Using Keyword Research to Gauge Your
Competition
Keyword research is an essential tool to find
a profitable niche market to build your business around. For example, if you type the phrase “weight
loss” into Google’s search engine, you’ll have roughly 100 million links
returned to you. Even if you search the
longer phrase “how to lose weight”, you’ll still come up with well over 20
million web links.
On one level, this is great news; you’ve begun
your research and planning by selecting an area plenty of people are writing
about. We can infer that there are a lot
of people interested in this particular topic.
Yet on another level, with so many other web
pages out there competing for attention, you’re going to have a difficult time
getting a prospective customer to visit your page.
What you’ll need to do is identify those
keyword terms and phrases, which are still related to your website, but for
which there is much less competition.
This is a bit of a balancing act, of course, because these keyword terms
and phrases still need to be terms and phrases people actually use when they
are searching for relevant information.
If your website gets lost amongst all the
competing websites, then your well-prepared website and articles aren’t going
to get much of an audience. For your
first web business concept (and any future businesses, too) you’ll need to get
in the habit of always asking yourself “what’s my competition?” A decent business idea with marginal
competition is almost always better than a great idea with an overwhelming
amount of competition.
Your initial way of researching competition
individual keywords is the search engines themselves. Simply type the keyword phrase you’re interested
in into Google or Bing or Yahoo and see how many pages come up. Keep track of the numbers each search engine
returns, and work to refine your keyword phrases toward those which have much
less competition.
Keyword research also provides you as a
business owner the foundation for a strategy.
You can focus on optimizing your website for the relevant keywords with
less competition, fewer competing websites optimizing for the same word. As your business and website grow and you
climb the pages towards number one, you can begin to optimize your website for
those more competitive keywords.
Keyword research is a powerful tool, use it to
build your business, to attract prospects and customers, and to position
yourself above your competition, now and ten years from now when your business
is still thriving and growing strong.
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