Google Keyword Research In 3 Easy Steps

The first step in any Internet marketing or affiliate marketing campaign is to start off by doing some basic keyword research to find out what your market is searching for and what your competition is trying to compete for. By doing some Google keyword research, we can find out what keywords will be easiest to rank for and will be less competitive if we are setting up PPC campaigns with Adwords.

The first step would be to head over to Google and type in a keyword that you want to compete for. If you happen to be marketing an affiliate product for something in the mortgage industry like a mortgage payoff accelerator program you would go over to Google and type in “mortgage accelerator” in the search field.

The next thing you want to do is compile a list of all your competitors on the first page of results. You can leave out URL’s that lead to news results or article pages. You just want to get a list of all the websites in the top 10 results that are selling a product related to your search term which in our example is “mortgage accelerator”.

After you have your list of website URL’s you want to head on over to Google’s free keyword research tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

We are going to be using this a little differently then other people use it. Instead of inputting keywords into the keyword research tool, we are going to let Google tell us which keywords are best by putting in a URL. In this case we will be entering the URL’s of our competition using the “Website content” button below “Descriptive words or phrases”. Just enter one URL at a time and let Google gather keywords related to the content on the pages you enter.

This is a much more effective way to do keyword research then the traditional way of just starting off with a single keyword. Here we are getting targeted keywords that Google thinks are a good match and related to the websites you enter.

After you have completed these basic steps in your Google keyword research you want to save your results in the format of your choice and you can step it up even further and dig deeper with the use of keyword research software. This will enable you to dig deep into each keyword and find hidden niches by analyzing the keyword further and determining it’s strengths and weaknesses.

If you choose to do further research you can choose to use a web based service like Wordtracker or use a desktop based software like Micro Niche Finder. Both are excellent ways to take your keyword research to the next level and find those hidden gems that will make you lots of money from untapped niches with low competition.