2.1 – Introduction to Niche and Keyword Research
This module is extremely important, as it will guide you through choosing your niche and keywords.
By the end of this module, you will have picked a great niche that has short-term gains with long-term potential. That means your website can make good money within 6-8 months but still has the potential to become a 6-figure business 3-5 years down the road.
Here’s an overview of what you will learn in this module
- Brainstorming for Niche Ideas (lesson 2)
- Keyword Research Basics (lesson 3)
- Researching Products on Amazon (lesson 4)
- Finding Commercial Keywords (lesson 5)
- Finding Informational Keywords (lesson 6)
- Analyzing Competitors (lesson 7)
- How To Pick Your Niche (lesson 8)
- Identifying Low Competition Keywords (lesson 9)
- Building Your Keyword List (lesson 10)
A beginner’s mistake is to get extremely excited and choose a random niche with insufficient research in order to get to the “fun stuff”. Do not do this! Due diligence in niche selection will determine your level of ultimate success, so it is not something to half-ass.
Here are some questions to keep in mind as you go through this module. Please think them through, record your answers, and use them to guide you as you complete this module:
- What are your short term and long term goals?
- What are your hobbies or interests? Can you make money with them?
- What personal strengths, resources and assets do you have to leverage?
- How much are you realistically prepared to invest in your business?
It’s important to align the niche you choose with your own interests and work-style. This is the planning and setup phase, and the idea is to set you up for success with the least amount of resistance.
An example of that would be picking a niche that is profitable, but also something that you enjoy, aligns with your strengths, and is most likely to help you meet your goals with a level of time/financial investment you are prepared for.
Not to say it HAS to be all of these things, but for example you might run into trouble if you pick an extremely competitive niche you don’t care about, with a goal of fast income but without sufficient resources to invest in it (again time and money) to succeed in a competitive niche.
Ok! Let’s dive into setting you up with a niche that you love, are excited about, and sets you up for success!
2.2 – Brainstorming for Niche Ideas
The purpose of this lesson is to help you quickly generate a list of niche ideas using our 3 favorite sources. Let’s get started!
More specifically, we’re looking for niches where a wide range of physical products are available with prices from $10 – $500. 509
That’s a general rule of thumb, but don’t get stuck trying to find the “perfect niche”.
In the last lesson we talked about the common mistake of not researching your niche well enough. Well the flip side of that is you get STUCK trying to find the “perfect niche” and shooting down your own ideas and then never really get started.
Don’t do that. As we go through the process, just come up with as many ideas as you can. We’ll get to the actual objective evaluation and analysis of your niche ideas later on in this module Ok. Let’s get started!
Look at yourself and your surroundings
1. What have you bought? What you wanted to buy? What products you use the most?
Look around you and take notes of all the objects.
Also think about the niche they fall under.
For example, “adjustable dumbbells” are just one type of products you can promote in the Fitness or Weight Lifting niche.
2. What are your hobbies and interests?
Most successful people we know started websites around something they’re familiar with or at least have some kind of interests in.
Ask yourself these questions and write down your ideas:
- What am I naturally good at? 509
- What activities do I love to do in my spare time?
- What types of books and magazines do I usually read?
- What things do I plan on learning more about in the future?
- What are my problems that I’m looking for solutions online?
You can also ask your friends and family the same questions.
- This is a good exercise to help you get out of your own head.
- You’ll be surprised that they will give lots of very good answers that you could never think of.
- And if you ended up building a site around products or niches they recommend, you can hire them to create content for you or they can even do it for free.
Check Amazon’s categories/best-seller lists
Since we’re building sites promoting Amazon’s products, it just makes sense to do our research on Amazon, right?
There are 2 ways you can get niche ideas from Amazon. 509
1. Amazon Categories
Go to Amazon.com Fullstore Directory. Choose any sub-category that you like. I’d recommend to start with one of the following big categories:
-
- Electronics & Computers
- Home, Garden & Tools
- Sports & Outdoors
- Automotive & Industrial
- Beauty, Health & Grocery
- Toys, Kids & Baby
For example, I choose Exercise & Fitness under Sports & Outdoors.
Now look at the left sidebar of the page. You’ll see the main category are broken down into sub-categories. Note these down. They’re all good niche ideas.
Now look at the left sidebar of the page. You’ll see the main category are broken down into sub-categories. Note these down. They’re all good niche ideas.
You can also scroll down and find a lot more like this:
Now dig a little bit deeper by setting the filters to display only products with 4+ stars rating with prices ranging from $30 – $500:
Go through each product and trim down the names to get only the main keywords that we need.
Rinse and repeat this process with other categories and try find at least 20 ideas to add to your list.
Remember to get only the product keywords not product name at this stage.
2. Amazon Bestseller List
The process is basically the same.
Go to Amazon Best Sellers, then choose any category. Look at the sub-categories and trim down product names to get only the main keywords.
Reserve engineer big sites / competitors
Big review websites usually rank for hundreds of thousands of keywords.
But because they’re too broad and are ranking purely based on their strong domain authority, in a lot of cases, we can beat them pretty easily with more topically relevant website.
Visit these site, browse around and note down keywords that interest you.
Some Sites That We Like:
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- Thewirecutter.com
- Thesweethome.com
- Consumerreports.org
- Bestcovery.com
Homework
- Brainstorm a list of at least 5 hobbies/interests and 20 product keyword ideas.
- For each product keyword idea, answer this question “Which Does This Fall Under?” to think about the bigger niches you can build your site around.TIP: About.com is a big media company and they have hundreds of mini websites in almost every niche.You can go there, search for a product keyword, and the results will suggest some topics you can build your site around to promote that type of product.
- Record in our Niche Brainstorming worksheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nEdl3kSHMPeZ1QYLjvfocmGS-3PrYP_pdpSfi9poplE/edit#gid=456327993
2.3 – Keyword Research Basics
In this lesson, we’re going through some basic but important concepts of keyword research that you’ll need to understand before choosing keywords for your website.
What Are Keywords?
Keywords are simply phrases people use when searching for something. Most marketers divide keywords into 3 main categories:
-
- Head Keywords – They’re usually single-word keywords with very high search volume and competition. These keywords should be avoided, as they don’t convert very well and are almost impossible to rank for.
Examples: cooker, juicer, dog training, etc
- Body Keywords – These are usually 2-3 word phrases that get decent search volume (at least 2000 searches per month) with lower competition than Head keywords. They can convert better than Head keywords but are still very competitive.
Examples:
+ best juicer
+ best cooker
+ dog training tips
- Head Keywords – They’re usually single-word keywords with very high search volume and competition. These keywords should be avoided, as they don’t convert very well and are almost impossible to rank for.
-
- Long-tail Keywords – These keywords are usually long with 3,4,5 or even more phrases. They’re very specific with clear user intent. Even though they don’t get much search volume individually (as low as 10 searches a month), when added together, they could make up to 80% of online searches.This is the type of keywords that we’re mainly targeting for our website because they’re generally easier to rank for and they also convert better.
Examples:
+ best masticating juicer for leafy greens
+ best pressure cooker for beans
+ dog training tips for jumping
- Long-tail Keywords – These keywords are usually long with 3,4,5 or even more phrases. They’re very specific with clear user intent. Even though they don’t get much search volume individually (as low as 10 searches a month), when added together, they could make up to 80% of online searches.This is the type of keywords that we’re mainly targeting for our website because they’re generally easier to rank for and they also convert better.
What To Look For In a Keyword
Google has a free tool called Google’s Keyword Planner to help you search for keywords and get an estimation of the demand for each of them.
For example, if you type in “best adjustable dumbbells”, below’s what you’ll see:
Avg Monthly Searches
This is the amount of searches per month for the exact keyword on Google. We use this to estimate how much traffic we can expect when we rank for a certain keyword.
How much traffic you get depends on how high you rank in the search results. It’s safe to say that you’ll get about 20% of the numbers reported if you rank anywhere in the top 3.
Suggested Bid
This is basically an indicator of how much the traffic is worth. CPC represents how much people are willing to pay for a click for a specific keyword.
It also represents how much you can make per ad click if you have Adsense ad on your website (roughly 60% of the number showed).
Higher CPC means there are more money to be made.
Adword Competition
Please remember that the Competition column you see on Google Keyword Planner is the level of competition for Adword advertisers, not the competition on the search engine results page (SERP).
SERP Competition
This is the level of difficulty to get your website to the top 10 positions in Google.
Seasonality
Another important factor to consider when doing keyword research.
Searches based around the word “Valentine” will not get high search volume in the summer.
Searches based on trending events will not get a large search volume in the future.
Be sure to enter your keyword to Google Trends to know whether it gets sustainable search volume for the whole year or just peak on a short period of time.
Evergreen Keyword Example
Seasonal Keyword Example (only peaks on Christmas)
Introducing User Intent and Different Types of Keywords
There is a common problem that many beginners make when doing keyword research.
They blindly target keywords without really understanding user’s intent.
Ranking for high search volume keywords could get you nice traffic, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting the right type of traffic that converts.
Deep understanding of the reason why people are searching for a specific keyword could be the difference between making $10 or $10,000 a month from your website.
So pay close attention.
When it comes to user’s intent, all of the millions of keywords out there can be divided into 4 types:
1. Informational (Important)
a.k.a “I Want To Learn Something” keywords.
These are searches in which the user is looking for something that they want to learn or get educated about.
Common modifiers:
-
- how to, lessons, training, benefits, what is, ways, does, why, when, recipes, etc.
- There are certain keyword modifiers that indicate problems or pain that the searchers are trying to solve. These usually lead to higher conversion than the above.
- Cure, Stop, Prevent, Fast, Fix, Get Rid Of, Treat, Clear, banish
Examples:
-
- How to learn guitar, online guitar lessons.
- benefits of coconut oil, does coconut oil help with acne.
- How to cure acne fast, how to get rid of acne.
Notes:
-
- Usually visitors coming from these terms take longer time and multiple touch points to convert into affiliate sales or customers.
- These keywords are usually targeted in our top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content to attract broad traffic which can be funneled down into higher-converting pages.
- They’re best used as ideas for creating high quality educational content that attracts backlinks and traffic.
2. Navigational
a.k.a “I’m Looking For This Brand” Keywords
These are searches in which the user is looking for a specific website or brand that is popular.
Common modifiers:
-
- brand name, founder/author name, URL, etc.
Examples:
-
- Cloud Living, cloudliving.com
- AMZ Affiliate Bootcamp
- Tung Tran
Notes:
-
- These terms alone usually have unclear user intent.
- Are not usually good targets.
- There are exception. If they’re searching for “brand name + product type keyword”, it shows very clear intent and would give higher conversion.
- Example: NIke Running Shoes
3. Commercial (Most Important)
a.k.a “Which One Is Right For Me” Keywords
These are searches in which the user already knows what they want to buy, but they’re just looking for the best option.
Common modifiers :
-
- Best, Reviews, Compare, Recommended, Review, Comparison, Top Rated, Does Something Work, Top 10, vs
Examples:
-
- Best Noise Cancelling Headphone, Noise Cancelling Headphone Reviews
- Canon T3 Review
- Canon T3 vs Canon T3i
Notes:
-
- These keywords show clear user’s buying intent and have high conversion.
- They’re also what we’re mainly targeting as Amazon affiliates.
- The types of content that work very well for these are product roundups and individual product reviews. You’ll learn about these types of content in module 3.
4. Transactional (No Important)
a.k.a “Take My Money” Keywords
These are searches in which the user has already decided on what they want to buy. They either want to buy it immediately or are looking for the best deal on the market.
Common modifiers:
-
- buy, purchase, sale, coupon, discount, promotion. deals, deal, bundle, bundles.
Examples:
-
- buy nike running shoes
- kindle fire coupon code
- camera t3i deals
Notes:
-
- These keywords have the highest conversion rates, but are usually dominated by ecommerce websites.
- Search engines can detect the intent so they just show the searchers the best results possible. Usually we wouldn’t see affiliate websites ranking for these terms.
-
- In our experience, keywords with “coupon, discount, promotion, bundle, deals” could be highly profitable although they don’t get lots of searches per month.
From now on, try to identify the intent behind every keyword you come across based on what you just learned.
It shouldn’t be hard.
Ask yourself this question: “What the searchers for this keyword are looking for? Do they want to buy something or just look for information?”
Resources for this lesson
Google Keyword Planner
2.4 – Researching Products on Amazon
And then in lesson 8, we will be showing you our criteria of a winning niche plus some tips to help you pick your final niche easier.
Because our main monetization method in the first 6 to 8 months is gonna be through Amazon affiliate links, we want to make sure that the chosen niche meets these first 2 important criteria:
Criteria #1 – A wide range of products are available on Amazon with prices ranging from $10 – $500.
For example, in the Camping niche, we can promote
- backpacks & bags
- tents & shelters
- sleeping bags & camp bedding
- etc
We like the $10 – $500 price range because higher priced products usually have lower conversion rate.
Watch this lesson’s video to learn how we actually do the search.
Criteria #2 – We must be able to find commercial keywords with decent search volume around those products. This will be covered in lesson 5.
Resources for this lesson
KeywordTool.io
Amazon
2.5 – Finding Commercial Keywords
In the last lesson you learned how to collect a list of product ideas from amazon. Now we will use these as “seed” keywords to find commercial keywords using a couple of free and paid tools.
A seed keyword just means a starting keyword that you can use to generate a larger list of keyword variations from to ensure maximum results.
There are several options for keyword tools. We’ve carefully selected only the essential tools required to complete this process and you won’t have to invest a lot of money into these tools.
Let’s go through your 4 main options of effective keyword tools, 2 of which are free and 2 of which are paid.
2.5.1 Free Tools
1. Keywordtool.io
You’ve seen this tool in the previous lesson. it’s a powerful tool that give you hundred of keyword suggestions in just one easy click.
Link – http://keywordtool.io/
2. Keyword List Cleaner
This one helps to clean up a big list of keywords from duplicates.
Link – http://www.contentforest.com/seo-tools/keyword-list-cleaner
2.5.2 Paid Tools
1. KW Finder (Starting at $29/month – 50% discount available for annual plan)
KW Finder can help you find low competition long-tail keywords very quickly and easily with the Keyword Difficulty Score (DIFF) ranging from 0 – 100 which basically tells you how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword. The lower the number, the easier to rank for.
It’s very affordable – lowest plan starts at $29 a month which is enough for most users. They also offer a 50% saving if you decide to purchase the annual plan and it is a great deal in our opinion.
If you use the link below, you can get 10% discount on all plans.
Link – http://www.amzaffiliatebootcamp.com/go/kwfinder
2. Ahrefs Lite ($7 trial for 7 days – $99 per month after)
Ahrefs is really the best suite of SEO tools that is currently available in the market. It has a lot of great features and uses but in this module we’re gonna only show you how to use it for keyword and competitor research.
You’ll be learning more about Ahrefs in module 5 about link building.
Ahrefs is an essential tool you’ll need to perform keyword research effectively following our lessons but it does come with a higher price.
So if you’re on a tight budget, we recommend you to sign up for a month and try to do all your keyword research in this period.
After that you can cancel the subscription to save your money and only subscribe again when you need it.
2.5.3 Commercial Keyword Recap
In lesson 3 you also learned that the best commercial keywords for Amazon affiliate websites usually contain these modifiers:
- Best, Review, Reviews, Comparison, Compare, Recommended, Top Rated, Top 10, vs
The “best” and “reviews” modifiers are usually the most common and come with the highest search volume so you should special attention to finding those.
2.5.4 Step by Step Instructions for Generating Commercial Keywords
1. Use KeywordTool.io and Ahrefs to generate a big list of long-tail keywords from your seed keywords.
2. Plug seed keywords and long-tail keywords into KWFinder
3. Filter the list to show only commercial keywords with search volume:
- Keywords containing “Best, Review, Reviews, Comparison, Compare, Recommended, Top Rated, Top 10, vs“
- Search volume >10
4. Sort the list by search volume from High to Low
5. Go down the list and calculate DIFF of promising keywords.
6. Record keywords with DIFF < 35 in the Market Research sheet.
7. Aim to fill the sheet with at least 15 keywords with DIFF <35.
8. Click on low DIFF keywords to have a glance of what kind of sites are in the top 10 results.
9. Record weak content sites with Domain Authority (DA) < 25 in the Market Research sheet. We’ll analyze these competitors in details in lesson 7.
Now I know that only reading those steps can be hard to follow, which is why we put together a video walkthrough so you can SEE these steps in action. Check out this lesson’s video!
Now you know how to leverage commercial keywords, remember there is another type of keyword that is extremely important, the informational keywords, which we will be teaching you how to use in the next lesson.
Resources for this lesson
KWFinder – 10% Discount
Ahrefs
Keywordtool.io
Convert Column to Comma Separated List
Keyword List Cleaner
Niche and Keyword Research Worksheet
2.6 – Finding Informational Keywords
Informational or educational content is the backbone of any successful website.
It’s essential in order to rank well with google, to engage visitors and get them to take the right actions, and to instill enough confidence in them so that they actually buy something through your affiliate link.
Think of it as part of a sales process – the first step of a sales process in any business is EDUCATING prospects so that they feel comfortable buying something.
The website we are building is no different.
That’s why we need both quality informational and commercial content to drawn in those people looking to learn more. So in this lesson, We’re gonna show you how to find informational keywords in your niche.
First let’s do a super quick recap on what an informational keyword is:
- These are searches in which the user is looking for something that they want to learn or get educated about.
- Common modifiers:
-
- how to, lessons, training, benefits, what is, ways, does, why, when, recipes, etc.
- There are certain keyword modifiers that indicate problems or pain that the searchers are trying to solve. These usually lead to higher conversion than the above.
-
- Cure, Stop, Prevent, Fast, Fix, Get Rid Of, Treat, Clear, banish
2 main ways to find informational keywords
1. Reserve engineering weak sites
The idea is if weak sites can rank, then we can rank too.
What are weak sites?
Low Authority Blogs
- DA < 25
- Bad content or outdated design
- You can find low authority blogs by analysing the top 10 of low DIFF keywords or search for KEYWORD + blog and scan the search results.
Niche forums
- Forum threads are usually not well optimized for keywords. They’re ranking just because there’s non or very little competition for the keyword.
- You can find niche forums by search for KEYWORD + forum
After you have a list of weak sites, here’s what you do next:
- Put each of those into Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.
- Check the keywords they’re ranking high for.
- Record promising ones to your list.
2. Playing around with keyword modifier
You can add informational keyword modifiers to your keyword to find informational keywords.
Use Ahrefs Keywords Explorer for brainstorming keywords.
Pay attention to patterns that come up to find a lot of keywords really fast.
- Example:
-
- … Hunting Tips
- How To … Hunting
- Does … Help Acne?
There you go! Now that you understand both types of keywords you need to target, let’s move on to Analyzing Competition.
Resources for this lesson
Niche and Keyword Research Document
KWFinder 10% Discount
Ahrefs
2.7 – Analyzing Competitors
In this lesson we are going to be diving into something we KNOW you have been worrying about in the back of your head.
Mostly likely, it’s causing a slight sense of doubt and is the primarily source of any hesitation you might have with this business.
It all comes down to the C-word, that one thing which is the ever-present concern of many business owners: Competition!
What if my niche is too competitive?
How can I compete against a massive company?
What’s going to stop someone from “stealing” my niche.
Stop. Take a deep breath, and relax.
One of the things we can say after many years in business is that the C word is the thing most commonly worried about, and also (at least in my experience) something that has literally never caused problems for us.
And it won’t for you either if you do your due diligence, which is what THIS lesson is all about 🙂
First off, most people have it backwards – Competition isn’t a bad thing.
In fact, It’s a good sign as it usually means there’s money to be made. No competition usually means that businesses have tried and failed because it’s a harder niche than it looks.
In this lesson, we’re going to have a detailed look at your competitors and how they’re doing so we can have a better idea about the chance that we can succeed in the niche.
WHO are your competitors? (it’s probably not what you think)
Your primary competitors are simply content websites that are targeting the same set of keywords that you’re aiming for.
They can be big or they can be small, but as long as they’re ranking on top 10 for your target keywords, they are your competitors.
When doing market research for a new niche, we specifically want to see several low authority competitors that are successful which means they’re ranking for lots of informational and commercial keywords. Why?
- Because it shows us that there’s room for a new site to enter the niche. and the keywords you want to target are not very hard to rank for.
- You can also discover hundreds of great keywords that you’d never know by analyzing their keyword data.
How to find (and beat) low authority competitors
What we need to do is simply analyze their keywords, content and backlinks to figure out what’s working for them then try to do better to beat them.
First off, what is considered a “low authority” competitor?
Just to recap, sites that we consider low authority are:
- Less than 2 years old
- Domain Authority < 25
- Low DA sites are easier to compete with as they haven’t done much promotion work. We can realistically achieve DA 25 or higher within 6-8 months of solid promotion work.
Now let’s talk about easy ways to find them.
First, find some seed sites:
- Looking at the top 10 results of easy keywords with DIFF < 35.
- Search for KEYWORD + blog.
Then, expand the list with related sites:
- Using this advanced search operator to find related site on Google – related:domain.com
- Using Ahrefs
Awesome – so after this lesson you now know how to analyze your competition to make sure you can dominate in your niche. Simply follow the steps we just went through, and you’re golden. Next we are on to lesson 8 where (drumroll please) you will be making your final niche selection!
Resources for this lesson
Ahrefs
Niche and Keyword Research
2.8 – How To Pick Your Niche
Time to pick your niche!!!!
In the past 7 lessons you should have gone through the market research process you learned for at least 3 markets. And now it is time to make a final selection.
Criteria of a Winning Niche
There are 5 main criteria for a winning niche:
- Preferably it’s a niche that you know well or at least feel comfortable working with for 2 – 3 years.
- It has a wide range of products available on Amazon.
- You’re able to easily find commercial keywords and informational keywords with decent search volume. Many of which are easy to rank for with DIFF < 35.
- You’re able to find at least 3 low authority content sites that are successful (ranking for 5000+ keywords).
- And you feel like you can create better content or better user experience than what’s already out there.
- There are forums, blogs and social groups like FB or Reddit about the niche – showing a sign of an engaged community.
Honestly it is as simple as that. If you can do those 5 things, then congratulations your niche is viable!
If none of your niches fit the criteria, then start this module over with some new niches and in a few hours you have your new awesome niche.
6 Tips To Help You Select Your Niche
- Do not get held up at this stage!
- If you’re not sure what to pick. Remember there are always opportunities for you in big markets like Health, Fitness, Beauty, Home, Pet, etc. You just need to dig deeper to find easy keywords.
- It’s better to keep the site’s focus broad but keep your own focus narrow so that you can scale later when you get some traction.
- Don’t be afraid of competitors and feel like you always have to beat them for every single keyword. You can rank 2th and 3th for a keyword and can still make good money.
- Besides, competitors can be good friends and even partners on future products as well. Think abundantly!
- Every niche is profitable. But it’s your execution that makes you money. Or as Derek Sivers famously said: Ideas are just a multiplier of execution.
- Save your mental energy to follow the course and execute our content and promotion strategy and you’ll find success.
In the next lessons and modules we will start to build your awesome new site! In lesson 9, we will start by building you a low competition keyword list to target with your new niche!
2.9 – Identifying Low Competition Keywords
In the last lesson you chose your niche, and now in Lesson 9 we are going to be giving you our framework for identifying low competition keywords, and then in the final lesson of this module we will be building a keyword list that you will be using to dominate your niche.
First off, remember that the primary way we gauge competitiveness is by analyzing the top 10 search results shown when we search for a keyword on Google, because if we can beat them then we are golden. And we’re not analyzing all the pages that are trying to rank for that keyword.
Here’s what I mean using our “best adjustable dumbbells” example:
So again, we would need to analyze THESE site only, not all 331 thousand of them 😉
We recommend using KWFinder.com for this process because the tool pulls all the metrics together in one click and saves you a lot of time than doing everything manually.
Trust me, keyword research gets really un-fun fast if you sit there and try to do everything by hand.
But I should also say this is not rocket science which means there’s no perfect tool or magic formula which can give you 100% accurate results all the time because no one really understands exactly how Google ranks their search results.
What we’re doing is essentially make an educated guess based on common practises and the metrics that are available to us.
By sticking to our process and criteria, you’ll be right more than 80% of the time when judging a keyword’s difficulty.
Remember, we’re targeting not just one but multiple keywords. So having a few slightly more difficult in your list is fine as long as you follow our criteria when picking your keywords.
It’s very important that you understand this so that you won’t get stuck trying to find the perfect keywords.
What Are The Metrics To Look At?
Keyword Difficulty Score (DIFF)
This is a great guiding metric we look at first to quickly have a glance over at the overall competition of a big list of keywords.
The Keyword Difficulty Score score makes judging a keyword’s competition really simple as it has taken into consideration all the important SEO metrics like Page Authority, Domain Authority, External Juice Links for you so that you can look at a single number and accurately gauge the competitiveness of any given keyword.
You can calculate this number using KWFinder. What is really happening behind the scene is that first KWFinder will calculate the difficulty score for every result in the first page of Google.
Then it will generate an average of those results to have the final Keyword difficulty score which you can see here. Usually, there are 10 results on the first page of Google and you’ll see exactly that in KW Finder.
But sometimes, you will see 11 results like this one or this one. Why is that? Well, it’s because Google has just come out with a new feature which automatically picks one of the results on the first page and display it in a Featured Snippet .
Lower Difficulty score means lower competition. For a new site, the rule of thumb is that any keyword with Keyword Difficulty Score under 35 is considered easy, from 35 – 40 is considered medium, and higher than 40 is considered difficult.
However, this metric is relative to the strength of your site. That means if you’re starting out, choose keywords with lowest competition possible, say DIFF < 35. As your site grows, you can gradually increase the Keyword Difficulty score range for your target keywords.
Page Title
The very first thing that you learn as an SEO is to insert your target keyword into your page’s title to tell Google that your content is relevant to that keyword.
Page Content
Most people only look at the numerical metrics and ignore this but the quality of the pages that are ranking is another important ranking factor you should really pay attention to.
If some or all of the top 10 results have poorly written content with bad design/formatting and you feel like you can do better, then it’s a really good sign of a keyword you can go for.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority shows you the ranking power of a website.
The greater your DA, the more likely you are to have strong traffic and high ranking.
Google nowadays prefers to put pages from high DA domains higher up in the search results even if those pages don’t have many backlinks.
But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to outrank them. In fact, we’ve beaten countless high DA sites with better content and more relevant backlinks.
Not required, but if you find sites with DA < 25 in the top 10, then it’s a really good sign. It means that there are rooms for new sites with low domain authority.
SERP Lean
For some keywords, Google tends to favor one type of website over the another.
For example, if you search for “cheap running shoes“, all you see are e-commerce websites ranking and it’s hard for your content website to enter the top 10.
It’s the same for “nursing schools requirements” where you see all the .edu and .org websites from different schools.
Ideally, we want to see other niche websites similar to what we’re trying to build on top 10 because if they can rank, then we can too.
However, if there are so many niche sites trying to rank for the same keyword, then it can get a little bit tougher to rank. 1-4 niche sites on top 10 are ideal.
What Does a Low Competition Keyword Look Like?
Just to recap, here’s what we consider as a low competition keyword based on our criteria:
- Keyword Difficulty Score (DIFF) < 35
- At least 3 results with DIFF < 30.
- No e-commerce lean (less than 7 e-commerce sites on top 10)
- Similar niche content websites ranking on top 10.
- (Optional) Multiple results with un-optimized titles.
- (Optional) Multiple results with low quality, outdated content which you feel like you can do better.
- (Optional) Some results Have Domain Authority < 25
Check the video for more examples of low competition keywords.
While we have given you lots of examples and clear criteria to follow in the lesson, something to keep in mind that assessing keywords is actually a skill that you will get better at over time.
Once you get good, you will still use the criteria we gave you, but you will also start to develop your intuition as to whether something will work or not. Through experimenting you will develop the ability to assess a keyword in seconds.
For now, stick to the guidelines we gave you, and have fun applying you new skill
The next lesson is the final lesson of this module, and we will show you how to put together everything you’ve learned so far to generate the final keyword list for your new Amazon affiliate site.
Resources for this lesson
KWFinder 10% Discount
SERPChecker
2.10 – Building Your Keyword List
Congratulations on making it this far! We are now on the last lesson of module 2 and so far you have chosen your niche and learned a ton about affiliate websites, keyword research and more.
Now let’s finalize your keyword list before moving into content production.
Our goal is to pick 50 low competition keywords for your new site. We’ll need 15 commercial / 35 informational keywords to achieve a balanced content strategy.
Remember there are 2 sets of keywords that we care about – commercial keywords and informational keywords.
There are 5 key guidelines for commercial keywords:
- Focus more on “Best” and “Reviews” modifiers as they’re most common and come with highest search volume.
- “Review” (without plural) modifier is also good for single product review.
- Low Competition (following the guidelines in lesson 9)
- At least 3 Keywords with Search Volume > 500. Higher is better but needs to stay within our criteria of low competition keywords.
- The remaining 12 can have lower search volume (at least 10).
And for informational keywords, there are 3 key criteria:
- i. Relevant to your niche.
- ii. Low Competition (following the guidelines in lesson 9)
- iii. Higher search volume is better.
Your homework before you begin the next module is to use what you’ve learned to pick 50 low competition keywords (15 commercial / 35 informational)
Resources for this lesson
Niche and Keyword Research Document
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