Building A Niche Site Part Three – More Keywords And Content

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Welcome to the third post in my series about building a niche site from the ground up.  Today I’m going to talk to you about some more keywords I picked out and go over the competition for those keywords.  If you want to read the first two posts in this series, just go here for part one and here for part two.  You should at least read part one because I go over alot of stuff about how to select products from Amazon and other keyword info that I’m not going to go over again in this post.

Now…if you haven’t heard this yet, then you should hear about it now.  Keyword research really is the most important aspect of building a niche site.  It’s not the design, or the content, or the navigation, or the traffic.  Because if your keywords suck, even the best design, great content and huge amounts of traffic won’t make you any money at all.

There are basically two big aspects to keyword research for this site, and other sites like it.  If you are going to be selling products on your site, then you need a keyword that people will be searching for when they want to buy something.  So if you are selling green tennis shoes on your site, you would want keywords like ‘green tennis shoes’ or ‘buy green tennis shoes’ or ‘cheap green tennis shoes’ or ‘green tennis shoes reviews’.  What you wouldn’t want to rank for is ‘free green tennis shoes’.  This is just a simple example obviously.

Now, you might not be monetizing your site by selling products.  So if you are planning on monetizing with ads like Adsense or maybe from BuySellAds or maybe monetizing through CPA networks, you don’t necessarily need a buying keyword.  When you are doing your keyword research, how you will monetize the site is something you absolutely need to keep in mind.  With my site, I am selling Amazon products.  Keyword research for this type of site is a little easier.  Most of my keywords will be for the product name itself.  However, I will also include some how-to type of keywords as well.  I’ll get into that later.

So as of right now I have one product and a few keywords for it which consists of one main keyword which is the brand of the product and a few other variations of that.  If you read my first post in this series, you’ll read a little bit about how I go about finding keywords, what to write about and what to promote.  Some people like to build what many refer to as “churn and burn” type sites.  This basically means they spend as little time and as little money as possible on a site, and build as many of them as they can, and see which ones work and which ones don’t.  The ones that seem to work they keep and they get rid of the rest.

If you want to build one of these sites, what you will have is a thin site with little content and very little value to visitors.  And if the value to visitors is low, then the value to da GOOOG is low too.  These thin sites are often more difficult to rank on Google, and when they do rank they more often get hit by updates such as Google’s Panda update or even through Google manual reviews.

I do not want to build these types of sites.  My strategy is to build sites with multiple products and high quality content.  Not huge sites, but not what I would call a thin site.  Again, I went over some of this in the first post.

So, what I did is not rocket science.  First I search Amazon for related products in the same niche I decided to go after.  And the nice thing about Amazon is they give you 2 lists of products on their product page:  “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” and also “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed“.  That gave me a list of products to look into.

Then I went to Google and I searched for these products and looked at what other websites that rank for those products are promoting.

Now I have a big list of products, and to narrow down to a handful to go after, there are some criteria I use that I explained in part one of this article series.

The next step after having my list of products is to find what keywords I will try to rank for.  To do this, I will head over to Market Samurai first because it will help me generate a bunch of related keywords for the main keyword.

Then I’ll use Scrapebox to give me a big list of related keywords as well.  And finally I will use the Google Keyword Tool to give me a big list of related keywords.

Now I have a big list of keywords.  I will start going through them and looking at the traffic by putting them into the Google Keyword Tool.  As pointed out in my first post, I want to have one or more keywords that add up to a total of 2000 EXACT matches in the United States per month.

This particular keyword, which is keyword 2 for this project, gets only 600 exact US searches per month, but I will also go after 3 other variations of this keyword to get me up and above the 2000 search minimum.  Here are the Market Samurai results for it.  This shows the statistics for the top 8 results when you search for this keyword in Google:

Keyword 2

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(If you are wondering why there are only 8 results, it’s because 2 of the top 10 results were videos.)

Where you see some of the fields are red, it means that MS thinks it’s more difficult to beat.  I’ll go over a few statistics here for you.  For more information on them, you can check out Market Samurai’s help videos.

DA:  The age of the domain.  Now the fact that these domains are all very old might scare some people off.  It doesn’t scare me off, because the PR of these domains is weak.

PR: The Google page rank of the site.  Anything under 4 is considered average.

IC: The number of pages indexed on the domain.

RDD:  The number of different domains that have a link to this domain.  Hope that makes sense.

RDP: The number of different domains that have a link to the specific page.

BLP:  The number of backlinks pointing to this page

BLD: The number of backlinks pointing to the whole domain

BLEG:  Number of .edu and .gov links to the page.  (This stat is totally useless in my opinion as I don’t buy into the gov and edu hype)

DMZ: Is the domain in DMOZ

YAH:  Is the domain the Yahoo Directory

Title:  Is the keyword in the Title tag

URL:  Is the keyword in the URL

Desc:  Is the keyword in the Desc tag

Head:  Is the keyword in the  Header tags.

I pay most attention to RDD, RDP, BLP, and BLD.  These are the off-page factors (backlinks) and are the most important factors when I determine the difficulty of the competition.

After that, the on-page factors that are important are Title/URL/Desc/Head.  These will tell you if the page that is ranking is purposely optimized for the keyword.  If they are, you know it will be more difficult to rank in general.

On-page factor analysis – Looking at the results, the pages in position 2 and 3 are optimized for the keyword, and one of them is the Amazon page for the product.  Besides that only one more, position 8, is optimized.    So nothing too scary here.

Off-page factor analysis – Looking at the top 3 sites, first let’s look at position one.  This page has 905 links to their page from only 11 different domains.  This tells you right away that the sites linking to them have links on every page.  This is much, much weaker than having 905 links from 905 different domains.  I took a look at a handful of those links (with Majestic SEO) and most of them are on pages with page rank of 2 or less.

Then I analyzed those 79 and 34 backlinks with Majestic SEO for the pages in positions 2 and 3.  (You can also use HREFS or OSE).  When I looked at those backlinks, nothing really stood out as being unbeatable.  Most of them are from free sites like article directories and web 2.0′s, which are good links but that alone will not be enough to hold onto positions if someone, like me, wants to take them from you.   And there are less than 100 as well.

Also of interest in the page in position 5.  This page has over 200K links from only 105 different domains.  This tells you right away that these domains have site-wide links to this page, and just goes to show you that it’s not necessarily the amount of links that makes you strong.  It’s having links from as many different domains, and more specifically from as many differ IP addresses, that really makes your backlink profile strong and tough to beat.

Here is another one I am going after:

Keyword 3

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This keyword gets 6600 exact US searches per month.

For product 2  and product 3 I ordered one product review article each.  At the same time I ordered 4 more articles for 4 more products, giving me a total of 7 products that will be reviewed on this site to start.  For each product, I am going after anywhere from 1 to 3 or 4 keywords per product.  It could stay at 7 products, or it could grow.  I am hoping things work out and I will be able to grow it.

Here’s the recap of where we are as of now:

1. I found a product to promote on Amazon and checked the keywords for it

2. The main keyword for the product has alot of searches

3.  I checked competition for this keyword, and I think I can rank it top 3 of da GOOOOOG

4.  I found a suitable domain and bought it

5. I ordered the first article on for the first product review

6.  I installed my WordPress theme and plugins

7. I uploaded the first article I ordered

8.  I found 6 more products and related keywords, and ordered content.  I now have a total of 7 product review articles, with one or more keywords targeting each page.

9.  Content ordered, delivered, and added to site.  One article was added every 2-3 days.

Next Up:

I will get into some SEO tips for the site.  I’ll talk about the on-page factors as well as how I will begin my link building campaign.  Stay tuned for more good stuff!

Bill Zimmerman

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