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Let me first apologize for the delay in getting this post out. I just got back from a 12 day vacation where my wife and I celebrated our daughter’s 5th birthday by going to Disney and visiting with family. I’m back now and ready to rock and roll. So let’s get back to business!

When we last left our heroes we talked about how to find products to promote, how to select a niche and ways to verify if a product is in demand. We dabbled with keyword research and determined that we should stay away from trademarked terms regardless of how good the traffic may be.

In this section I am going to dig deeper into the keyword research side of things so lets get started!

Perform Keyword Research

In my previous entry (Niche Site Duel Part 1 – Selecting A Niche: My Strategy) I revealed that I was interested in creating a niche site around the topic of raw food juicing. My initial monetization strategy is to promote and sell high-end juice machines that I have experience with and like.

To do this, my goal is to create an authoritative repository of information related to juicing. The site will include juicing tips, juicer reviews, recipes and videos.

Since this duel requires that I use SEO alone to promote my site (and not pay for clicks) it is important that I choose a domain name wisely. For what it’s worth I employ this same process whenever I setup a website these days regardless of whether it is a PPC or SEO-based campaign. Back in the day SEO didn’t matter when you were buying traffic, but now the major PPC search engines like Google, utilize relevance (among other things) to determine how much to charge you for each click your ad receives.

In order to improve my chances at getting my site to appear on page one of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) I am going to look for a phrase that is targeted, has high traffic, and low competition. I will use Market Samurai to perform this analysis.

Since my niche site is focused on raw food juicing and my monetization strategy primarily revolves around the sale of high end juice machines, I am looking to attract an audience that is interested in juice machines. I would really like to focus my niche on the Vitamix 5200 and buy a domain like Vitamix5200.com. It’s targeted. It gets 1,627 searches a day and has a reasonable level of competition (32,700 competing websites). But alas, Vitamix is a registered trademark. So it’s a no-go for my first choice.

It’s a shame too because in addition to everything else, the specificity of the phrase would have attracted people in the Research and Purchase phase of their New Purchase Decision Making Process which I eluded to previously (See Niche Site Duel Part 1 – Selecting a Niche) as being the sweet spot.

The Keyword Phrase I Chose For my Niche

Since being precise with my keyword choice is not an option for me with my niche I ultimately had to settle with a broader/more generic term; but one I still think can be leveraged to attract people new to juicing. I tried several seed keywords that lead me to many dead-ends (i.e. words or phrases that I could not use due to Intellectual Property issues, insufficient traffic, little relevance or high competition).

This is the final path and process I ultimately followed:

Video Summary

1) Entered “Juice Machine” as my seed keyword into Market Samurai.

2) Ran the Keyword Research Module to generate a number of related search keywords and synonyms that people use when searching using similar phrases.

3) Selected “Analyze Keywords’ to collect “Competition” information for the provided keywords.

4) Applied the following filters:

• SEO Traffic(SEO): 80
• Phrase-to-Broad (PBR): 15
• SEO Comp (SEOC): 30,000

5) Noticed that juice machine had the most traffic but since it was my seed keyword it was not subject to my filters and had more competition than I would like (105,000 competing sites). On the other hand juicer machine was not only within spec (filter-wise) but when I sorted by SEOV (V is for Value) it became obvious that it had approximately 2.5 times the earning potential of “juice machine” making it a very attractive choice, especially if I want to place AdSense units on my site.

6) A quick check using Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module revealed that juicer machine had some strong sites in the top ten first page results returned by google for the phrase juicer machine. Not all were optimized however, and at least four in the top ten spot, including the site at the number one position, had a domain age of “-” which means that it is less than a year old.

So if I can optimize my site better then any of the people in the top ten position I can essentially replace them. I feel confident I can, so Juicer Machine it is!

Remember, you don’t have to be faster then the bear… you just have to be faster then the slowest person.

Conclusion

Getting the planets to align just right is no easy task. Trying to accommodate every requirement of your plan is the goal but not always achievable. Many times you have to concede one requirement to accommodate the other. That was the case here as I ultimately chose the fairly generic phrase “juicer machine” which fails to target people in the “Purchase Phase” of their “New Purchase Decision Making Process” (See Niche Site Duel Part 1 – Selecting A Niche: My Strategy for more on this). This just means I will be catching people at the early stages of their research and have to do more work on my site to convert.

Additionally the SEO analysis revealed that the competition is a little more steep then I would have liked. There are holes however that I intend to exploit and run for daylight.

Later I will take you through the IP Scrub portion of the analysis before actually purchasing my domain. Feel free to hit me up with any questions or comments you may have.