An integral part of finding a niche product is doing keyword research. What is a keyword? When someone searches for something on a search engine, what they type into the field of the engine is the keyword(s). It could be web hosting, xbox, buy treadmill, or a billion other subjects and combinations. The real question for the niche marketer is, what are the keywords that will bring buying customers to their website, what is the demand, and how much competition is there?

There are many tools for doing keyword research. Software you can buy, software that is free, and many online tools as well. Some well known online tools are Wordtracker and Overture. There is also a free tool on this site called Keyword Explorer. It shows the most popular keyword variations based on what you type into it and shows how many searches are performed each month for the particular keyword and also how many competing websites appear in google for the keyword search term. I use this tool myself to quickly find high demand, low competition keywords for my chosen niche.

Another great free online tool is SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. You can do a lot more with this tool, such as selecting what country you want results for, search results for Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You can view Google trends and if you click on a keyword, it breaks it down into even more keywords. Take some time to practice with this tool and you will quickly see how powerful it is. It may be the best free keyword tool online.

If you are looking for some powerful videos on SEO, I recommend Traffic Blueprint. These are the best SEO videos available at under $10 and well worth it. One of the videos goes into detail on how to use the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. It’s not difficult though.

So, the main idea behind keyword research is to find relevant keywords based on your chosen niche market and find ones that have a high number of searches and a low number of competing websites.

There is much debate about what is the optimum value for monthly searches and competing websites. It really depends on what your strategy is. If you have a very narrow keyword based on a product name, such as “bowflex series 7 treadmill”, then fewer people may be typing that into the search engines. On the other hand, there will also be fewer competing websites and those who are typing product names into the search engines may be more prone to buy that product. Keyword Explorer says there are 2,000 monthly searches with 26,000 competing websites. SEO Book says there are over 7,000 monthly searches for the above term. These are pretty good numbers. You should be able to find products that have over 1,000 searches per month and under 100,000 competing websites for product specific keywords. The more searches and fewer competing sites the better.

For a broader term like Treadmill or Horse, you will have hundreds of thousands of monthly searches, but the competing websites will be in the millions. It is important to continue drilling down into the more specific longer tail keywords to find the ones with high searches and lower competing sites, but keywords that attract buyers. The term “iron horse” might have good search/competition numbers but have nothing to do with your horse related products, whereas “horse saddle” might be a better fit. Relevant keywords, general to specific.

Once you find several long tail keywords related to your niche product, these keywords can then be used as article and post titles on your blog site. Using the keyword in the title and body of the article will help with search engine ranking. This is also true if you are submitting an article to directories. Your keywords are what draws targeted traffic to your article or site once indexed by the search engines.

As a final example, lets say you did your product research at ebay pulse and chose the High Definition TV niche, or “HDTV”. If you type this keyword into one of our tools, you will get many variations with HDTV as part of the keyword. We may want to ignore the lower priced items such as HDTV Antenna or a less relevant term like HDTV Info. However, there are more terms that are of interest such as

  • Sony HDTV
  • Samsung HDTV
  • 32 LCD HDTV
  • 42 LCD HDTV
  • Sharp HDTV

There are many more that can be drilled down. Since these are popular items on ebay and people are searching for them in the search engines with the keywords listed above, this has the potential to be a profitable niche. Each item could be a seperate blog post or article optimized with the keyword phrase in question. If we use our ebay wordpress plugin to display relevant auctions it might look something like this:

insignia-ns-lcd32-09-32-flat-panel-lcd-hdtv-tv-broken Insignia NS-LCD32-09 32" Flat Panel LCD HDTV TV BROKEN
US $50.00 (4 Bids)
Auction Ends: Saturday Oct-11-2008 13:31:29 PDT
Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item
sony-bravia-kdl-32s20l1-s-series-32-lcd-hdtv-tv-nice! SONY BRAVIA KDL-32S20L1 S-SERIES 32" LCD HDTV TV NICE!
US $340.63 (12 Bids)
Auction Ends: Saturday Oct-11-2008 14:56:37 PDT
Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item
10-32-55lb-flat-panel-lcd-hdtv-vesa-wall-mount-bracket 10-32" 55lb Flat Panel LCD HDTV VESA Wall Mount Bracket
US $3.99 (0 Bid)
Auction Ends: Saturday Oct-11-2008 15:41:29 PDT
Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item
sharp-lc-32sh12u-32-widescreen-lcd-hdtv-w-hdmi-input! SHARP LC-32SH12U 32" WIDESCREEN LCD HDTV w/HDMI INPUT!
US $460.00 (21 Bids)
Auction Ends: Saturday Oct-11-2008 16:03:17 PDT
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brand-new-32-lcd-hi-def-1080i-hdmi-digital-tuner-hdtv Brand New 32" LCD Hi Def 1080i HDMI Digital Tuner HDTV
US $499.99
Auction Ends: Saturday Oct-11-2008 16:16:08 PDT
Bid on this Item   | Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

This is what our site visitors would see if they are interested in 32 inch lcd HDTV. If they buy from your link, you earn a commission.

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