Events Listed - The Idea

Posted by admin | Key Word Research, Site plan & Costing »

Keywords are the foundation of any internet business model. Keywords depict consumer behavior; search engine modeling & bookmarking sites are all driven by keywords. Building a business online is all about getting your product or service in front of new consumers when all you know about them is what words they have entered into a search engine or bookmarking site. I use wordtracker.com for my initial keyword research. I tend to use my generic keywords from my ideas list as a starting point. What I do is that I create a spreadsheet with different types of keyword terms – those with commercial intent, researching purpose or simple navigations.

Now 80% of search volume online comes from the head of all search phrases, by this I mean general terms like “Events”, “Parties” & “Conferences” & 20% of the words in these phrases will be associated terms. We’ll target those 20% specific terms.

Getting to the long tail through keywords:

If we target the long tail we don’t have nearly as much search volume but we have 80% of all the words searched to work with. Likewise, the longer the tail on a keyword phrase the more targeted the search. People tend to, by nature search the shortest most generic terms first, if the results do not represent the solution they are looking for they add words, they keep adding words to refine their search until they finally land on a page that solves their needs.

We want to find a business opportunity that will provide an opportunity for us to be able to build as many of these pages as we like of targeted searches

Identifying commercial and information based searches through filtering:

Now you will find throughout your research that close to 1/3rd of all searches are performed by people looking to navigate to a particular page or site using search engines because they cannot remember a URL. We have no Interest in these words. We work through our list until we have 500 - 1000 word phrases in our commercial intent and information search lists together.

Once we have our lists ready, we filter them by their search frequency and remove words with less than 20 searches a day.

Looking out for keyword trends:

Once I sorted my lists I could see a pattern emerging straight away with words like DJ, parties, invitations etc showing up multiple times. I am not going to give away my keyword list but I knew at this point that I was looking down the barrel of an event related business opportunity on the web.

You should have a list of 40 phrases, half of them representing commercial intent and the rest representing a need for information - and all estimated to be searched more than 30 times a day or more.

Next I search each phrase in Google and bookmark the top results into my Google reader. Using my reader as my information store I punch these sites & the topics they represent into Google trends and I study the trends of internet users over time on these particular sites to get a feel for the market. Google trends is a bit like the stock market charts that shows you patterns of growth or decreases in search volume over time for different sectors and more recently different websites.

I add my notes against each site to my Google Reader & I can even share the links & notes through an RSS feed into my Friend feed account or my Google shared links page by clicking the “Share this” button in my reader notes tab. By doing this I have somewhere on the web to send people who can take a look at my research results to get opinions. I’ll touch more on this topic in another post sometime later.