Keyword Analysis Research

Remember all that niche and keyword analysis research you did? Well, once you've did that at the start, you're done, right? You'll never have to do that again, right? It's all over, right?

Wrong.

It turns out that I'm constantly doing keyword analysis research. Let's talk about that, about why you want to do ongoing research, and about when you'll want to do it again. And again. And again.

First of all, let's clarify what we're really researching and analyzing, here. It's all about keywords. When you were trying to determine what to sell or promote from your site, you wanted to know if a product was a good one or not. You wanted to know if it was potentially viable in the marketplace. You might have thought you were testing your products or your niche, but in reality, you were looking to see if there were any viable keywords that related to that product or niche.

Let's go through the thought process:

1. I have an idea of what to sell: Left-handed wind shifters
2. I know that I'm going to create a site to sell the left-handed wind shifters, and that I'm going to have to promote that site.
3. To promote it effectively, I want to know if there are search terms (keywords) that are in demand, but not flooded in competiton.
4. If I can't find keywords that I can effectively use to promote, then maybe the niche itself is too narrow, too unknown, too obscure. Or, it could be too big, too broad, too crowded of a market. It's best for me to think of something else.

See? You're really researching keywords.

So, here are some times to do keyword analysis research that relate to your website:

1 - Keyword Checkup

Things shift, things change. That's the one thing that you can count on as a constant on the 'net. So, keywords that you thought were great when you started might not be the best ones six months or a year later.

A personal example: On one of my blogs, I had researched some keywords when I started, and I found that "Dutch Oven Cooking" was a good keyword. About a year later, I was revisiting my keywords and discovered that "Dutch Oven Recipes" was a stronger keyword, by the numbers. I was getting good ranking as it was, and I wasn't sure I should re-optimize. In the end, I did. My traffic and my AdSense revenues have multiplied five-fold since then.

2 - Blog entries, articles

Every time I write a blog article, when I'm done, I take a quick moment. I think of keywords that would be of interest to people searching for that kind of content. I jump in and do some quick keyword analysis research and find out how good they are, and which ones are the strongest. Then, I go back and rewrite a few sentences of the article so that they contain more of those keywords.

I did it while writing this article. Why do you think you're seeing "keyword analysis research" over and over? Oops, there it is again...

3 - Expanding a niche

Let's say that your website is about selling baseball memorabilia. You've been doing a good business with it, and you're established with good rankings. If you're thinking about expanding into football items, that would be a good time to research the keywords that relate to football.

4 - A whole new website

Let's carry on with the same example of the sports memorabilia site. If it's going well, and things are smooth, maybe you might want to expand in a totally different area. Maybe you want to sell cosmetics, or car parts. Those are so different from sports memorabilia that you'd really have to set up a second site, or even a third, to do both. So, when you're starting from scratch, you'll want to research from scratch as well. Time for more keyword analysis research.

The bottom line is that you'll want to be constantly exploring your keywords. If you do keyword analysis research enough, you'll find that it's very easy and you can get a good idea in just a few minutes instead of hours.

Then you can keep expanding and growing.



Mark also has other sites and blogs, including Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Recipes, MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.

Mark's other blog posts: Save the Lawyer! A Book of Mormon Story, A Birthday Dutch Oven Gathering