To develop a successful website online it must at least meet this minimum criteria:

• There must be demand for the product / service / information.
• The level of competitiveness must be understood and accepted as reasonable and attainable
• You need to be able to monetize the site after successfully obtaining traffic.

The elite marketing types of the world can create a market. The rest of us need to identify and take advantage of one that already exists.

Identifying Demand

There are many products available for sourcing keywords and obtaining demand estimates for those keywords. Notice the word estimates. Always use multiple sources of information to get a feel for keyword demand.

Online tools that provide demand estimates are derived from sample data and are subject to spamming and demand ramping due to automated rank checking and webmasters protecting their most lucrative keywords by automated requests using keywords that are otherwise worthless. For this reason, the most competitive (and obvious) niche markets will generally show higher demand using tools than really exists while less competitive niche demand can many times be underestimated by keyword services.

Here are a few of the many resources available online:

Free Wordtracker
This tool provides 100 results estimating the daily searches from a seed keyword entered into the tool. The results are from 300 million metacrawler queries over a 90 day period. The keywords are updated twice per week, separates singular and plural terms, and has adult filtering on by default.

The tool provides a hyperlink to “drill down” long tail keywords to mine results that contain the word or words in them. This tool is a great place to begin your keyword mining.

They also provide a plugin to Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox browsers enabling keyword mining right from your address bar.

Identify results you find relevant and popular enough and place them in a spreadsheet.

GTrends from Wordtracker
This tool is everything free Wordtracker is and even more. I only mentioned free Wordtracker above for two reasons. One, you can build it right into your browser, and the other being that GTrends can be taken offline on occasion.

GTrends adds a historical perspective to the daily search results shown for the last 90 days. The graph shows search volume for the keyword from prior years, estimates the actual visitors for the #1 SERP in Google, and displays their concept of competition (which I would never use....ever).

Wordtracker also provides a link to Google Trends for regional information, as well as a link to search for the keyword + affiliate for monetization ideas.

Keyword Discovery
Keyword Discovery provides a free tool that serves up the top 100 searches related to any seed keyword entered in the tool. The tool provides search volume for the last 12 months for each search term using a huge 36 billion search database that includes 180 search engines worldwide.

Again, use this tool as another source of keyword mining and demand criteria to compare to Wordtracker on your spreadsheet of mined keywords.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Google provides a keyword sandbox that provides excellent mining including the ability to enter multiple keywords.

This tool does not provide hard demand quantities but is excellent for comparison of search volume with seed keywords and includes a graph showing seasonal trends for the last 12 months.

Columns can be selected to display estimated cost per click for search terms as well as advertiser competition levels.

Google Traffic Estimator
Once you have developed a list of keywords that show good levels of competition using Free Wordtracker and Google's Adwords Keyword Tool the traffic estimator provides the estimated number of clicks an advertiser can anticipate based upon bidding for ad positions 1, 2 or 3 when participating in Adwords.

We use these numbers whether the client plans a PPC campaign or not just to get a feel for competition levels and advertising cost. Spammed keywords that show big demand on keyword tools will not have high advertiser competition.

Identifying Competition (KEI is worthless)

Ranking can be tough. Pick the wrong keywords and you need cash, time, patience, and skill to achieve high rankings.
KEI is not the way to identify the level of competition in a niche. It is, however, a good indicator of how long the sandbox period will be for a new domain entering the niche.

Nobody really builds a website with the idea of ranking on page 3. Ranking in the top 3 positions on page 1 is what its all about. When choosing keywords it is important to understand what it will take to rank for those keywords, and the value of ranking for them.

There are dozens of important criteria used to rank web pages. Nobody really knows all of them but there are ways to identify the level of competition you will be dealing with. A good start would be to identify the following about the top 3 pages for your money keywords.

• Quantity & Quality of Backlinks
• Domain Age
• On Page Optimization
• Internal Linking Strategy (links from domain pages to target page)
• Size of domain & Freshness of Content

Long Tail Keywords
The purpose of mining hundreds of keywords for your niche is to work them into the content naturally as you create your site. Often you will find that more traffic is derived from hundreds, or even thousands, of long tail keywords than is possible with the main keywords you target for your site. These keywords are not the ones we are concentrating on but are the heart and soul of a new domain.

A Wider Spectrum

To identify how many optimized pages have been created for your keywords don't use KEI. Instead measure this by using advanced search engine operators on Google.

allintitle
Example: allintitle:”blue widget”
This tells you the number of results containing your keyword phrase in the title of indexed pages on Google. Optimized pages would include the keyword phrase in the title.

allinurl
Example: allinurl:”blue widget”
This identifies the number of indexed pages with the keyword phrase in the url. Optimized pages would include the keywords in the url.

allinanchor
Example: allinanchor:”blue widget”
This shows how many hyperlinks are indexed with the keyword phrase included in the anchor text. With time you can divide the allinanchor results by allinurl and allintitle to get an idea of how much backlink optimization a keyword phrase has compared to others you have experience with. (This is subject to some skewing however)

Real World Example

Lets look at an example of two different niche keywords on a spreadsheet to see the difference in market competitiveness.

If you simply looked at these two using KEI and quoted indexed pages alone these two are not drastically different. However, the strengths and weaknesses of each are apparent when evaluating more metrics.

SEO Planning

This type of analysis is helpful in developing your SEO plan which is the topic of our next website building post.

This post will discuss many factors including:
• Branding
• Domain Names
• Tiered Website Design
• Keyword focused pages
• Global and local navigation
• Indexing & PageRank

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