Keyword Analysis:
Step 1 In Any Internet Business Marketing Strategy.

To begin the discovery process, we brainstorm and write down any phrases related to products we sell, including manufacturers and model numbers of our most popular items, as well as the products that provide us with the largest profit per sale. For example, if I were selling digital cameras, my list might include the following key phrases: digital camera, digital cameras, nikon, nikon digital cameras, Digital SLR Cameras from Nikon, and Nikon D5000 Digital SLR Camera.

Using licensed and proprietary software and online tools like the Google External Keyword Tool, we compile a huge list of search terms that are relevant and related to our specific market niche.

 

b) Market Analysis: What’s going on out there?

These tools will also give us an indication of the actual search traffic for each of our keyword phrases (search terms) as well as a sense of how many advertisers are paying to appear on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and what they are paying. This is a great indicator of the commercial viability of each search term. Why bother spending valuable time and money promoting pages optimized for terms that very few people are searching for?

And we don’t stop there. Our market analysis reports on each keyword phrase with data like organic search engine traffic, how many visitors we could expect each day if we were in the #1 position in Google, how many competing pages exist on the entire Internet for the phrase, and the ratio of broad match to phrase match results. This helps us determine how much and what kind of Internet promotion will have to be applied in order increase website traffic from each search term, whether PPC or in the Organic listings. Here’s where we start to see some of the "golden nuggets" in the Organic listings… with high traffic and low competition.

Note: We prefer Organic listings to PPC ads for long term sustainable traffic. We do use PPC to generate traffic, but usually only in the beginning testing phase, if at all.

We do this so that we can:
reduce our PPC spend
increase our SERP and PPC conversion rate
increase our landing page conversion rate
decreasing our cost per acquisition and cost per sale
and actually increase our long term return on investment (ROI).

 

c) Competitive Analysis: What are my top competitors doing right now?

Wouldn’t you like to know what your online competition is doing to promote their business? Of course you would. We all would.

When we analyze our market competition, we look at who is showing up for the terms that we’d like to show up for. We jot down notes about the Universal results that show up for our phrases and we take a look at the websites, images, videos, news items and articles that do appear on page 1.

Now that we have an idea of what kind of media is getting ranked for our keywords, we’ll drill down into any competing websites in our niche to help us decide how much effort it will take to push our competition off page 1 entirely – or at least, what it might take for us to appear on page 1, above them…

We take into account optimization tactics like domain age, number of incoming links to the page, and other factors such as if the keyword appears in the Title tag, the Header tag, or the description tag of our competitors’ web pages.

 

d) Strategic Analysis: Ready for Internet promotion.

Based on the above three reports, we compile a report that details suggestions on where to focus our marketing efforts for each keyword phrase. The suggested focus might be on article marketing for some phrases, while the evidence (data) might suggest press releases for others (or videos, or images, etc).

 

Bottom Line: We gather Competitive Intelligence before blindly spending our time and money chasing a dream niche or keyword phrase. The only reason we want to appear on Page 1 of the SERPs is to take advantage of actual traffic that may or may not have been discovered by our competition.