Most marketers will do at least some level of keyword research when creating niche content sites in order to generate “organic search engine traffic” to their Affiliate / Made for Adsense sites.

And the purpose of this keyword research is to of course “game” the search engines (for better or worse) so you can hopefully get to the first page on Google.

But it’s not all about Keyword Research and finding the “right” keywords for your page. Because that will only get you half way there… the other half of the equation has to do with proper competitive analysis, which to me seems to be the most overlooked step of niche research. It also seems to be an overlooked subject in many of the ebooks and reports. And I can honestly say that I was not as successful building profitable web sites until I learned to do what I am about to describe below.

Most of the articles and ebooks that I have read deals with the following:

1. Find your niche
2. Find keywords
3. Go to Google and do an “exact phrase” search (i.e. using quotation marks around the keyword phrase)
4. If the results are below x, you are “golden”… 

I’m sure you have read something similar elsewhere… I even published a video on keyword research using similar strategies. I’m not saying this method is wrong or that it doesn’t work. What I’m saying is that the method is incomplete. 

I mean, how do we know that we are “golden” and will rank in the top 10 in the search results unless we know what the target is in the first place?   

The above mentioned method is great if all you are doing is going after 3^rd or 4^th tier long tail keywords with very little search volume for direct to affiliate article marketing (or Bum Marketing a term coined by Travis Sago); but what if you want to build an authority site (for your chose niche), or build an affiliate “store” using affiliate feeds (or a site where you display ebay feeds on your site). 

In these cases, you are more than likely to come up against stronger “opposition” since you are more than likely dealing with 1^st or 2^nd tier keywords. 

What we need to keep in mind is that we are NOT competing against the search engines; we are competing against those ahead of us in the search results. 

You know, I’m a relatively lazy person and like to take a shortcut when I can. So, why not learn from your competitors and take the shortcut to successful internet marketing? 

If we know what the competition is doing we can simply duplicate their efforts and most likely eclipse their results in a short amount of time. By the way, I don’t mean copy their content, rather copy their effort (in terms of link building, keyword densities etc.). 

Ok, so what are my steps to accomplish this?

1. First off, we need to determine a niche or a product category

I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but if you are wondering how I go about this, watch my video on how to find profitable niche markets or products.

Let’s say we’ve already determined a product… I’ve picked “Radio Flyer” as the product I want to promote, simply because I almost tripped over my son’s radio flyer when taking out the trash this morning…

2. Go to the Free Wordtracker Keyword Research Tool
and enter the keyword prhase to make sure there are enough searches per day. Here are the results for “Radio Flyer”:

And we can see that the phrase "Radio Flyer" gets 382 searches per day… while "Motorized Radio Flyer Wagon" gets 474 searches even though the latter would qualify as a 2nd tier “long tail keyword”. Interesting… but we can see that with over 10,000 searches per month (for Radio Flyer alone), it is a potentially profitable keyword. 

3. Go to Google and type in your keyword phrase.
When you type in our keyword and check the results, you’ll find the following:

As you can see, there are nearly 2 million results for the term “Radio Flyer”. You can also see that there are affiliates advertising for the keyword using Adwords (on the right side of the screen under sponsored links). 

Now if you want (and I recommend you do this), you can go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to see what the bids look like to make sure it’s a “profitable” keyword phrase. I mean, let’s face it, if no one is bidding on the term it’s likely that people aren’t having much success with it online. This is what it would look like:

 

 

Once there, be sure to select the “Cost and Ad Position Estimates” (as seen above) to see the current “Estimated Cost-Per-Click Average”, and you can see that “radio flyer rocking horse” is going for a healthy $2.22 per click on the average.. In case you’re wondering, “Radio Flyer” is going for an average of $1.09 per click. 

Ok, so we now want to check the sites in position 9 and/or 10 to see how difficult it would be to get on the first page of Google for our chosen keyword phrase. The last two positions on the first page of Google are occupied by the following:

 

 

We’ll take a look at the site in the 9th position since position 10 is occupied by a ".gov" site, which might be harder to beat out. 

4. Click through to the page (the position 9 / 10 page)
and check the PageRank of the chosen page as well as the backward links pointing to this page. In order to see Page Rank you will need to install the Google Toolbar to your browser. When we click on our chosen page (which by the way is not about the toy, but rather a music band) this is what you will see:

 This page as you can see has a “query string” in the URL (it uses a ? and % and such instead of a regular URL), which is good for us. It also has a “greyed out” area under PageRank (on the Google Toolbar). However, the URL: www.epitonic.com/artists/radioflyer.html is a PR3 page (which can be seen when it first goes to the page). 

In order to see the Backlinks for your chosen page, you need to either use the Google operator “link:” or you can use the drop down menu next to the PageRank bar on your Google Toolbar. For our example I will use the Google Operator, like this:

 As you can see there are only three backlinks to this page that’s indexed by Google, which is great as it makes it easier for us to overtake them. However, this isn’t the whole story (as you will see below). 

5. Check keyword density of your chosen page
using the “cached” pages function (see highlighted area in the example below):

Once you click through, you will go to a "cached" version of this page. Here’s what it looks like:

What we see here, is that the keyword “Radio Flyer” has been highlighted throughout the page. We can also see that the keyword phrase occur four times on this page (a relatively conservative keyword density).

As a side note, if you happen to be on a page that is extremely “busy” with a lot of things going on (images and a lot of text), you can also use the “Cached Text Only Function” at the top of the cached page you are on (see highlighted area in the example below):

 

Using the “Cached Text Only” function will display the page in text only by taking out all of the graphical components, like this:

 

 

 

Using the “Cached Text Only” will help you identify the keywords on the page a lot easier…

This may also be a good time to see if they are using an “ALT” tag on images (which in this case they’re not) and to check some of their other “on-page” optimization.

6. Check the backlinks in Yahoo
(Yahoo calls these “inlinks”). You can go to Yahoo Site Explorer or use Marketleap, which is the one I prefer to use as it gives me the stats for both Google and Yahoo on the same page.

Once on Marketleap, click on “Link Popularity Check” link (see highlighted below):

 

 

 

Then enter your desired URL(s) along with the "captcha" to generate your report, like this:

 

 

 

Once you click on “Generate Report” it will go back to both Google and Yahoo and retrive the backlinks. The final report looks like this:

 

 

If you take a look at the results, you will see that Google has 3 backlinks (which we already knew) and Yahoo has 98 “inlinks” to this page.

 

 

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Ok, so now we know quite a bit about our competition and how we can beat them out of a top ten position. It sure beats the vague “do a search in quotes” scenario… don’t you think?

Let’s recap.

We now know…

 

a. the keyword gets plenty of searches every month (by checking with Wordtracker)

b. that people are more than likely earning decent commissions since the per click average is north of $1.00 (over $2.00 on a couple of keywords).

c. your competitor’s page has a low pagerank;

d. the page does not have a lot of backlinks (you can get 98 in a few months or less)

e. the exact keyword density of this page. 

 

In other words, we now have enough ammo to replicate this page or do one better.

Hopefully this made some sense to all of you… All I can say it that if you put some extra time and effort on the front end besides just searching for a "profitable niche", you may find an easier time ranking in the search engines.

How do we use all of this data? Well, I will reveal that in a future article.

 

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Written by: StevenR - AffiliateMarketingDiary.com : Your Resource For Internet Affiliate Marketing
Original Article: It’s Not About Keyword Research

Tags: keyword research, organic search engine traffic, affiliate marketing, competitive analysis, niche research, seo