How to find niche terms

by Trevor Stolber

Successful SEM or Search Engine Marketing has a lot to do with how smart you are at identifying niche keywords. What is a niche keyword? Why do I need a niche keyword? I know what keywords people use to search for my products! How do I find niche keywords?

These are all things that people think and say. So let's deal with them in order.

What is a niche keyword?

A niche Keyword is an untapped resource. A niche keyword is a keyword that is relevant to what you are trying to sell / provide with lots of searches and comparatively little competition.

Why do I need a niche keyword?

Due to the high searches and low competition these are extremely easy to optimise in the SEO process and subsequently are easy to get high rankings for. This in its self should explain why. It is much better to target your marketing at a few niche keywords that receive a small amount of very highly targeted traffic rather than struggle to get anywhere near the top results for a highly searched highly competitive generic search term.

I know what keywords people use to find my products!

This is the trap that many people fall into. Please don't use this line of thinking when marketing on the web. The fact is that whilst you may have a broad idea of what people search for to find your product - it doesn't mean that they will. There is also usually plenty of niche or very targeted keywords you can use that will bring a much higher conversion rate.

How do I find niche keywords?

This is a good question, so now we have covered why you need niche keywords lets discover how to find them. By now, I am sure, you can't just aimlessly surf the web and search engines and discover a niche keyword. After all a keyword only remains as a niche if no one else (or relatively few people) has found it.

We must be able to see how many people search for a keyword and how many competing sites there are for that keyword. An excellent tool for this is wordtracker - available at wordtracker.com. Word Tracker gives you a free demo and offers a yearly subscription, which is worth its weight in gold if you want to market a web site effectively. The wordtracker process goes roughly as follows - enter some words that are close to what you are marketing, word tracker then gives you a long list of terms that people search for that relate to these, you then tick which ones are relevant.

Perform the analysis and wordtracker does its magic. The way wordtracker measures a keyword is by its KEI analysis or Keyword Effectiveness Index. This is basically the number of searches for the term - divided by the number of competing web sites. The lower the KEI the better the keyword is to target. Another very good free resource for this that I have stumbled upon is NicheBot http://www.nichebot.com, which does something very similar in a google style manner. This is quick and easy service to use and in my opinion should be in every online marketer's toolbox!

Let's go through an example using NicheBot.

We will use the example of a sports shop selling special sports shoes.

Now most people would immediately think of targeting the term "sports shoes". That's a fair enough thought, but think a bit more and how many different products and types of products does that cover? Lets look at it.

Keyword Phrase	Pages	Comp	Ratio
sports shoes	6,160,000	402,000	4620.69

That's a lot of competition on a very high ration.

Now lets look at a more specific word

turf sports shoes

106,000

0.40

And hey presto in just a quick search I have already found one niche keyword. If you were selling this type of product you would stand a very high chance of ranking highly in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) and would likely get the majority of highly targeted traffic all be it a slightly lesser volume than for the more generic keyword.

Let's analyse how you decipher this then. The keyword phrase bit is obvious.

The page column lists the number of pages that are returned in google using this search; this means that is the number of pages that contain some of the keyword or phrase.

The Comp column is the number of competing sites with the whole keyword as its title. This then equates to the ratio, which is obtained by the competition and the amount of searches performed.

For a reliable result on the amount of searches performed for a keyword I use either word tracker if I have it open or Overtures keyword suggestion tool, which is also helpful for identifying niche terms. This gives a list of the amount of searches performed in the previous month. Please note that this only represents about 85% of the actual value.

There are similarities between this and keyword hunting for PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns as well.

So there you have it, niche keywords explained!

Trevor Stolber is an Online Marketing professional specialising in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Trevor Stolber owns and runs WEB-Wizard LLP who specialise in fast and efficient business web sites.
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