If you’ve reached this stage, you’ve decided on your niche and selected your products. Now it’s time to focus on what keywords you’ll need to use when promoting your site.
This is crucial for a review site that relies on search engine traffic for the bulk of its visitors. Many, if not most of your visitors will find your site by typing in a search term and seeing your site at the top of the results page. This search term is what we call a keyword – it can be more than one word – and the trick is to optimize your site for the keywords that your potential customers are likely to use.
Of course, that’s easier said than done, and keyword research can often be an involved and frustrating process. You need to get the balance right between a keyword with enough searches to generate a good volume of traffic, and one that’s not too popular that the competition for that phrase is going to be too strong.
Not surprisingly, there are several dedicated research tools available to help with this task. In this article, I’m going to discuss what I consider to be the best tool – Market Samurai – but I’ll also show you how to get the most out of Google’s own free keyword research tool.
Market Samurai
This is a hugely popular tool with affiliate marketers. To be fair, it’s much more than a simple keyword research tool. It can perform all kinds of niche and market analysis, all helping to give marketers that vital edge over the competition. But for our purposes, we’ll stick with the keyword program.
Although Market Samurai is a paid software, you can run it free for the first 30 days.
Once downloaded and launched, you’ll be asked to name your project (you can choose the phrase you want to research). You then select “Update” and click on “New Keyword”. Let’s say you’ve chosen “Digital Cameras” as your niche, to stick with the example from my previous article, and you want to find out what people are searching for in relation to that phrase.
Enter “Digital Cameras” into the keyword field and click “Update”. Next, go to ‘Keyword Research’ and select ‘Generate Keywords’ in the upper right corner. You’ll get a list of keywords related to your main phrase that people are searching for.
Clicking on “Keyword Analysis” will bring up an analysis of all the keywords on the list. To choose the profitable ones, here’s what to look for:
– For your main keyword phrase (this is the keyword you’ll use for your domain name), look for a monthly search volume of at least 800 with an SEOTC of no more than 20,000 in order to get a good chance of ranking in search engines.
– For other pages on your site, you can use relevant keyword phrases that have at least 150 exact match searches with an SEOTC of no more than 10,000.
There’s plenty more that Market Samurai can do, and you should check out the many online tutorials for more details. But for carrying out accurate keyword research that’s ideal for review sites, it’s a tool I can strongly recommend. Give it a try here.
The Google Keyword Tool
This free, online tool lets affiliates check the number of searches for a particular keyword. This is how to use the tool to research profitable keyword phrases:
- Navigate to the Google keyword tool page.
- Type the keyword phrase you want to search e.g. “best digital camera”. You’ll be asked to type in “captcha” phrase before you can start the search.
Always make sure that you check the ‘exact match’ box on the left hand side of the page. This will ensure your search numbers will be for the exact phrase you keyed in (in the order you specified) and not all phrases containing those words.Look at the list of suggested key phrases. The best keyword phrase niche is one that has fewer than 50,000 monthly searches and low competition. Millions of searches just means the competition will be huge and your chances of ranking high will be nigh on impossible. - If you hover over a search phrase that looks likely to be profitable and click on it, you’ll see a dropdown menu with an option to select ‘Google Insights for Search’. That takes you to the Google Insights page wher you can view other statistics, such as the locations where that phrase is the most popular and at what time of year that popularity peaks. That’s interesting for discovering seasonal and/or regional search phrases.
Google’s Keyword Tool is pretty easy to use and it’s free. It’s ideal for beginners who are still in the process of learning the ropes of affiliate marketing or those who are testing the market for a particular niche or product.
With many years of keyword research experience behind us, Hyaroo can provide an expert service tailor-made for review sites. We know precisely how to spot the “buying” keywords that are most likely to result in high conversions for affiliates.
If you’re ready to get your review site off to a flying start, contact us now and let’s get started.