Keyword Research for Beginners – Part 1 – Brainstorming

Why Do Keyword Research?

Before you choose a niche to promote, you must find out if it’ll be profitable. You need to market stuff that’s in demand. The idea is that you do the research in advance to qualify any niche of interest.

Find Your Seed Keyword

A seed keyword is usually a single word or maybe two words that sum up the niche. For pet products, the seed keyword would be pets, or if you’re only interested in promoting dog products, the seed keyword would dogs.

Keyword Research – Search for Competitors

Your first port of call is to monitor Google’s Adwords advertisements. There are the ones that appear on the right hand side of the Google search. We need an example to work with, so let’s assume we want to create an affiliate site selling candles. So using a seed keyword in our market (in our case, candles) we can check by typing the keyword into Google to find out if anyone else has sites or advertisements that target that big keyword. The image below shows the sponsored links at the top of the page. There were plenty more in the right hand side of the page too.

How Do We Figure Out the Most Obvious Keywords?

Go to Google’s Search page and type in the main, seed keyword for your market. We type candles.

Skip to the bottom of the page and Google will show you all the searches related to your seed keyword.

Now open up an EXCEL spreadsheet document and enter in the extra keywords you’ve just found. You know that people type these because Google listed them as related searches to the seed keyword, candles.

Click on each of the related keywords to discover more related keywords.

You might achieve a list of keywords like this (note, this list is not exhaustive):

Also check during this process that there are some paid Gooogle Adwords ads showing up on the right hand side. This indicates that there is profit in the niche. Over a period of time, the longer you see the same company’s adverts showing up – the more indication that the niche has money. No-one will continue to throw money at a Google Adwords account unless it is profitable for them to do so.

There are many specialised and paid tools that you can use to do research, but you can achieve a good start simply using Google as shown in this article.

Tags: affiliate marketing, google search, keywords

Category: Beginner, Keyword Research