Wow! I’m having so much fun in doing the exercises in the 30DC (and one of my sites was hacked) that I haven’t had the time to write up what I’ve been doing. Just a quick recap on what we saw in the earlier parts of Day 2. Hopefully we should now be aware of the definitions of the terms Market, Niche (or Nitch depending upon your orientation to the Atlantic Ocean, LOL) and Micro-niche. If you remember, to represent a Market, a keyword will have over a million competing pages in Google (using the phrase in “quotes” – phrase matched). A Niche will have between 30,000 and 1,000,000 pages (phrase matched) and a micro-niche will have less than 30,000 (again, phrase matched).
If you remember, traffic is also a consideration. You might not have that much competition, but there might be a reason for that – nobody is looking for it, i.e. the keyword has no traffic. And I did say that the guy who shot the video explaining this had used a tool called market Samurai to find this information out. So what is Market Samurai?
Well it’s a very powerful tool which works on many levels. If you were to use to just do keyword research, it would be worth every penny. And for the purposes of this post that’s all I’m going to discuss. As we go on through the 30DC, Market Samurai (MS) will be demonstrated to its full potential, so let’s not run before we can walk.
Using the definitions of Market, Niche and micro-Niche the trainer enters what he estimates to be a ‘Market’ sized keyword into MS and runs a keyword search. This throws up all the related keywords that there could possibly be (well it seems like it – LOL). Now using this list he is able to analyse the keywords in order to see how they may or may-not fit the criteria for Niche or micro-Niche. He then drills down to find a good set of keyword phrases which meet the suggested criteria of having at least 80 searches per day (broad matched), less than 30,000 competing pages (phrase matched) with a Phrase To Broad ratio (PBR) of at least 15% (in essence the PBR is what sets a search to either phrase- or broad-matched).
An awful lot of the initial research is intuitive. The trainer is able to pick a good market sized keyword, e.g. saxophone in his case, because he’s had practice. When I first started doing this I was too prescriptive in what I was looking for as a market keyword, so much so that by the time I’d run things through MS, I was left with an half decent keyword that had no related keywords. So, my best advice is to be broad (small b – remember the definitions of Market, Niche and micro-Niche) in your initial searches, don’t funnel yourself too early, you can become disheartened if all of your great ideas turn out to be no good.
To access the 30DC training on the 30DC website, click here.