To get a sense for the potential value of
keywords in a certain niche, we need to do
more than just look at the number of searches
those keywords get each month. In today's
Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains what else we
should be looking at, and how we can use
other data to prioritize some groups over
others.
How to Estimate the Total
Volume and Value of
Keywords in a Given
Market or Niche
Whiteboard
For reference, here's a still of this week's
whiteboard. Click on it to open a high
resolution image in a new tab!
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another
edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want
to chat about how you can estimate the total
volume and value of a large set of keywords in
a market or a niche.
Look, we're going to try and simplify this and
reduce it to something that is actually
manageable, because you can go way, way
deep down a well. You could spend a year
trying to figure out whether Market A or Market
B is better to enter or better to chase
keywords in, better to create content in. But I
want to try and make it a little simple without
reducing it to something that is of no value
whatsoever, which unfortunately can be how
some marketers have looked at this in the
past.
Asian noodle keywords
So let's try this thought exercise. Let's say I'm
a recipe site or a food site and I'm thinking I
want to get into the Asian noodles scene.
There's a lot of awesome Asian noodles out
there. I, in fact, had Chow fun for lunch from
Trove on Capitol Hill. When you come to
MozCon, you have to try them. It's awesome.
So maybe I'm looking at Chow fun and sort of
all the keyword sets around those, that
Chinese noodle world. Maybe I'm looking at
pad Thai, a very popular Thai noodle,
particularly in the U.S., and maybe Vietnamese
rice noodles or bun. I'm trying to figure out
which of these is the one that I should target.
Should I start creating a lot of pad Thai
recipes, a lot of Chow fun recipes? Should I go
research one or the other of these? Am I going
to chase the mid and long tail keywords?
I'm about to invest a large amount of effort
and really build up a brand around this. Which
one of these should I do?
Side note, this is getting more and more
important as Google is moving to these topic
modeling and sight specific, topic authority
models. So if Google starts to identify my site
as being an authority on Chow fun, I can
expect to rank for all sorts of awesome stuff
around it, versus if I just kind of dive in and
out and have one-offs of Chow fun and 50
different other kinds of noodles. So this gets
really important.
The wrong way to look at AdWords data
A massively oversimplified version, that a lot of
people have done in the past, is to look
broadly at kind of AdWords groups, the ones
that AdWords selects for you, or individual
keywords and say, "Oh, okay. Well, Chow fun
gets 22,000 searches a month, Pad Thai gets
165,000, and rice noodles, which is the most
popular version of that query -- it could also
be called Vietnamese noodles or bun noodles
or something like that -- gets 27,000. So there
you go, one, two, three.
This is dead wrong. It's totally oversimplified.
It's not taking into account all the things we
have to do to really understand the market.
First off, this isn't going to include all the
variations, the mid and long tail keywords. So
potentially there might be a ton of variations of
rice noodles that actually add up to as much
or more than pad Thai. Same thing with Chow
fun. In fact, when I looked, it looked like
there's a ton of Chow fun modifications and
different kinds of things that go in there. The
Pad Thai list is a little short. It's like chicken,
vegetable, shrimp, and beef. Pretty simplistic.
There's also no analysis of the competition
going on here. Pad Thai, yeah it's popular, but
it also has 50 recipe sites all bidding for it,
tons of online grocers bidding for it, tons of
recipes books that are bidding on that. I don't
know. Then it could be that Chow fun has
almost no competition whatsoever. So you're
really not considering that when you look in
here.
Finally, and this can be important too, these
numbers can be off by up to 200% plus or
minus this number. So if you were to actually
bid on Chow fun, you might see that you get
somewhere in the 22,000 impressions per
month, assuming your ad consistently shows
up on page one, but you could see as little as
11,000. I've seen as much as 44,000, like huge
variations and swings in either direction and
not always totally consistent between these.
You want them to be, but they're not always.
A better process
So because of that, we have to go deeper.
These problems mean that we have to expend
a little more energy. Not a ton. It doesn't have
to be massive, but probably a week or two of
work at least to try and figure this out. But it's
so important I think it's worth it every time.
1) Keyword research dive
First off, we're going to conduct a broad
keyword research dive into each one of these.
Not as much as we would do if we knew, hey,
Chow fun is the one we're going to target.
We're going to go deep. We're going to find
every possible keyword. We're going to do kind
of what I call a broad dive, not a deep dive into
each market. So I might want to go, hey, I'm
going to look at the AdWords suggestions and
tally those up. I'm going to look at search
suggest and related searches for some of the
queries that I get from AdWords, some of the
top ones anyway, and I'm going to do a brief
competitive analysis. Maybe I'll put the
domains that I'm seeing most frequently
around these specific topics into SEMrush or
another tool like that -- SpyFu , Key Compete
or whatever your preference might be -- and
see what other terms and phrases they might
be ranking on.
So now I've got a reasonable set. It probably
didn't take me more than a few hours to put
that together, if that. If I've got an efficient
process for this already, maybe even less.
2) Bid on sample keyword sets
Now comes the tricky part. I want you to take
a small sample set, and we've done this a few
times. Random might be not the right word.
It's a small considered set of keywords and bid
on them through AdWords. When I say
"considered," what I mean is a few from the
long tail, a few from the chunky middle, and a
few from the head of the demand curve that
are getting lots and lots of searches. Now I
want to point each of those to some new,
high-quality pages on your site as a test.
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