How to do keyword research using Micro Niche Finder

Lately in addition to Google’s keywords tool, I’m using Micro Niche Finder for keyword research. A lot of my sites are on what you call a micro niche. I would define this as a niche that gets somewhere around 1,000 searches per month.

Here is how you would do the research using Micro Niche Finder:

1) Enter a keyword in the box. Lets start with “golf”, which is an extremely generic word. MNF returned the top 200 keywords for this. They range from “golf”, with 2.7 million monthly searches, to “gc golf”, whatever that is, with 140 monthly searches. I’m going to look at the middle part of the list, where the keywords have appx 900 searches. I see there are 13 terms that have between 720 and 1,300 searches per month. This is the subset I’m going to focus on. Here are the 13: golf valley, bar golf, golf mill, golf club swing, hills golf course, golf professional, putting lessons, private golf club, golf stories, international golf, private golf, championship golf, and golf expo.

2) I now want to narrow down my list to terms where I think I can find a good affiliate product to sell. A term that someone would use when they are looking to buy something. Active buyers are THE group you want to target when making niche sites.  Especially nice would be something I could find a ClickBank product for, since that is one of my favorite affiliate systems. I will take a closer look at these four: golf club swing (book?), putting lessons (book?), golf stories (book?), international golf (travel affiliate or book?).

3) The next step is to use Micro Niche Finder to check out the strength of the competition. The strength of competition formula is one of the great strengths of MNF. It returns a numeric score and a green, yellow or red button, to indicate which keywords might be the best to go for. The four keywords I settled on scored like this: golf club swing – green, putting lessons – yellow, golf stories – red and international golf – red. Now I’m down to two.

Here are the stats. All of this data is retrieved by MNF:

golf club swing – 1,000 searches, 258,000 exact matches (quotes), ad cost 1.27, strength of competition score 28, green.

putting lessons – 880 monthly searches, 117,000 exact matches, ad cost 1.29, competition 66, yellow.

4) Next thing I’m going to do is look at the competition. I head over to Google, and first do an allintitle and allinurl search. This will tell me how many pages are specifically targeting these keywords. Here are the results.

allintitle:golf club swing – 87,600

allinurl:golf club swing – 33,000

allintitle:putting lessons – 7,790

allinurl:putting lesons – 2,450

What these results show is how many pages include these terms in their title or url. In other words, how many pages are out there that are specifically targeting these terms, or at least including these terms. Based on this, I’m somewhat favoring putting lessons, because of the minimal competition. However, Micro Niche Finder told me the strength of this competition was a little higher. So, time to look at the competition.

5) What I want to do is figure out what it will take to get into the top ten in Google. Anything else, in my opinion, isn’t worth the time. You can still grab a little traffic if you are ranked lower, but not enough. Obviously if you are using keywords that have more searches than these, you may be able to get away with it. For example, I would be very happy to be in the 20th position on a search term that gets 2 million searches a month. But that’s not what we are focusing on here. For this analysis, I’m going to do the searches without quotes, since that’s how almost everybody uses Google. For purposes of this article, I will continue on only with putting lessons.

Top 10 for putting lessons:

1 – youtube

2 – youtube

3 – Very nice site by a marketer offering free lesson (to build his mailing list) and selling ClickBank and Adsense. Site is a PR3.

4 – A golf course site. They have a very long article on golf swings, probably done for SEO purposes. PR3.

5 – wikiHow site, PR3

6 – essortment site. Looks like an article site, PR3.

7 – 5min videopedia site, PR2

8 – Marketers site on golf instruction, PR1

9 & 10 – This is a patent site for a golf swing. Interesting! PR3

11 – Amazon page for a golf swing book, PR3

12, 13, 14 – All pages with PR0 that look like marketers sites.

6) OK, decision time. Frankly, I’m not going to build anything here. With a reasonable link building program I would expect to end up around 11 or 12 after a while. This falls into the category of “not worth it”.  This keyword has a few too many strong sites for my preference. With such a small niche, I’m doing a lot of work (or outsourcing a lot) just to get a share of 1,000 searches per month. So I would move on. The beauty is, this entire research would only take me about ten minutes using Micro Niche Finder.

For this article, I have only used a very small portion of the Micro Niche Finder functionality. You can do MANY types of searches using the tool, including trends, new content, ClickBank Marketplace, domain tools lookups, Ezinearticles lookups, and on an on. I’ve been using this for a month, and I haven’t even touched most of the functionality yet.

You can also save and retrieve searches and projects, import keyword lists, and do a lot of data manipulation.

Hope this helps! If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me at david [at] webtooltime.com.