Keyword Research – The Backbone of Affiliate Marketing
This is the step that will dictate how visitors will find your site.
I suggest that before you carry out the keyword research, you form a clear idea of your affiliate niche and its extent before you begin this step (this is because keyword research is critical to get right).
At this stage of the process you want to find out the exact phrases that people type into the search engines, when they are looking for information or products relating to your affiliate niche.
If we continue with the example that we used in the last post, our website is about fly fishing. On it, we will be promoting fishing tackle, rods, reels, flies, etc etc.
If you were a fly fisherman looking to buy a reel, what are you going to type into Google to find relevant sites to buy a fly fishing reel? After all, that is what you need to know as an affiliate marketer with a fly fishing niche site.
You might type in any of the following:
- fly fishing reel
- buy fly fishing reel
- purchase fly fishing reel
- fly fishing reel review
But, if you’re already a fly fisherman, you probably buy fishing magazines and have seen reels that interest you. So, you already have a make or model number in mind. You would then search for a specific make of reel and possibly include the model number in your search.
Then again, if you’re new fly fishing, you are unlikely to know the main makes and model numbers, or what to search for. That is where keyword research comes in.
Your research will not only find phrases that are actually being searched for, it will also bring to light a lot more phrases than you could realistically come up with yourself, and in a fraction of the time.
How many “fly fishing reel” related phrases can you think of? 5? 10? Well, I just checked at NicheBot, and in seconds, it returned 82 phrases that people are actually looking for this past month. Of those, 19 were specific makes and models, such as “Eagle Claw be78” (which gets an average of 13 searches per day).
Keyword Research Tools Aid You In Your Research
There are many tools, both free and paid that you can use for your keyword research. One of the best is the free tool at Google called the Keyword Tool External. This is a great tool for finding keywords, the competition, average search volumes, search trends, estimated cost per click and much more.
I have found that Google’s Keyword Tool does have one big disadvantage over the paid tools like Nichebot and WordTracker. If we look at our fly fishing reel example, Google returns 49 keywords for the term. But, none are make and model specific like NicheBot found for us.
That said, Google’s Keyword Tool also allows you to search specific websites for the keywords that they use. For instance, if we search Google for “fly fishing reel”, the number one ranking page is for Ross Reels USA. Plugging their URL into the Keyword Tool, Google comes up with 200 keywords that are prominent on their website. Many of these are specific makes of reels (but still not models).
I always use more than one keyword tool when conducting my niche research. I like the n
umber of different keyword options that I get by mixing paid keyword research tools like NicheBot with the free tools available. Even WordTracker has a free version. Another keyword tool that you might consider is Keyword Discovery. They too have both a free and paid version. I’m not as well versed with Keyword Discovery, but here again, NicheBot also allows you to search their database.
By the time you finish digging deep into the keywords that define your affiliate niche, you should have a list of hundreds, if not thousands of keywords. It can be quite perplexing deciding what to do with them all.
A decent and profitable affiliate niche will generally produce 1000 keywords or more. You should dig deeper if you can’t come up with at least 1000 or maybe think of another niche if you can’t come up with more than a couple hundred.
So, Which Keywords Should You Target For Your Niche Website?
In order for your web pages to be found in the search engines, they need to rank well for the actual phrases that people are typing in at the various search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
That is why you used NicheBot or WordTracker to find out what people are typing into the search engines.
The best keywords to use to build your site, are those that are searched for a lot at the search engines (high demand), but have not been targeted by many other websites so have so relatively few competing pages in the search engines (low supply).
This means that you have to do more keyword research to determine the search volume and competition. Luckily, most of the keyword tools do this for you. So now, it’s just a matter of analyzing your keyword list. Luckily, there are tools for doing this too. We’ll find out about these keyword analysis tools and what we are going to do with our keywords to theme our niche website in the next post…
Tags: affiliate marketing, keyword research, keyword research tool, keyword tool, keywords, niche website, NicheBot, WordTracker
Related Posts on Ristvin Marketing Blog
Posted: September 6th, 2009 under affiliate marketing.
Comments: none
Write a comment