Keyword Confusion? – Going From the Niche to the Keyword
People often have the misconception of what qualifies a keyword as being quality, so I am going to hopefully help clarify this once and for all.
Over the years I have dealt with 1,000′s of PPC campaigns and likely a simlilar number of SEO campaigns (on site and off site). The focal point of these campaigns was, you guessed it, KEYWORDS.
First though, what is a keyword?
My definition will make it much easier to understand than some of the convuluted “marketing speak” definitions out there. A keyword is a term that someone searches when they are looking for something.
Nothing more, nothing less. Don’t trick yourself into thinking a keyword is something more complex than it actually is.
How bout’ an example of keyword research?
For more clarification, I want to walk you through a couple of examples that are niche related. I want to start with a clean palette though and start the process without a niche. Then I will work my way towards finding “qual ity keywords”.
I am going to grab a word from one of my past sentences, “palette”. Let’s see what we can come up with:
A totally random search and I have 3 pretty good starting points for niches. The keywords are “not” quality yet though, so lets choose a niche and refine our search here. I will pick something I don’t know ANYTHING about (I hope not), “make up”. 
I chose to elaborate on the term “eyeshadow palette” so I clicked on the term in Jaaxy. Here are the corresponding results.
Wow…that is a lot of search results relating to eyeshadow palletes. In fact, I added this to a keyword list to see what my anticipated traffic numbers (monthly) could be if I ranked on the first page of Google for all of these terms.
1348 average searches per month to my “make up” site. These terms will also be very easy to get ranked under, I can tell by looking at the QSR (Quoted Search Results). Quoted search results determine how many rankings in Google and I recommend that you find keywords with under 400 QSR. Let’s take a look at some of the results for the “eyeshadow pallette” keywords and see if they make the QSR cut.
They ALL make the cut!
Value of this research: $1500
If you were to pay for this type of traffic, you could expect to easily spend $1300-$1500 per month. If you spent some time creating content relevant to this on your website or through article marketing efforts, you could get ranked under these terms.
These are “quality” search terms. They have minimal competition (under 400 competiting websites in the world), get a good amount of exact search traffic (over 100 searches per month), and they are all relevant to my [gulp], make up campaign.
I even quickly found a couple of great domains (using the Find Domain function) that I could buy.
largeeyeshadowpalette.com (was available when I wrote this)
180eyeshadowpalette.com (was available when I wrote this)
brighteyeshadowpalette.com (was available when I wrote this)
Below is an example of the domain search function in Jaaxy that I used to quickly scan domains to see their availability.
You could buy these domains and (a) resell them on the domain marketplace (like flippa.com) for a profit. You could probably fetch $50+ for each of these domains if you have good sales copy and you have the right buyer. That is a profit of $40 per domain.
OR you could build mini-sites on these domains and secure the top rankings in search engines like Google because you have the “keyword rich” domain. Once these sites start getting rankings and traffic you could either flip them (for several $100 depending on traffic), or you could monetize them through advertising, capturing leads, or selling “make-up related” products on them.
A Quick Overview of a Quality Keyword
Here are the question that you need to answer when assessing the quality of a keyword.
(1) Is it relevant to your niche? If you don’t have a use for the keyword, then there is no point in using it. For many people that write about various topics, this is not as critical as they just search for a quality keyword regardless of the niche.
(2) What is the search engine competition? If you are using Jaaxy, you can quickly assess this by looking at the QSR. This reveals exactly how many pages in Google there are competing with you. If there are under 5,000, you can typically get a decent ranking but I usually aim for under 400 QSR. There are many more keywords out there that have limited competition than you problem think (millions!). The lower the QSR the better.
(3) How much traffic does the keyword get? First, you want to make sure that your are searching for EXACT search traffic. This will be the most accurate traffic numbers that you can use at is the “bare minimum” traffic that you can expect out of a keyword. If the keyword has more than 100 searches monthly, then it is a good one. The higher the better.
Those are really the only 3 metrics that you should concern yourself with when doing research. Don’t over think keyword research or you will waste far too much time “analyzing” and not enough time “doing”.
I hope you enjoyed this post. Feel free to share it!
Tags: best keyword tool, breaking down a niche, finding keywords, jaaxy keyword tool, keyword confusion, niche research, ways to find keywords
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Comments (21)
Thanks for the numbers needed in search. Btw, Flippa doesn’t deal with domain buying and selling anymore.
@Kat
Flippa actually does still accept the sale of either domains (without a hosted website) or domains w/ a website. Both can lead to great ways to monetize your keyword research when you buy a keyword rich domain. You should take a look at Jay’s Case Study on his HaloWiki.com website he sold in a matter of days for a 500% profit. It is within the blog here.
You listed the qualities of a keyword but you didn’t mention commercial intent. Can jaaxy help us find profitable keywords that attract buyers? If not, then how do we recognize one?
@Jim
Yes, Jaaxy can help you find keywords that are profitable and attractive to buyers. Commercial intent is not necessarily a good guage of whether or not the specific keyword attracts buyers. The good thing about Jaaxy is that we have removed meaningless data such as this (MSN had no way to determine if someone purchased through keywords, only the merchant knows) and we focus on the metrics that are important and provide insight and efficient data that will speed up your day to day tasks. Find domains quick that have great value. Find keywords that have very low competition and high traffic effortlessly. Find out exactly what the competition is doing and analyze what their SEO regime that is leading them to top rankings. The important stuff!
Cheers,
Kyle
Great post Kyle. A lot of people offer advice about KW research these days and make it seem more complicated than it needs to be.
@Nekas
Glad you liked the article and thank you for your feedback. We are very proud to officially rolling out Jaaxy to the general population very soon, you can get it now at $19/mth…we cannot make any guarantees on the price point going forward as this was the intended beta pricing.
Nice post, but not sure how you will make $. Would you have to approach an eyeshadow manufacturer and ask to sell their products? I guess I am still caught in the thinking of: low competition keyword with high traffic does not always monetize your website, because they are low competition for a reason!
@Deborah
You would then use this keyword research to obtain traffic via article marketing or on site SEO (by focusing on these keywords). Once you get ranked and have this traffic coming in, there are many different ways to monetize it, one being the way you mentioned with the promotion of products. You actually don’t have to contact these companies however, you can sign-up to affiliate programs which allows you to automate the process.
I have been using this technique for the past three weeks and I am happy with the results.
Thanks again
@Sunganani
Awesome stuff. It is a technique that I always implement when doing my keyword research and it allows anyone to start with a very broad concept and uncover MANY different niches.
Nice example of how to make keyword research count!
it looks like life just got a lot easier with Jaaxy
Kyle,
Great, simple and business-minded article, loved it!
By working with a quality keyword regardless the niche one can write about various topics, therefore maximizing ones options, time and increasing traffic. In my view it simplifies everything and it makes much more sense but it only applies if you are either buying/reselling domains or exploring them with sub domains isn’t?
I did come across Jaaxy before but did not know that you and Carson were the co-owners. Will the premium of $19 per month remain the same once you go ahead with the official launch?
You guys are brilliant! It’s a pity that I can only take advantage of your specials due to the currency conversion, looking forward to your reply.
Really Like the article. I am just beginning to understand all this about keywords. Thanks for making my life even that much easier.
@Larry
Glad we could help!
Stay tuned to our updates on the Jaaxy blog as we are going to be revealing some more awesome keyword research tips and breaking apart some poor research habits that some people may have that lead to inefficiencies in the research.
Thank you Kyle for this great eye opening article!! I have a whole new way of looking at keyword research now and it doesn’t seem that scary anymore. Also i really like Jaxxy very quick and easy to use, please keep up the great work and thanks again!
Hi Kyle, the number of quoted search results is it really a measure of competition strength? I’ve read in many places that this is the wrong way of checking for competition.
I believe that the right way is by spying on the competing webpages to know how well they’re optimised in terms of on-page and off-page SEO.
If you can know the number and quality of back links your competitor have, you’ll know the number and quality of links you need to outcompete the competitor. This will tell you how strong a competing website is.
@Henlus
Quoted search results is the metric you want to look at when determining the number of competing pages in Google. This is KEY.
Competition (website) research is completely different, and the assumption that research backlinks is the key indicator is dated knowledge. Backlinks are fractional in terms of the weight on the rankings in Google from what they once were and it is impossible to attain proper metrics on the quality unless you read the actual content, understand their backlinks, and understand the inner workings of Google’s ranking algorithms.
Because of this, I suggest performing most of your research on the actual keyword competition versus the actual competition of the keyword as you can waste a considerable amount of time with very little results (if that makes sense).
I just signed up and really like the features. I have a question – all of the returns show Canadian returns. For example, if I input the word franchise it gives me keywords for Canadian franchises and Canadian franchising. I don’t live in Canada. I assume this is because the owners are in Canada with a Canadian IP tied into Google/ca? Any way to by-pass that or set for US?
@Judy
Input a more targeted term and your results will become more targeted, for example put your location. US franchise, American franchises, etc. The system is a smart system meaning the results get more relevant to you as you search.
I did the same keyword searches on Jaaxy and also on the Google keyword search tool to compare the two results and found them to be vastly different at times. Could you tell me why this is happening? Shouldn’t they be similar?
@Jan
We do not rely on just Google because the numbers are often inflated drastically. We leverage several different search engines including Google and have sophisticated algorithms on our end that do a much more accurate job of predicting the traffic that a particular keyword will get. That is why you see the disparity. Also, all of our results are based on exact results as “broad results” are relatively meaningless in this day and age.