Finding a profitable niche is the key to making money online with this method. Doing the proper research for your keywords will determine how much your niche site can make. About 80% of my time is spent making sure that I choose the right keywords for the new niche site.
I hope you read and did you project for Choosing A Topic For Your Niche Site. It will give you a good set of topics and keywords for the research we are about to do.
When doing research for my niche sites I use a Excel spreadsheet to track all of my keyword stats to make sure that I can easily see what I need to rank for and why. At the end of this post I will have a link to my spreadsheet.
Getting Keyword Stats
I use a two part strategy to get my keywords for the niche site. The first part is getting information from Google Adwords Keyword Tool. The second part is getting information from Google.
With Google Adwords Tool you can get all the information you need to see if the keywords are even worth trying to rank for. When we get into the tool we need to make some changes so it will show us the results that matter to us. The first thing we need to change is what Columns it shows us. If you will look on the right side of the keyword area you will see “Columns” with a drop down menu. Go ahead and un-check “Competition” and then check “Estimated Avg. CPC”.
Ok, now that we have made these couple of changes lets go ahead and use our first topic and start searching our new keywords. Once we get our results back, we will need to make one last change. On the left hand side of the search results you will see “Match Types”. Go ahead and un-check “Broad” and then check “[Exact]“. This will give you only the search results that someone typed in exactly like you see it.
While on looking at the results you will see the Keyword, Global Search Results, Local Search Results, and Estimated CPC. I going to take just a minute to explain each just so we are on the same page.
- Keyword – This will be the exact keyword that someone will type in when they are on Google looking for some king of information or product that interest them.
- Global Search Results – This is the number of exact searches for the keywords that are made globally/around the world.
- Local Search Results – This is the number of exact searches that were made for the specific keyword in your country.
- Estimated CPC – This is the estimated cost for every click that someone is willing pay Google for a lead to their site.
Getting Keyword Potential
Now that we have our first set our results we need to see what type of money this keywords are worth. Inside the Google Adwords Keyword Tool just above the results you will see “Download”, it will have a drop down menu and select all. You will receive a pop up that will ask how you want to save it. You need to choose “CSV for Excel”. After it gets done downloading do ahead and open it up. Also open the Excel sheet that I have at the bottom of this post. You will need to Copy and Paste some of the columns into the my sheet. You will need to copy the following columns to my spreadsheet: Keyword, Global Search Results, Local Search Results, and Estimated CPC.
Formula For Potential
Searches x .4 x CPC x .25 x .05 = potential
- Searches = The amount of local searches each month
- .4 = The amount of expected visitors you will receive being number 1 on Google.
- CPC = This is the estimated Cost Per Click that someone will pay
- .25 = Estimated earnings percentage that you will receive from the CPC
- .05 = 5% is the amount of people that will click an ad on the niche site
Once you have copied them over it will now show you the potential of each of the keywords. You will notice some have real good potential and some really suck. One of the rules I set for myself is to not use any keyword that has a potential of less then $10 per month. I remove everything on my list that is under $10. This will help filter out a lot of the crappy keywords that will not make you any money.
While we are filtering out bad keywords lets go ahead and get rid of some more. These are two more rules that I have:
- The amount of global searches must be above 1200 per month
- The amount of local searches must be above 1000 per month
The purpose of making this site is to get traffic and have it convert into money. If your keyword only gets searched a couple of times per month this will not do you any good. So go ahead and filter out any keywords in your spreadsheet that do not meet these requirements.
Ease Of Ranking For Your Keywords
Now that we have a good list of keywords that have a good potential of money and have the right amount of searches per month lets see how easy they are to rank for. This is the tedious part of getting the right keywords. For each keyword that is still on your list you will need to check and see how the other sites are doing that rank for that keyword. To make this as easy as possible you need to be using Firefox with the SEO for Firefox addon. With this addon you can do Google searches and it will show you the PageRank(PR) for each of the results that appear on the page.
Now that we can get the PR of the sites that already rank for the keywords we want, lets add them to our spreadsheet. All we really care about when looking at the results is the first four that show up. Each of these will have a Page Rank of 0 – 10. Add each of the four sites PR to the spreadsheet for that keyword. What the goal here is to do is to find some keywords that are easy to rank for. When you get all the page ranks added to you spreadsheet add up all the PR’s and get a total. If all four sites have a total score of 0 – 12 then it should be easy to rank for. Also any keyword that has a site with a PR of 4 – 10 try to stay a way from. When the PR gets that high it is hard to beat them out of their rankings.
So lets get you going on this weeks projects:
- Use Google Adwords Tool for each of your keywords
- Export the Data and add it to your spreadsheet
- Filter out all the bad keywords
- Get the easy to rank for keywords
Rules to live by for this week:
- Do not use any keyword that has a potential of less then $10 per month.
- The amount of global searches must be above 1200 per month.
- The amount of local searches must be above 1000 per month
- Find keywords that have a PR score of 0 – 12 without any sites with a PR of 4 – 10
Here is my Excel Sheet that I use to filter keywords.
Get this done and next week will be a lot easier for the both of us.
