Small business marketing insight - getting niche keywords the easy way

(photocredit: sharif)

Getting small business niche keywords the easy way

Easier, anyway.

I've told you how RankTracker is great about finding keywords in conjunction with Google's Keyword Tool, right?

Now, I recently ran into the problem where I ran this great list through Google and RankTracker and came up with only about 5 niches and the rest were too big to mess with. And these keywords weren't particularly related to each other, which meant I'd reached a dead end... wait -- not so fast.

I recognized that within those niche keywords themselves were other keywords which might expand if I backed up a bit. So here's the new sequence:

1. Take your handful of usable niche keywords.
2. Run them through Google Keyword Tool again.
3. Take those results and run through RankTracker to find KEI
4. Take any that are above 100 in traffic and run them through Suggest->WordTracker.
5. Now, you cut off all below 2.0 KEI and 20 in traffic.
6. Weed out the nonsense ones, and you have just expanded your list to find more related niches.

Now, in this you don't throw away the upper competition keywords as long as they have good KEI. You are going to start, as usual, with the smaller niches and then keep adding in content with the same or similar keywords to take on related niches and will find yourself ranking for that keyword with the big competition.

That sequence is a bit faster than what I recommended before - and the efficiency is what matters.

You'll now find that you've probably opened up a whole new line of niches to work at.

Here's my example - the results are fascinating.

Started out with 4 keyword phrases with these words in them: ideas, small, business, marketing, new. (I'd tell you the keywords, except they have some niches which I really want to work on. But if you run them through any sort of keyword generator, you'll wind up with what I had and even more than I did - hmmm, that's another approach, isn't it?)

Now, ran these 4 phrases through Google's Keyword Tool - and wound up with 200 keywords (I'm beginning to think they chop some off...)

Put these in RankTracker and ran them through the above sequence. Wound up with 120 finalists.

Four phrases on new small business ideas (and there are only so many articles you can write with variations of that phrase in it) and wound up with ways to take over large chunks of these top keywords: "advertising, marketing, business," and some others that are really just large niches.

I'd love to show you the results of these - and after I get my marketing campaigns rolling, I may.

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Another note is to keep track of all these keywords - with spreadsheets, as I've mentioned. Because as you keep working these keywords over, taking different slants on those same few subjects you're interested in, you are going to find several different approaches to the same subject. Meaning that you can create volumes more content and have several products in related niches. As you keep adding these to your ecommerce engine and your blog, you'll start developing your trusted authority in these areas - since they all have to do with each other.

Just make sure that you cross-link your ecommerce pages with your blog - both ways. This gives you more link-love being shared. And if you have only one domain, set one of these up as a subdomain.domain.com so that you'll then have a virtual site as "external" links to your other site. But that's another topic...

So - have fun with this.