Chapter 13
Keyword Research
Where are the “sitting ducks?”
In Chapter 7, we talked about the publicly accessible Google keyword selector tool and used it to see what search words your potential customers were using. I said it then and I'll say it again: this tool is essential to understanding your market. Keywords are the “key” to identifying opportunities.
When it comes to keywords, the ones you want to find are the sitting ducks! What do I mean by that? I'm referring to the keywords that have respectable organic search volume (in other words, they are frequently being searched for) but have almost no competition. Those keywords are what I call sitting ducks. They're just waiting to be targeted! And the Google keyword tool makes them easy to find.
Step 1: Enter one of your primary keywords into the Google keyword tool and sort the list of search results by “competition.” By “competition,” the Google keyword tool is referring to the pay-per-click (PPC) competition for that particular word or phrase. You may not be interested in doing PPC advertising and that's fine. But competition in the PPC world usually mirrors that of the non-PPC world, so you can extrapolate one from the other.
After the keywords have been resorted, scroll down to the bottom of the list where you'll find the keyword phrases that don't have much competition. The keywords with low competition but good search volume are what we're after.
Step 2: Pick a few phrases that seem to have good search volume but limited ...
