How to Do Keyword Research – From Keyword Seed List to a Profitable Niche

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This tiny little tutorial is meant for SEO beginners. Just for instance, if you never heard of what a seed list is or how to do keyword research, you are one.

Keyword seed list is a list of keywords you gather for further keyword research which may very well contain thousands of related keywords about the niche you are going to venture into. It’s the raw material. To attain this amount of related keywords, you’ll need a matrix for keywording that generates both logic keywords and illogic ones from the perspective of a human searcher.

Say you are targeting for ‘chocolate’ and researching a little bit of what specific niche of it you want yourself in cause’ apparently you’d be in dreadfully pierce competition if you target ‘chocolate’ for your grand new site, wouldn’t you.

Create a keyword seed list

To come up with a seed list of ‘chocolate’ you want to:

1. Collect as many related keywords as possible, because it’s a seed list and you want plenty of them to distill out enough of the really working ones for your site.
2. Include all of your core keywords in the list, in this case, ‘chocolate‘, ‘milk chocolate‘, dark chocolate‘, ‘chocolate truffles‘ and so forth.
3. Prepend or / and append prefixes and suffixes to the core keywords, coming up with keywords like ‘quality dark chocolate’, ‘dark chocolate bars‘ and ‘quality dark chocolate bar‘.

   There are a variety of prefixes and suffixes for chocolate here, such as brand, producer, color, shape, ingredients, season / occasion and price, it’s time for your imagination and creativity.

   Technically, you could have hundreds of thousands of different combinations of keywords this way, that’s when a handy seed list generator tool comes to help.

4. As it’s apparently a rather competitive niche, you want long tail keywords rather than short ones.

As of now, I don’t know any effective seed list generator and manager, and you’ll have to do it all by yourself, possibly with a paper and a pen or Notepad. Actually it’s fun to conduct step 3 while step 2 is pretty obvious with core keywords which everyone knows and mediocrity marketers are targeting, however you will end up with something rather different, creative and very profitable if you find your way in step 3.

Rule out 99% of the keywords in the seed list

Hopefully when you are done with the seed list, you have keywords in at least 4 figures’ amount.

In this phase, we’ll need to garner some search results for each of the keywords you have. Tough job with thousands of keywords, huh? Well, it won’t be such a tiring job once you encounter a gold-mine-keyword, which I believe, with such a mass, it’s highly possible.

To determine if a keyword is worth developing and exploiting, you need the following 3 search stats data for it:

1. The monthly number of times searched
2. The total number of results served up
3. The number of web pages with this keyword in title

1) There are a lot of free tools available to get the number of times any keyword is searched throughout a month. The most popular ones are Adwords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker, while you can also try these. However you should bear in mind that all the data is based on estimation and has only relative values.

2) To get the total number of results, you just search that term in Google and see the number of web pages it comes up against the criteria.

3) To get the number of web pages with the keyword in title, you will use ‘intitle: keyword phrase’ as the search term in Google.

A good keyword is one with plenty of monthly search volume while the competition of it should be as low as possible (small number of total results and intitle results). Personally speaking, without a deep pocket or if the keyword is not a core keyword that’s vital for my SEO campaign, I would never consider fighting for one with over 7 figures of total results and over 500 of web pages in intitle results.

Profitable keywords for your niche

Now you should have a rather effective list of keywords on your niche, ‘chocolate’ in this case, of about 100 to 500. The size varies by the size of your original seed list and the competition level of the niche: the bigger the original seed list or the less competitive of the niche, the larger of the effective keyword list.

By effective keyword list, I mean the list of keywords that can now be used in your whole SEO cycle — site structuring, content writing, PPC campaigns and such. With a good job done on the distilling process, each and every of the keywords in the list is pure gold as it bears significant search volumes against its low competition level.

You may now proceed to write content and build a site around this keywords list. However, it is the results (organic traffic) of the site that speaks for the effectiveness of your keyword research. Don’t be upset if it doesn’t work out. Do some more research and get around your previous ways to discover what works better.