How to Find the Right Keyword for Your Niche Site

In my last article I gave you some tips for finding and choosing a niche to create a website on. The next step (after finding a niche) is to find a long-tail keyword to go along with it. A long-tail keyword is simply a phrase someone types into a search engine that is multiple words and less common. For example if you were to type "golf" into Google, that is NOT a long-tail keyword, its simply a keyword. Instead if you were to type in "How To Learn Golf", that would be a long-tail keyword.

The reason you want to target a longer keyword is because there will be less competition. The goal is to rank on the first page of a search engine (Google being the mac daddy), so if there are 30 million results it will be impossible. When you have a longer keyword there are much less results and a very good chance you will be able to get on the front page of Google. Typically you will want to find a search phrase that has at least 100 searches per day and less than 50,000 results. There is no sure fire way for determining this. There are tools available that aide you in this area, but they are not accurate. They probably have a 75% accuracy at best (which is good enough).

I personally recommend using a tool called Wordtracker. They have a free version (which is obviously limited) and a paid version. For now all you need is their free version. Once you are there you want to type in your niche. Once you do this it will give you a list of common key phrases people type in, and it will list the estimated amount of searches per day. So if your niche is boats just type in the word boat (or boats). It will give you the most common search terms. You will only be able to see the first 100 if you are using the free version.

I just typed that in and I saw that "How to buy a boat" was a common search term with 75 searches per day and 38,000 results in Google. I know I said a minimum of 100 results per day but I would normally write a search phrase like this down anyway. Its a smart idea to keep an excel (or google docs) spread sheet. Just record each decent search phrase you come across, the amount of searches, and the amount of competition (or results) in Google.

You'll have to do some thinking when finding a good long-tail keyword. If you don't find any decent ones by typing in the name of your niche then you will have to add in words. I usually add in the word "how" to my niche. A lot of subjects/niches have a ton of people searches for "how" to do something related to it. So if your niche (like I said before) falls under boats, people may search "how to build a boat", "how to ride a boat", "how to get your boat registered". Get what I'm saying? Just use your imagination.

Once you have all of your key-phrases add up the number of searches per day. Aim for at least 5 long-tail keywords. You will be using these phrases in the articles you are going to right. So when someone is searching for something your page will show up in the search engine under the specific term you targeted. This is a part of SEO (which stands for search engine optimization).

Stay tuned for my next article in this series.