Keyword Research Mistakes That Could Kill Your Online Business

When doing keyword research for niche discovery or article writing, a lot of newbie marketers use online tools or desktop software to generate data. In the hands of a skilled search engine optimization specialist these tools can produce a goldmine, because they know how to interpert that data.

But to many new marketers rely too heavily on the raw data and simply don’t know how to use it. They take things much too literally.

For example, one online tool takes related keywords and phrases from several different sources, runs them through Google to find out how many searches a month there are for those phrases and weighs those numbers against how many pages there are in Google “competing” for top results in the SERPs.

That’s all very useful data, but if you take the word “competing” too literally, you’re looking at it all wrong.

Their idea is that, if there are 1, 2, 5, etc. million other pages “referencing” that phrase in Google, that they have X million other competitors that they’re “up against.”

That’s not necessarily true. All those millions of references usually just means the topic is a popular one that a lot of people wrote about or talked about on their pages and blogs. They not competitors… but the newbies think so and scrap the idea of going into that particular niche.

Me? If I’m doing keyword research, I go to Google first and search for conversational keyword phrases to find out how many other pages use the phrase. I try about 25 different variations of the phrase that people would use and if there are millions of references to those phrase, I’m happy as a pig in muck.

I then visit a lot of those pages (like, a hundred or so) and make a note of the contextual ads, banners, etc. that are showing up on those pages. I do that to find out what phrases advertisers are using to advertise to the people reading those pages.

Then it’s off to Google’s AdWords tool to find out now much advetisers are paying per click to advertise to this group of people and if those numbers are appealing to me, I investigate the niche even further.

I ask (and research):

Do the people passionate about this niche congregate anywhere online, like have they set up groups on social networking sites, are there active forums or other online communities in the niche, are there prominent, busy frequently bloggers in the niche, does the topic get stumbled, bookmarked, etc. on a lot of those services?

Do people actually spend a lot of money on products and services in the niche? Is there new people entering the niche (as users) and is there money being spent on advertising?

…and the list goes on.

In a nutshell, a lot of conversational (ie: people talk a lot about it) references in the search engines means I want to get me a piece of the action in the niche, and I won’t have to rely heavily on search engine traffic to get it.

[Photo credit: Abulic Monkey via: Flickr]