6 Easy Steps on how to do Keyword Research for your Niche

A week ago, I had a chance to talk with you about the 3 tips on how to select a profitable niche to promote products and make money online. I hope you already come up a good list of niches in hand because today we will go over another important lesson; researching for keywords.

Why bother?

So, why do we need to bother about doing keyword research for our niche?

Searchers use keywords to find the information about something or to look up some products to buy. Search engines, like an electronic dictionary, go through its content and find the most relevant information to return to the searchers. In practice, search engines use more than 10  known factors to decide which results are returned. I will cover more details in the later posts.

Because we don’t know what keywords searchers use to find the information, we need to research for keywords. We need to know exactly what those words are, how many people search for them a month, what is the potential to growth, etc. We need to know all of that information to match our content with the keywords so that the content will appear in the result page.

That’s the basic purpose of the keyword research. Now, there are 2 types of keywords that you need to know. There are:

• Normal keywords. Normal keywords are often 1 or 2 words long. Many big companies are competing to rank #1 in these keywords. Why do corporates need to compete with each other to appear in in the search engines for one or two keywords? People are bounded with what psychologist Herbert Simon called “bounded rationality”. We exert the smallest effort to achieve adequate result. For instance, if you are searching for car insurance company, you will not enter “car insurance company in the US”. Instead, most of us will just enter “car insurance”. That’s why big companies are pouring millions of dollars for search engine marketing.
• Long tail keywords. 5 to 6 words long, describe exactly the intent of the searchers. For example, a searcher may try look for “cheap and reliable car insurance in seattle, wa.” This is the type of keywords that we will optimize our content for. The advantage of this type of keyword are low competition and medium traffic. However, sometimes, the traffic of the long tail keywords is so small that it can’t be tracked by the search engines. You may want to ask “Then. Why should we care to match our content with keywords that only few people are searching for?” Good question! In the short term, long tail keywords bring less traffic than normal keywords but they are well converted traffic. It’s because we know the searcher intent very clearly. We know what he want by looking at his keywords. In addition, in the long term, the aggregate traffic will become big that can outrun the traffic from normal keywords.

How to really research for keywords.

I have talked enough B.S stuff. Let’s put some hand-ons practing about researching keyword. In this post, I will use Market Samurai to teach you how to do the keyword research. Keyword research module in Market Samurai is free and you can download it here. I also posted a review about Market Samurai not a long time ago so you can read it and evaluate your consideration in purchasing this powerful SEO software.

1. Let’s open Market Samurai and create a new project. Let’s use your niche as a root keyword. I choose to promote products to help women select gender for their babies so my root keyword is select gender. So in here, I have
2. Then, click on the Create button. Next, select the Keyword Research button
3. Then, choose the Ignore Additional in Market Samurai. Market Samurai often includes some of the related keywords that totally unrelated to what we are looking for so I often disable this function every time I do keyword research.
4. Click on the Generate keywords button
5. Here’re the list of my keywords. They look promosing!. I love it. Click on the Analyze Keywords button to go to the next step
6. On the next screen, you should select the following things in order to gain enough information about the keywords. You have to select SEO Traffic, which tells you how many traffic a day. You also have to select SEO Competition, which tells you how much competition for that keyword. You may also select Adwords CPC to evaluate how much you can make money of that keyword.
7. Click on the Analyze Keywords one more time to analyze our competition. At this point, I found it really frustrating in Market Samurai the first time I used it. I had to click Analyze Keywords button twice before I could get enough information. Maybe Market Samurai should do something about it.

Let’s look at what we have here. From this table, I can see clearly what I should optimize my content for. I should optimize for select baby gender and baby gender selection because they have good traffic and low competition rate.

What will we talk about in the next post?

In the next post, I will talk about how to optimize keywords for our content. I hope that you find my tutorial about keyword research helpful and if you have any questions, just comment below and I will reply right back.

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