How to Find and Implement Niche Keywords

Niche Keywords ; The key to SEO is competing to become the top search result for a given keyword. This means that your effort will have to be constantly evolving, and consistently growing. While this does mean that you’re going to always be searching for the best competitive keyword phrases, it absolutely doesn’t mean that you always have to compete for the MOST competitive terms.

The ultimate end goal of any SEO effort is one thing; traffic! What most people in the SEO industry might not realize, is that you can achieve top ranking positions that will generate substantial traffic by targeting LESS competitive keywords as well. This won’t work for all low competition keywords, but mainly for ones that are very specific to your industry niche. These low competition industry keywords are also known as “Niche Keywords.”

Niche Keywords Breakdown :

Any time you are working to identify target keywords, it can be a difficult process. You have to use the mindset of a buyer, and think like a Google searcher – applying this strategy to every stage of the buying cycle. Only using your product keywords won’t suffice. Depending on exactly what industry you are in, standard product keywords will almost always be extremely competitive, and generally over saturated. If you work in the printing industry for example, certain keywords like “Business Cards,” or Catalog Printing are always going to be extremely competitive.
Yes, it can be useful to compete with the masses for traffic from these terms, and it is always a good idea to focus some SEO effort there. On the other hand, If you can identify keywords that are less competitive, but still have a decent amount of traffic – and have very high relevance to your industry, you can get much faster results! These are your Niche Keywords: they aren’t extremely competitive, but are extremely relevant to your industry. This is your niche. Again, for the printing example, and Niche Keyword would be something like “Variable Data.” An extremely relevant industry term that simply isn’t cutthroat competitive, like “Business Cards.”

Locating Niche Keywords :

One of the best ways to locate your specific Niche Keywords is to use free SEO tools like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. These tools will let you see and analyze the exact search volume as well as the competition level for industry keywords. While this is a good start, even great SEO tolls like the Google keyword tool have the limitations of simple robotic data record. You need to go deeper when identifying great Keywords, and truly try to think like a customer searching in Google – even misspellings! As an example, if you were going to buy a horse you might type things like “winter horse coat” or “hoof care.” These are low competition high relevancy terms that are much less competitive than “buy a horse” or “horse sales.” These Keywords will be easier to rank for, and still drive enough traffic to your site to make it worth your while. Think about the buying process and all the small facets that go into a purchase – and you too can benefit from Niche Keywords!

Implementing Niche Keywords :

Remember, while SEO is powered by robotic algorithms – it’s a human that clicks through to your site in the end. You have to be careful when you implement these industry Keywords into your overall SEO Strategy. For example, on the on-site side of things -  if you took the drastic measure of changing all of your websites title tags and page headers from major product terms to Niche Keywords – the site would no longer make sense to your visitors! These visitors are going to expect to  see the extremely competitive product terms across your site… not because they’re competitive SEO keywords, but because they’re the logical industry terms that people expect to see.
The absolute best way to successfully implement Niche Keywords into your overall strategy is to add them to existing efforts incrementally. Start off-site building some links with these Keywords as the anchor text; then when you see some traffic as a result of good ranking for these terms, you can begin to include them on landing pages that are 1 or 2 steps deep into your site. Always remember that the relevancy of the term toward the overall user experience is the absolute #1 concern in your strategy. This isn’t only to serve the actual human experience either. Search engine algorithms are getting so advanced, they can literally tell whether or not your content makes logical sense – and will reward or punish you accordingly.

Tracking :

Just like all of your SEO strategies, you have to track your efforts for them to be worth anything. You need to ensure that the effort you are putting in is paying off, and that what you think caused a result actually did. This means putting Analytics on your landing pages, setting up trackable URLS for your links, and generally making sure that these Niche Keywords are generating the traffic you hoped they would. If a few months have gone by, and you haven’t seen a result; it’s probably time to move on to another term. This is a classic trial and error process, but if you perfect it – it will pay off.