“Why would I need that keyword research for my brand new site,” you ask? Well, the reason for that is because it’s the first thing that you need to do in our day and age before you even think about building your site (let alone launching it) because this kind of research shows if your plan actually makes sense in terms of SEO. And if it does not look good to an SEO guy, it means you won’t get new customers from the Internet. Sure thing, you don’t want such a situation, do you? Let’s have a closer look at what I actually mean by that. By the way, you can show this case study to your boss while explaining why his idea sucks (if you found out SEO drawbacks in it. 🙂
The “Buy Pork” story
You may have come up with a super-dooper idea that goes something like this, “I wanna build a site that sells pork in the United Arab Emirates. My customers will find me primarily via Google … “. It may sound as a pretty solid idea at first sight. You can go ahead and hire a web designer who draws a really mind-blowing design for your site. That done, you hire a web developer who makes all that Photoshop stuff work as a website and you’re good to go and wait for your customers who should come from Google. Is that what you would do? Wrong! 🙂 No panic! I’m gonna show you what was incorrect in your logical chain.
So, you planned to drive customers from Google (or any other search engine for that matter) but the question is whether people in the United Arab Emirates search for that keyword. For starters, English is not an official language in the country, but let’s ignore that factor just for simplicity reasons. Now, it is just your guess that people search for this sort of product. And that’s your problem. Though it may sometimes be a good thing to have a hunch in certain situation but planning a business is not the best place for such an approach to entrepreneurship.
Let’s refer to a neat tool from Google which is called Google Keyword Tool to actually see if your idea makes any sense. So, first off, you need to go to this site. Now you need to type in your phrase, say “buy pork”, in the “Word or Phrase” text field. In the advanced options and filters, you need to select your target country (the United Arab Emirates in our case) and your target language (English for this case). That done, take a look at the “Match Types” options and select “Exact”. Make sure to uncheck the rest of the options there.
Since we are in the “Match Types” section now, let me cast some light on what those options mean and how you can use them:
“Exact’ – this option allows you to see the exact amount of monthly searches for your query. In our particular situation, you’ll be able to see how many times a month users search Google for the “buy pork” query.
‘Broad’ – this option will take into account searches for the query taken separately (“buy” and “pork”), grammatical forms of the words (‘buy’, “buys”, “buying”, “bought”, ‘pork’, ‘porks’), synonyms, etc.
‘Phrase” – if you select this option, the amount of searches will include all the queries where “buy pork” is a part of the search phrase. For instance, “buy pork in New York”, “buy pork fresh’, etc.
So, having ticked the “Exact’ option, you can click the “Search’ button. By the way, you need to be signed in into your Google account in order to be able to do that. If you’re not, you can click the “Sign in” link or just enter CAPTCHA and click “Search”. Now click on the “Keyword” ideas tab right under the “Search” button.
At this point of time you should be amazed by the stupidity of your idea (no offence!) to create an online business like that and target the UAE as customer base. As you can easily see, nobody in the United Arab Emirates is using that keyword (and consequently query in Google). Now, if you do another search and this time select the United States in the “Locations” option, you’ll see that some people search using that query (“buy pork”) but not that much and it’s totally not enough for a business to survive. Now filter the results by Local Monthly Searches (just click on the text). And what do you see now? It’s given you other keywords that you may consider using and those keywords have enough searches for running an online store.
For example, if you choose to optimize your site for the “pork chops” keyword and target US this time, you’ll be able to drive up to 370 daily visitors to your site. And they are potential customers. I got that amount as follows: 22 200 local monthly searhes divided by 30 days and by 2 (50% of Google searchers will go to your page if you rank #1 for your keyword).And that’s by far a more promising business idea than the original one.
The formula for potential daily visitors
Now a bit more on the formula that I used for estimating potential daily site visitors if you conquer the top ranking for your keyword in Google’s SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
Since we need to know how many people will come daily, we need to divide the amount by 30 because that’s the average number of days in the month.
Now as for the second part of the equation. For starers, there are different opinions as for the percentage of visitors that click on the first search result in Google. For example, this figure shows that it’s 42.13%.
But this figure is a bit different – 56.36%.
In either case, it’s close to 50%. And that’s exactly what I recommend using. No problem that we round it a bit. Our formula is not supposed to give you an exact number. It’s just supposed to give you an idea about the destination you’re about to choose. That’s what it’s all about. So, let it be 50%, which means half of all the people who search for your keyword (say “pork chops”) will come to your site. So, that’s why you need to divide the amount of visitors you get for one day by 2 (that is to say by 50%).
And a screencast on how to estimate traffic if you rank #1 for your keyword.
OK, guys I did my best to make my point but chances are I missed something or just was not clear at some point. If you have a question or some kind of a suggestion, please let me know about it in comments.
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Useful Links
Advanced SEO’s Guide to Keyword Research
The Lazy Writer’s Guide to 30-Minute Keyword Research
Keyword Research: Ultimate Guide
8 Alternatives to Google Keyword Tool
AnswerThePublic.com
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