Ranking for Profitable Niches

If you joined us for my last post in this series, you found us tearing apart the golden niches filter in The Last Keyword Tool (TLKT) to find profitable niches.  Now let’s use TLKT to take a deeper look at just how competitive these terms are and what we need to do to rank for these terms.

I always like to take a look at the “search value” of a term.  By this I mean I multiply the adwords cost by the natural search traffic to get an idea of what someone might pay for all the traffic coming through a keyword.  This helps me to see what keywords I might want to check out first.  I’ll make my next blog post about how to do this.  For now, we’ll just pick some terms at random.

Let’s take another look at the results of our modified “golden niches” filter:

Wow, ‘acai juice’ right up at the top surely has some good traffic and high cost – let’s take a look at how competitive that term is.  To do that, just click on the keyword.  If the keyword hasn’t been examined before you’ll need to hit the “reinspect keyword” option at the top of the screen:

This option will take a minute to collect the data.  Note that you can reinspect the data when ever you want to see any changes that you or your competition may have made.   Ok, let’s look at what this screen will tell you once the data has been collected:

The Competitive Analysis Visualization graph is an important ‘at-a-glance’ indicator as to how hard this keyword is going to be to rank for.  Broken lines are good – it means that the value for that line fell to zero – always a good sign.  Here we see that it’s the PageRank that fell to zero for one or more domains ranked in the top 10.  Excellent.  Also from this we can see that in order to compete in the top 10 you need a page rank between 2 and 4 (the orange bar that I’m pointing to with the arrow).  That means that I need to have a site already in place, live and with some kind of page rank if I’m going to hit the front page for this term quickly.  Or, alternatively, I need to buy a domain pre-loaded with page rank, but there are scams out there for that, so that topic is for another day.

Let’s look at the stuff in blue on this chart – you can see that you need between zero and 500 inbound links to rank for this term – that’s in keeping with the page rank, so there’s nothing surprising there.  I wonder just exactly where we could expect to rank with a new site – to know this we need to examine the table down below:

Clicking on the picture above will let you see it in detail.  From this we can see that it’s wikipedia and goarticles who have the low page rank.   However as I look down the list, all the small sites have a bunch of inbound links to that page and all of the sites with a small page rank are authority sites.  It looks like it would be fairly easy to squeeze geoarticles off the front page and take it’s place – it’s not well optimized for this term (no green flags) and no inbound links; it’s in this spot simply on the authority of the site as a whole.  However, trying to move up a notch into slot #9 looks like it might be a daunting task – lots of inbound links and though the site is small, it’s targeting this term because it’s in both the title tag and in the meta data (green flags).  Also you run into a heavy page rank at this spot and the next slot up, position #8 doesn’t look like it offers any relief.  I’m thinking this term is a bit competitive for my blood.  I’m looking for lower hanging fruit.  Let’s check out another keyword from that list above.

‘Organic acai juice’ (look for the term in orange above) seems like it might be easier – fewer competing pages, much less traffic and lower cost – I’m betting this might be sweeter fruit – let’s look deeper and find out.

Here I get the sample screens, a reminder that we need to ‘reinspect’.

This looks more promising – PageRank range is 1-3 and inlink range falls to zero before it gets below the fold.  I’m rubbing my hands together and salivating <grin> … Let’s look at the other chart for a second.  (You guys probably think at this point that I really do affiliate sites, huh?)

Here you can see what the usage of the keyword is on the actual pages that are ranked.  You can see it as a phrase (red) and as a broad match (yellow) term.  This helps to give you an idea of whether these folks are actually TARGETING this term.  This is represented by the red and yellow lines and is read against the left side of the chart – you’ll see that the average keyword density maxes out at 3.5 times on the page for the second site – it’s also about that high on the top ranked site; where as the phrase maxes out at 1.77 and that’s for the 10th ranked domain.  This means that as a keyword this is not a highly targeted term.

Let’s take a look at the table down below these charts:

Again, click on this graphic to see it better.  Position 5 has a low page rank, but it’s got three green flags.  Not a lot of inbound links, but a few pages.  We can click on the number of inbound links and it will take us directly to yahoo site explorer where we can examine those inbound links to see where they are from and even click through to the originating page to see what the page looks like and what the anchor text is:

Here you can see that the number 1 inbound link is an affiliate link.  Hrm… if they have an affiliate program that takes off, that number of inbound links could rise quickly.  Something to keep an eye on.

It’s followed by position 6 which is a poorly named product page.  This page has nothing to say for itself, except that the term is in the meta title and on an authority site (lots of pages).   Next is a (naturally) poorly optimized Youtube page, with zero inbound links.  If you can’t get above that one, you are doing something wrong.  By the time we get to position 9 and 10 we see the only thing these sites have going for them is some on-page optimization (if you remember from the chart above #10 had the keyword contained on the page a few times, too).

So this has all the makings for some fairly ripe low hanging fruit.  Would someone like to give it a try and let us know

If you guys would be interested in my writing an article describing exactly what I’d do to rank for this term, let me know.

This concludes my analysis of low hanging fruit, and I’ll be back to talk about adding a column that shows the “search value” of a term.
–Sue and the Theme Zoom Team

Theme Zoom Krakken is an integrated application suite that radically combines Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Keyword DNA Creation, Automated Silo Structured Blueprint and Website Development.

For more information about The Last Keyword Tool visit Theme Zoom.

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