Keyword And Niche Selection

The main criteria to keyword research is to find a niche where I can do something to help people. Other than this, there are six other criteria that needs to be met by any proposed keyword before further investigation and research is done on it.

1. Search Volume: minimum 3,000 Local Searches Per Month

The search type must be set to Exact Match.

2. SEO Competition: Is there room in the Top 10 of Google?

How difficult will it be to be on the first page and in the first listing? Things to look for include:

• Is the keyword used in the URL?
• Is the keyword used in the Title and description?
• The number of incoming links to those pages and the quality of those links.
• Page Authority
• MozRank
• Page Rank
• Anchor text distribution
• Content on the competing pages

3. The Grandma Test 4. Can I Earn Money In This Niche?

Use these tests to gauge how profitable is the niche:

• Average Cost Per Click. How much are advertisers willing to pay for the keyword? It should be more than $1.00.
• Are the any Google Ads? If there are no ads in a Google Search, it might not be profitable because no one is advertising anything.
• Are there any Amazon products?
• What are the other sites selling? Take note of the products being sold and from what merchant.
• Search for money keywords. These include on sale, for sale, price, affiliate, partners, media kit, product description, equipment, services, products, customer review, testimonial and now available.

4. The 50 Post Test

Try to write down 50 blog post ideas. Start off from the top of my head. Then when I run out of ideas, use the following strategies to gather more post ideas:

• Place the seed keyword in Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find related keywords
• Do a Google search and see what the other websites are writing to gain inspiration
• Go to Amazon and look up related books. Look inside the cover at the content page to get more post ideas
• Search through forums and discussions for problems or issues people are having

If I struggle to gather 50 posts, then I have to reassess if this is a niche I want to get into. 6. Can I Create A Beastly Resource? Can my website be the ultimate resource for my niche that will be referenced as an authority that cannot go unnoticed? All the above is dealt in more detail in this post.