Here is a quick tutorial on how to do proper keyword research for AdSense Sites.
To start things off we are going to work on finding a niche for which we will eventually build our site around. When looking for your niche you want to concentrate drilling down to a specific niche and avoid jumping into a large topic.
For example, let’s say that you are interested in pets. You would not want to build a site around the pets but instead try and narrow down to a more specific topic. You could go with “dog trainning” or maybe “cat health”. You want to go with a topic that is specific and avoid any general topics.
How do you come up with a niche? Start by listing several topics that you are interested in. Pick topics that you are knowledgeable in and that you have a interest in as this will make writing articles and promoting your site much easier. You can pick a topic that you do not have a lot of knowledge in but it will be a little more work for you. It’s your choice.
Once you have a topic picked out, we are going to do a little keyword research to help you find a niche within that topic that people are interested in. The last thing you want to do is find a niche and build a site and later realize that you are the only person interested in it!
To do our initial keyword research we are going to use the free Keyword Research tool fro SEO Book which can can be found here.
Simply enter in a general keyword about your topic. Staying with the pet theme, I will use the topic of “dogs”. I would enter in the term dog and them take a look at the keywords that appear. Look through the list and come up with several niches within your general term. For example, after entering in the term “dog”, I may pick the term from the list such as: dog training
This tool will also give me a list of dog related keywords. Next to each keyword will be two bars. The first is for the “Search Volume” and the second is “Advertiser Competition”. You want to find a keyword that has high search volume.
Wordtracker Keyword Research
Now that we have several niches picked out we are going to do some more extensive keyword research. For this we are going to use a tool called Wordtracker.
Wordtracker is not a free tool and you must pay to use the full version but you can get a 1 day pass for around $8. Trust me, this is the best $8 you are going to spend because without knowing what keywords people are ACTUALLY searching for and what kind of competition there is for those keywords, you are going to severely diminish your chances of building a successful site. This is the most important step in building your AdSense site and is one of the few things you will need to spend money on.
**Update: Wordtracker no longer has the 1 day membership and you will now need to get a 1 week membership**
Once you set up your Wordtracker account, login to your account and choose the “Keyword Universe” option. On the following screen simply enter in one of the keywords that are on your list and let Wordtracker pull up a list of related keywords.
When the list is complete you can start clicking on any terms that are related to the niche you are researching. For example, in my “dog training” example one of the related terms that it found was “puppy training” which is related to the niche I am researching. I would then click on puppy training and a list of terms will appear on the right half of the screen.
Once the list appears on the right you can either click on each term that is related to what you are researching and it will be added to your keyword basket or you can just click on the “add all keywords to your basket” link and all the terms will be moved to your keyword basket.
Using the “dig” link will show all related terms to that keyword. Go through all the keywords and add all related keywords to your keyword basket. When you are finished with this just click on the Step 3 icon in the bottom right of the screen.
Step 3 let’s you determine how much competition there is for each of your keywords. This is critical because we want to be targeting low competition keywords which will give us an easier time ranking high for each term.
Simply click on the Step 4 icon and you will be taken to the Competition research page. For the competition research I usually just choose Google and choose YES for KEI Analysis and Quotes as shown below. Then click proceed.
If you have more than 100 keywords in your basket then you will have to do this for each 100 terms. Just use the Keywords drop down menu to select each 100.
After you have all the competition stats scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “View all your results” link and export your keywords into whatever format you choose.
Take a look at your keywords results and make sure you have plenty of terms that have less than 100,000 results under competition. Even better, see how many results you have that have 10,000 or less for competition. These will be the keywords that you target. If you do not have at least 30 to 50 keywords with low competition and at least 10 searches you may want to explore another one of the niches on your list. If you have several niches in mind, do keyword research on them all so you can then pick the best looking niche based on your research.
Find your niche and then do your keyword research with Wordtracker. I again stress that the keyword research is the foundation for everything we will do from here on out. Don’t skimp out on this step and do extensive research.
If you have any questions, just post a comment and I will post a reply to help you out.
