In the last section we discussed how you could identify profitable niches. This is often one of the most difficult aspect of creating a website, but hopefully chapter 3 has made it easier.

BEFORE going any further you should have already identified the niche you intend to build your site around.

The next step is to carry out the keyword research, and you need a clear idea of your intended niche before you begin this step (which is also the most critical to get right).

This step will ultimately dictate how visitors will find your site.

Your job in this stage of the process is to find out the exact phrases that people type into the search engines, when they are looking for information or products relating to your niche.

Example. Your website is about fly fishing. On it, you promote fishing tackle, rods, reels etc etc. If I was a fly fisherman looking to buy a reel, what am I going to type into Google to find relevant sites where I might buy a reel? After all, that is what you need to know as the webmaster behind a fly fishing site.

I might type in any of the following:

fly fishing reel

buy fly fishing reel

fly fishing reel review

and so on.

However, just because you think of a phrase related to this niche, does not mean that anyone is actually searching for that phrase. That is where keyword research tools come in. Not only will your research highlight phrases that are actually being searched for, it will also find a lot more phrases than you could realistically come up with yourself, and in a fraction of the time.

How many “fly fishing reel” related phrases can you think of? 5? 10 at a push?

Well, I just checked at Wordtracker, and in seconds, it returned 68 phrases that people are actually looking for. This is pure gold!

Wordtracker also provides me with essential data, like how many people are looking for each phrase, and how many competing web pages there are for each term.