Finding "The Sweet Spot"

Keywords are an essential part your of search engine optimization (SEO) program.  What you are going to learn in this article is that keywords are also a very important part of your niche marketing efforts as well.  There is no point in going after a market that is far too saturated with competition because as you already know, your site is going to get lost in all of the many search results, and all of the optimization in the world is not going to help.  Moreover; any attempt to get around this problem by bidding higher for the most sought after keywords can drain your war chest.

On the other hand, settling into a market niche with little competition but no actual a demand will likewise lead to failure.  If there are too few eager buyers in your niche market it won't support your business.  The key to success is to find what we call "the sweet spot".  The sweet spot is the area that you want to focus on it is that magic place where demand is high, but competition is low.  Efforts that you put into researching niches with an identifiable sweet spot will certainly pay off. 

The ideal niche market is one where this a lot of searches being done, but relatively few documents come up.  We can use Google search tools help us find this.  One good weapon to try is Google's Search-based keyword tool.  What this tool does is tell us something about the number of monthly searches conducted on any particular search term.  It also gives us a visual representation of the relative amount of competition there is for this term.   If that is not enough information for you, it also gives you stats on what others are bidding for that search term, and it even tells you from which website the data is being collected.  The search tool does all of this for a long list of associated keywords that you perhaps did not think of.  In this way you can use this tool to get ideas.

As a marketing professional you want to find the sweet spot for your chosen niche.  The sweet spot is defined as that area on a list of related keywords where the number of monthly searches is HIGH, but the number of actual webpages that come up when that search is conducted is LOW.  When you find the keywords that are contained in the sweet spot, you want to make note of them and work them into your niche website and also the articles that you publish on Mooker.

Let's take a look at an easy example of what we are talking about.  While using the Google analytical tool I entered the search term "foosball".  A term that I regarded as a typical micro-niche that someone might  want to try to work.  The results of the analysis reveal that the keyword phrase "dynamo foosball table" is searched approximately 82 times per month.  Is this enough demand to support my proposed foosball table marketing business?  Well, we don't know yet.  It depends on the level of competition and what the conversion rate for my site is.  Also, it is important to know that this is just one keyword phrase.  I have to  look at all of the all of the keywords and search stats available to me to accurately estimate the future traffic.  Now, when we get back to analyzing our "dynamo foosball table" keyword phrase we notice that Google informs us that this keyword is about 50% saturated and they further suggest that we would need to bid about 59 cents to assure that we would get our share of traffic if we were using PPC.  Is this good?  We have to compare this information to other keyword terms to find out where the sweet spot is.

With further digging I now find out that the term "isp foosball" is being searched 33 times per month.  Now, I do not even know what isp foosball is and I have never heard of it before, but it gets my attention because when I look, I see that there are virtually NO web documents that come up when that terms is searched.  Talk about an under served market!  To confirm this conclusion we can take a peek at what Google suggests we bid on the term, only 10 cents!  This information helps us because it teaches us that there are things that people are searching for that few people if any are providing information about.  We can say that this little niche is clearly in the sweet spot.

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Read more:  AdWords For Dummies (For Dummies)

This article was written by Mark Soveign who owns and writes for Wertheim Communications LLC as well as Mooker.Com