s a little technical, but if I can figure it out anyone can.

          Should be up in an hour or so. This should allow people to use openoffice and get the same benefit! Additionally it works with huge files (I’m testing it on a 1.5GB csv file right now) and seems to be working.

          Stay tuned.

  • Brian

    What do you think of Stealth Keyword Competition Analyzer?

    • http://goalyard.com/ Paul

      Never heard of it. I’ll go check it out. Have you used it?

      I just checked out the sales page. It all depends on how they determine if a keyword is good. I think I’ll buy it and check it out. I have my own custom tools, but it’s hard to go wrong with a 60 day money back guarantee. One thing… they spelled analyzer once on their video. Once with an S, once with a Z. Hope they paid more attention to detail in their software.

  • Owen

    Hi Paul,

    I am still very new at this SEO thing. I am a web developer and have been building websites for almost a year now but still have no idea how to get to the #1 spot on Google. I am here to ask some questions but before I do I want to thank you for all your time and effort making these vids. They are a great help.

    Q1: Paul, I have followed your video above and found some nice keywords that I would like to use to start a WordPress Niche Site. What I don’t understand is the following: I have seen you researching the competition in Traffic Travis and say that it wont be too difficult to beat the site in the top spot even when they have more than 1000 BLs. I thought BLs were very important. I have a keyword with the following details for the #1 competitor, please can you advise if this would be a competitor that I can beat easily using your method.
    PR: 6
    Authority: 0
    BL: 8999
    BLS: 4747352
    EDU/GOV: 44
    DMOZ: Yes
    Title: No
    Desc: No
    H1: No

    Q2: Which elements have the heaviest weigting in Google? Does Title, H1 have more weight in the Google algo than say the BLs?

    • http://goalyard.com/ Paul

      Backlinks are important.  In your example, that looks like a tough page to outrank not knowing anything else about it.  The number of backlinks doesn’t necessarily matter.  It really depends on how targeted those backlinks are, and the PR of the linking page.  

      Considering the page doesn’t have the keyword in the title, desc, H1 it would tell me that the page isn’t targeting the specific keyword.  Because of that, it may be doable.  It’s really hard to tell just from these raw numbers.

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