The first thing you need to do is preliminary keyword research. This involves using keyword tools to find a large number of keywords that you would potentially want to target for your niche.
By now, you should have already chosen a niche. Now, you just need to gather a list of keywords you can use to get traffic from various sources such as search engines, or with pay-per-click marketing.
Let’s say you have chosen the acne niche. You’re targeting individuals who have acne and are desperate to get rid of it. You would probably want to start with seed keyword phrases like “acne” and “pimples”.
This would return keywords such as:
- Get rid of acne
- How to clear up acne
- Get rid of a pimple
I use the Google Keyword Tool for this:
This tool is free, and it returns results directly from Google’s own internal database of searches people have performed. Although no keyword tool is 100% accurate, Google’s own data is likely to be the most accurate you will find.
Google will give you around 100 keywords. You can then dig deeper by taking some of the keywords it returns and using those as seed keywords to find more.
If you are creating a small niche site, you may want to focus on just a handful of keywords. In this case, the 100 keywords you originally find may be enough. If you want to create a large authority site, you will potentially want thousands of keywords. This will require you to continue digging, using some of the keywords you find as additional seeds.
Once you have a list of keywords, you need to analyze them. Not every keyword is going to be one you would want to focus on for SEO purposes. Some won’t have enough traffic to make them worth the time, and others will have too much competition to give you a reasonable chance to rank.
In the next section, you’re going to learn how to analyze your keywords to find out which ones you should concentrate on.