How are you identifying your niche?

A few weeks ago, I created a simple video on Basic Keyword Research. I’d produced that article to help a Chinese friend who had decided to create a website offering Chinese travel tours. After publishing their site they realized they weren’t getting any web traffic, despite their traditional marketing efforts.

I decided to do a quick analysis on their site and realized it had been put together without any strategic planning or keyword research. Not being a direct close friend or directly associated, I didn’t have time or the desire to sit down and explain what some of the problems were.

However, making a quick 10 minute video was easy and somewhat enlightening, but still nothing more than an extremely simple introduction. I’m not the best video producer by any means and I failed to explain the basic concepts of understanding the data.

If you do a Google search for “chinese travel” and get About 140,000,000 results, that should tell you there is heavy competition for that specific keyword. If you want to get your site to show up on the front page for that search term, you have a lot of work ahead of you.

If you run the “chinese travel” search term through the Keyword Tool by Google, you find that globally there were around 49,500 searches and 33,100 locally for the month of April. My “locally” covers North America.

Finally, if you examine the search terms with the Traffic Estimator, you discover that you could expect between 14 – 23 visitors per day if you held the a position in the top 3 positions.

Without any more research efforts, this data should tell you something. It should tell you, that it’s a long climb to the top and the results are somewhat minimal in the end. You would of course piggy back on a variety of keywords along the way, but you have to ask yourself if this is the correct keyword to capture? Are there better ones?

Ideally, you want to find keyword combinations that have a lot less page results from your search and have a higher rate of traffic once you’ve made it to the front page. This is due diligence work but vital to the success of your site and it’s marketing campaigns.

I like to try and create a plan based on keyword research for whatever site I create or develop. I’ll sometimes find a heavy competitive keyword phrase and make it a long term goal, but I’ll always find long-tail keywords I can use to get the site started.