Find Out What Type Of Website Best Suits Your Company

I can see all the people who have just read the title of this article scratching their heads and wondering if old Steve hasn't flipped his noodle. Well, I assure you that I am quite sane. I'm in no way stating categorically that keyword research is a hoax, but I am suggesting that maybe we need to look at this tactic a little more closely than we've been doing. It may not be all that it's cracked up to be.

Let's start with the basic premise of keyword research so that we all know that we're all on the same page. For the most part, when doing keyword research, you want to find keywords that have a lot of searches and not too much competition as far as sites listed on the SERPs, primarily Google. That's a simplified explanation, but for now...it will do.

Okay, what's a lot of searches? Does anybody REALLY know? Isn't a lot a relative term? And doesn't it vary from niche to niche? For example, if I'm targeting a niche that has almost no competition because it's relatively new and there are only 1,000 searches a month for a particular keyword, aren't I going to still get more traffic to my site if I'm number one for that phrase than if I'm targeting a keyword where the top 50 sites all have PR of 8 and 100,000 plus backlinks a piece, even if that keyword gets 1,000,000 searches a month? I'll be lucky to even be noticed.

And what about those numbers of searches? In case you haven't given this some thought, whenever an Internet marketer does keyword research, each keyword he types into Google contributes to those number of searches. With all the marketers out there, how inflated do you think some of these numbers are? Would you say they're very inflated or just a little? Is there any way to even know? After all, Google doesn't break out the keyword stats into real and I'm just a goofy marketer clogging up space categories. It all gets lumped into one pot.

What about broad and exact match? The war over that stuff is going to go on forever. I mean let's be honest. The average ma or pa Kettle who goes to Google to look up, gift ideas for teenager isn't going to type the darn thing in quotes. That's only something we marketers do. So who says that exact match is the ONLY viable number to use? In my opinion, that's nonsense. And don't even get me started on all the things that people type in that we wouldn't even think of. Do we really need exact match for those oddball phrases?

Personally, I think too many people make too much fuss about keyword research. For one thing, it's not an exact science. For another, go check out each keyword tool and tell me if they all give you the same results. That's where the REAL fun begins...trying to figure out who's right.

Keyword research, at best, is going to give you a general idea if there is a market to go after and how hard it's going to be to reach that market. It is NOT the be all and end all to finding that killer niche that's going to make you oodles of cash.

Is keyword research a hoax? Maybe not, but its reputation isn't entirely based on reality.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim