Once we know what keywords are, we have to go through the process of finding them and what tools we can use to locate these little gems. There are three main things we are going to try to establish when looking for good keywords. The first thing is the search volume; this is the number of people who search for a word or phrase. So we want to see the number of advertisers competing for the phrases we are looking for. The last thing we check is the amount of commercial intent a keyword can have. This is the amount of sales that were historically generated from the previous performance of these keywords.
To stay within the scope of this article, we will discuss how we find good search volume. We’ll also look at the amount of competition for your chosen keyword phrases and how it might be easier to find our keywords before finding our niches. If I start with a niche and want to find keywords, I look at the words or phrases that best describe what I am selling.
For example, if my niche was in the toy industry and I was selling toys, I would take the word toy and put it in a free tool that I use online called “Free WordTracker Keyword Suggestion Tool.” This is a great tool, it is a simplified version of the WordTracker keyword tool. You can find this free tool at freekeywords.wordtracker.com.
Then we proceed to put the word that best describes our product in the WordTracker tool and click the “hit me” button. If for example we say that we sell toys. And we put the word toy in the text box and press the button, we would end up with a list of words or phrases, with a column of numbers on the left side. The numbers to the left of the words indicate how many times these keywords or phrases are searched each day according to the WordTracker database. This number is actually much smaller than the search volume that Google has each day, this is because Google has many more searches than the search engines that WordTracker uses to collect data. Now, in our toy example above, we see that we have some keywords with good search volume. Below is a list of some of the results.
14459 toys r us
3597 toys
2982 adult toys
1235 toys r us app
1198 toy poodle
1161 baby toys
1154 kb toys
1144 toy
Personally, I like to take words that have at least 1000 searches per day, as this tells me that they will have a very good search volume with Google. As we can see, most of these phrases have a good search volume, but many of them have nothing to do with the sale of toys, for example, if I was not affiliated with Toys “R” Us and sold things, then The keyword phrase “toys r us” is not good for me. The other problem is that if you were to use this keyword phrase in a Google AdWords campaign, you would have trouble trying to optimize your campaign, using a keyword phrase in the title and description of the ad with the brand name of Toys R Us on it.
There is a slim chance that the keyword “toys” is a good fit, for the simple fact that there is likely a lot of competition for this word. But we still put it on our list and keep it to check and be sure. The following again is useless to us unless we are in the adult industry. Then we have the phrase “toy app for us”, this again is not related to what we are selling. The phrase is “children’s toys”; again, people are looking for an organization that is not really toys. So what we ended up with is just two words on the list that we could use, but when I go through them, they both have very high competition.
So we go back to the drawing board, and now we have to think of a word or phrase that is more specific to the products we sell. We limit our search to a particular type of toy, the reason for this is that we will probably incur less competition and find more phrases. These very specific words can have a greater commercial intent, turning into sales with higher conversion rates.