Part 1: Finding Keywords - Longtail Sniper Guide

Welcome to Part 1 of the Longtail Sniper Guide. If you have no idea what this is, then go here.

The internet is based on keywords. People make an extraodinary amount of searches everyday making search engines like Google rich. However, Google isn’t perfect because it has to use machines to makeup the search results. This means many long tail keywords have terrible search results that offer very little value to the searcher.

Why is this so? The main reason I believe Google offers bad results is that people sometimes search for unusual combinations of keywords. These strange combinations of keywords are simply not used in content very often, so Google has to make it’s best guess.

However, this gives opportunity for internet marketers to fill in the gap and actually help Google give what people are looking for and in turn also help you make money. If you’re thinking about doing any spamming, think again because your income will be limited and temporary. This is because Google will see how searchers are viewing your site. If they click on your link and quicky hit the back button, you won’t keep your search ranking.

Enough with the theory, let’s get to action.

Judging Keywords

The first step is to understand how to judge keywords. From my experience, I look at the following list of criteria.

  1. Popularity
  2. Competition (Top 10 Search Results)
  3. Monetization

Popularity

There are multiple ways to judge how much search volume a given keyword gets. Thirty Day Challenge revealed an amazing way to quickly view the search volume of any given keyword. They used Google Trends to approximately figure out how much volume a given keyword had. It was more accurate that many keyword tools out there. It isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done.

The best way to judge popularity using the Thirty Day Challenge method is to use the GTrends tool. You can search for any single or combination of words and it will give you a list of 100 related keywords with a little graph button on the right. Click on this graph button to bring up the Google Trends stats plus competition. Ignore the part that says (< 30,000 and > 100). We’re going to use a better more sophisticated way of judging keywords.

What you need to focus on is the “Actual Visitors Per Day”. This is an approximation by comparing the keyword you chose to “Male Yeast Infection” which receives about 500 visitors a day.

Write down your number (spreadsheets are recommended). Depending on the niche, I pay attention to any number above 30-40. This means the keyword is getting traffic. Higher the better of course.

Competition

This is the trickiest part. As I mentioned earlier, the first metric you need is the GTrends competition number. This is taken from a simple Google search when you search: “keyword1 keyword2 etc”.

Thirty Day Challenge mentioned to only go after keywords which have 35,000 or less websites ranking for your keyword. I, however, do not take such a simple approach.

If the keyword as under 100,000 competition, I judge it as fairly easy to get into the top 10 and rise. I then make a note on my spreadsheet.

However, if the competition is above 100,000. I then judge the top 10 in the search results. The following are the things I look for:

  1. Is the keyword odd? By odd, I mean is this keyword NOT used commonly when writing. For example, news reporters may use “Fish Oil” much more often than “Fish Oil Pills”. The more odd, the better because there will be less competition despite there being still plenty of pages in the search results.
  2. Results pointing to home page. If most of the top 10 is pointing to the main page of a site like www.fishoil.com instead of www.fishoil.com/pills. Then I can be reasonably sure that the keyword is heavily being targetted by others. It may not be worth my time compete with others head on.
  3. How are Web 2.0 sites ranking? If I see a lot of Web 2.0 sites in the top 10, this is good because it usually means I can beat them with a better strategy. Web 2.0 sites include Digg, Propeller, Ezinearticles, Yahoo Answers, and so on.
  4. Page Rank. Page Rank (PR) is a way Google rates individual pages on the web. It is updated every few months. If Google likes a webpage, it will usually give a higher page rank. This is why Google.com is PR 9. To easily check PR, download the FireFox Add-on SEO for Firefox. Keep in mind that judging by PR is much more complicated than you think because Google ranks pages for keywords also based on many other factors like how relevant is your page to the keyword. You’ll understand this more with experience.

Based on the above, I make a mental note about how much competition the keyword has (write it down too!).

Monetization

How easy is it to make money with a keyword. There are a few of ways to do this:

  1. Pay Per Click (Advertisement) - When you search for a keyword, you’ll notice ads on the top and right. These are paid advertisements. It is wise to check them out to see if they are selling a product that has an affiliate program. If you do see affiliate programs, you know there is a good chance to make money off it. Start collecting these affiliate programs.
  2. Study the keyword. “Buy Fish Oil” is much more likely to result in higher conversions than “Fish Oil”.
  3. Find Affiliate programs related to your keyword. The more programs, the more likely the niche can be monetized.

Monetization is important because you doesn’t matter if you have thousands of visitors if you can’t even make a buck off them.

So now you have a basic idea of how to judge keywords. Remember that with experience, you’ll be able to refine your ability to judge them. Even every failure helps give you a better idea.

Finding Keywords

There are a lot of keywords out there. It can be a daunting task to analyze thousands of keywords out there. That’s why we use tools to make it easier on ourselves. The following is a list of methods/tools I use to gather keywords.

  1. Reverse Affiliate Method (RAM) - Start looking at various affiliate progarms to start brainstorming various niches. You want to join performance based networks like Commission Junction, AzoogleAds, Never Blue Ads, ClickBank (Digital Goods) and so on. Sites like Publisher Spot and AffiliatePrograms.com are good places to start looking for more.
  2. Keyword Tools - A great free one is GTrends which I mentioned previously. It uses Word Tracker’s free service and merges it with what was learned in Thirty Day Challenge. I also recommend GTrends Made Easy. It is a software tool that runs on Win XP that will pull the GTrends values for lists of keywords. This saves time. It will also pull the keyword database from Wordze (another great keyword tool) and get the GTrends values from those as well. Then you can sort through the information for the keyword that meet your criteria. I use this technique ALOT.
  3. Subjects you have an interest in. Look into areas where you have knowledge in and try to think of keywords that someone like yourself would use when trying to solve a problem or when looking to buy something.
  4. Explore popular products. Sites like eBay Pulse and Amazon. A nice list can be found in the Thirty Day Challenge forums here.
  5. Check out magazines and other niche publications at your local book store. If a company can afford to put out magazines, then there is money in the business.

There are definitely more ways to find keywords. It takes very little time to check keywords especially if you use the tools I described above. I recommend you spend some good time with keywords. It is the building block of the internet. Whenever you think you have exhausted your search, think again. I have learned this over and over again. However, don’t spend too much spend on it since keywords are worthless if you don’t test them.

Now it’s time to go to Part 2 where we test the best keywords we find.