The biggest mistake many new entrepreneur make when starting a new business is to create a product or service based on something they enjoy and interested. Creating product or service based on your interest isn’t bad. But is there any demand and market for the product after several months working hard creating it?
This is the major problem many new entrepreneurs are facing. They have no idea where to find people buying their products. They are spending many sleepless night just to create fantastic products but finally realize that nobody wants to buy their greatest products.
If you do an analysis carefully, you will notice that those people are creating product before they find the market that wants the product. In the real world, what entrepreneur should be doing is finding the market first before they start to create their own products and services. This will give you a better chance to success.
How can we find and research the market? In this article, I’ll be showing you one very good way to find a profitable market by applying killer keyword strategy.
Looking For High Keywords Searches
Let’s start with keyword research. We need to find what are the words people are searching and how many times they are searching. The more times someone searches for a word, the more popular and more demand the word is. So it make sense to look for those keywords with high searches.
There are many tools available to find out how many times people are searching a keyword per month. One of the free and recommended tool is Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Personally I use this tool very often.
Assume you are in dog training niche. So we can start by searching “dog training” in Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
From the diagram, you can see that the 2nd column is the number of searches per month. You should look for those monthly searches of at least 10,000. The higher the better. It might not worth your effort to create a product for those searches with just 1,000 or 2,000. And you might not be able to grow your business in the future.
For our illustration purpose, I’ll choose “dog training classes” and “puppy dog training” with total monthly searches 14,800 for both. I believe you can analyze more keywords and find the perfect keyword for you.
Just to explain a bit more why I choose “dog training classes” and “puppy dog training”. With “dog training classes”, you can actually create some kind of online membership site which people can subscribe to dog training class learning how to train a dog. For “puppy dog training” keyword, you can easily create an ebook teaching people how to train puppy dog.
Checking Keyword Competition
Next, we need to check how much competition in the search engines for each of these keywords. The competition here means how many other websites or web pages are promoting related product or service.
It is an important factor because if the competition is very tough, then it is difficult for you to acquire customer.
Let’s go to Google and enter the keywords “dog training classes” and “puppy dog training” separately. The number of competiting web pages are 18,200,000 and 872,000 respectively. It is very clear that “dog training classes” is much more competitive than “puppy dog training”.
But wait, there is a little trick that you should do to really understand who are your actual competitors. If a website does mention the keyword in their content but doesn’t have the keyword in their title, chances are they probably aren’t promoting the product.
By using the following command, we’ll be able to get a much better list of our competitors. This command will eliminate those web pages that are not mentioning our keyword in the title tag.
allintitle: dog training classes
allintitle: puppy dog training
Now the results look a bit different from the above without using “allintitle” command. “Dog training classes” is less competitive with 8,360 competing web pages. Given that there are only 8,360 competiting web pages for “dog training classes” keyword, it makes your chances of ranking well much easier.
Results/Searches Ratio (R/S Ratio)
This is the most important step – data analysis. Here are the data collected.
Keywords: dog training classes vs puppy dog training
Number of Searches: 14,800 vs 14,800
Number of Competing Web Pages: 8,360 vs 44,000
Let’s do some calculation based on the data we’ve collected. It is called R/S ratio (results/searches ratio). Results mean the number of competing web pages. It can be used to determine how much demand there is for a product/keyword.
The keyword “dog training classes” is searched 14,800 times and number of competitors is 8,360, so R/S is:
8,360/14,800 = 0.56
Let’s look at another keyword “puppy dog training”. It is searched 14,800 times and number of competing web pages is 44,000, so R/S is:
44,000/14,800 = 2.97
Typically we’ll look for R/S ratio which is less than 2. The lower the R/S ratio, the more profitable the keyword will be for you. So the winner is “dog training classes”.
Conclusion
When we’re trying to build an online business, it’s important to find the market before creating your product. In the market finding process, killer keyword strategy should be applied to find those keywords with low results/searches ratio (R/S ratio). It will help you to build a more profitable business no matter which industry you’re in.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Lovely article.
Doing your analysis carefully before starting your next big project in vital and gives you a better and higher chance to success.
@Salwa,
Yes, without proper planning, you may not know what your market want.
This scoring system is very similar to KEI Score that WebCEO gives you when trying to understand keyword effectiveness as related to search volume & competitiveness. Nice article.
Just found your site today. Good post on creating a basic scoring system, but I think you need to look at it a bit differently when thinking about traffic numbers and the type of site you are trying to get serps for. Some sites might be well served by qualified 1000 to 2000 monthly search opportunities, where the demand for a product or service is not high but very focused.
Leather boat seats, for example, are not as popular a search term as dog training, but let’s say for the sake of argument that it only has 2000 searches per month. That’s an average of 66 per day. If you can get an above the fold result, then you have a 40% chance of getting a click. That’s about 26. With that type of search, the prospect is highly qualified for a conversion, so let’s say we can convert that traffic at 4%, which is one order per day. That is a high ticket item, about 2K. That’s $60,000.00 in sales a month from a 2000 search a month keyword.
See what I’m saying?
@rumblepup,
If we are using SEO for your approach, then we need to check the competition. If the competition is low, then it will be easier to rank your web page. If we are using PPC, then of course it will be easier compare to SEO.
I have experimented a lot with the keywords in my website. Finally I selected keywords by brooding over all the SEO aspects. Less competitive keywords are definitely good to start with but they have comparatively lesser search volume than the high competitive keywords. So it becomes very difficult to choose when we think about the future of the website. Everybody needs more traffic! What do you think?
@SplitFive,
I do recommend you select 2 types of keyword and optimize both category together, primary keyword and secondary keyword. Primary keyword is short tail keyword which is very competitive and high traffic. Secondary keyword is long tail keyword which is less competitive and less traffic. When your site is new, you can get higher ranking for those secondary keyword easier and it can bring you some traffic at the beginning stage. Since you’re also optimizing primary keyword, eventually you will get higher ranking for primary keyword once your site becomes established site and you have accumulate enough inbound links.