Keyword Research / Competition Analysis Help

Hi all,

I know this topic has been discussed a lot but am having trouble understanding a few things with keyword research. Most guides I have looked at have concentrated on things from an Adsense monertization point of view (1K exact search, high CPC, etc). I like building sites on product based keywords and often get confused on a couple of fronts:

1 - Examples (not my niches) are product name keywords with a high number of backlinks but mostly from the same domain. I've always looked at BLP as the #1 metric to look out for, is this wrong? For example, if you wanted to go after fleece jackets, you would find large clothing apparel stores. Many of the links pointed to the specific fleece jacket page are from internal links.

2 - If amazon is found in the #1 spot, is this considered as weak competition, or strong?

3 - Is the only way to have success in product based niches through "review" or other buyer keywords?

Anyway hope this makes sense, if there is a better guide out there I don't mind reading.

Thanks!

I hope I am allowed to bump, just looking for some guidance on choosing keywords for Amazon-type sites.

well hope when have time to write ebook about keyword research and share it here ...... , about keywords it's silly when
judgement based on search count i monetize keyword with less than 40 global searches better than one of other keywords with 20+ k global , about competition there's about 200 factors for competition ....... , if you need to get more knowledge then practice and see live examples , now go and sign up with adwords and use adwords keyword tool and search for random amazon/other keywords , check first results using free tools like http://www.majesticseo.com/ , http://www.webseoanalytics.com/free/seo-tools/serp-analysis.php , http://serpattacks.com/ , ....etc

after 2 weeks you will answer your questions by yourself .........

Amazon is a different beast from Adsense, what you seek in Adsense are different from Amazon in terms of what data is important and whatnot.

If you want to target Amazon sites, find those product in Amazon that have at least 50 customer reviews or so plus having more than 4 stars rating, and that wouldn't be enough by itself if the price of the product are miniscule, try to find products that are priced at least $100 and above.

You don't have to specifically target "review" keywords per se. You can target a specific product name keywords (i.e apple 17 inch macbook) and have a lot of US exact matches searches on the keyword and that would be enough to make sales. "review" type keywords in most cases have much much less searches than the main product name keywords.

williamk said:

You don't have to specifically target "review" keywords per se. You can target a specific product name keywords (i.e apple 17 inch macbook) and have a lot of US exact matches searches on the keyword and that would be enough to make sales. "review" type keywords in most cases have much much less searches than the main product name keywords.

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Thanks for your help! I think my main problem has been trying to apply Adsense keyword research to Amazon sites. And it has had mixed success. The example you provided above about the apple 17 inch macbook. I'm assuming you could not use that as a TLD could you as it would go against copyright infringement. Were you saying that you would target that keyword as a subpage?

Thanks again,

Adam

It depends mate, some of my Amazon sites contain the trademarked domain (EMD) and only a small number of them were shut down, most of them are not and the beauty is that they rank significantly fast due to the EMD boost combined with the easy to rank product name keywords. I'm not concerned too much about it as long as I'm promoting their products in a good intention. But the other approach is to create an authority site where you target several products in amazon from a specific niche i.e bicycle/toys/home improvement and create a brandable cool domain where you don't have to take the risk of being shut down by using subpage for each of the products you promote, this kind of approach are more stable but takes longer time to rank, its all up to you to decide.

I think competition and keyword research really comes down to experience. There were many times I thought the competiton would be easy and vice versa.

You never really know until you do it. So, why not just do it? The only thing you can do is learn and gain experience.

As long as you aren't in the big money making niches, anything is possible.

I hope I am allowed to bump..

There are many ways of analyzing keyword competition but the most effective way is to look at the front page of Google for a keyword and see how strong the ranking webpages are. By strong I'm referring to how many backlinks there are to each webpage along with the quality of those backlinks. There are a few tools that will do this for you (some free, some expensive). If you have money to spend you can't go wrong with SEOmoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool...but if you're on a budget you can use Learn2Rank's Keyword Inspector (my tool). I just released it yesterday, here is the original post:

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo-tools/442649-free-keyword-analysis-tool-keyword-competition.html