Exercise in Keyword Research and Niche Selection
October 8, 2008
As of this writing, I own the #7 spot on Google for the keyword phrase “rachael flatt”. Most readers of this blog won’t know her, but Rachael Flatt is the reigning U.S. ladies national silver medalist and reigning World Junior Champion in the sport of figure skating. Until this morning, I didn’t even that I owned that coveted #7 spot because, quite frankly, I had never checked. Several weeks ago I put up a very, very basic fan site for her after meeting her in person at a figure skating competition. Her silver medal performance at the 2008 U.S. Nationals was a significant inspiration for me finally getting off my duff and starting to skate myself.
So, what made me check? Apparently, her agent did a Google search to see what was out there about her, and found my bare-bones fan site. She then contacted me about the possibility of creating a more expansive site to help promote Rachael in the figure skating sphere.
This led me to one of the very initial steps involved with any sort of online enterprise: keyword research. When it comes to Internet marketing, which an in depth fan site of any celebrity most definitely is, keyword research is a major component of several tasks that go by different names, such as “market research”, “niche selection”, and “search engine optimization.” Keyword research is a very important aspect of each of these business building tasks, and is often the first place to start whenever a new idea emerges.
Why would I want to do keyword research for a FAN site? Quite honestly, it has to do with niche selection. There is an entire universe of athletes out there, and converting a basic fan site into a full blown project requires the knowledge ahead of time about whether that athlete has enough search traffic to warrant the effort. In addition, it’s wise to know what other keywords relevant to the project need to be targeted for optimization.
Where does one start with keyword research? Personally, I use a very methodical approach, which has evolved over time as tools and technologies change. Here’s my current keyword research checklist, verbatim out of my own playbook:
- Go to Google.com and enter in the keyword phrase YOU would use to start looking for the niche product or service you are interested in selling.
- Look at the results, and take a look at the web sites on the first page of Google results.
- Identify the web site that has lots of written text and that most closely matches the product or service niche that you want to get into.
- Now, in another browser tab or window, go to the Google keyword tool
- Click the radio button for “website content” on the left side
- Enter the URL for the web site you found in step 3.
- Check the box that says “include other pages”
- Click the button that says “get keyword ideas
- Wait for a minute while Google analyzes the web page you entered and returns the results.
- After the keyword results show up, change the Match Type to “Exact” using the drop-down menu on the right side, immediately above the keyword list.
- Sort the list from highest count to lowest count by clicking on the “Approx Avg Search Volume” column heading.
- If you scroll to the bottom of the list, you’ll see a link to export the entire list and all the displayed data to a spreadsheet. Do this if you have a spreadsheet program, otherwise just print the list so you can mark it up.
- Now, starting with the highest searched for keyword, go back to the Google search engine and start searching for those actual keywords.
- Print out the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) for the keyword, and write the search volume number on the printout.
- Start to pay attention to the web sites that rank in the top 10 or 20 for the top keywords. You’re looking for the dominant players in this particular market.
- As you go down the keyword list, you’ll start to see the major players moving DOWN in the SERPs, or not there at all. You’ll also start to see that there are niche players that dominate some secondary keywords.
- Make note of the keywords for which the top sites are NOT one of the dominant nor niche players, or that these sites rank low for these secondary keywords. These keyword phrases are your potential goldmines for targeting with your SEO efforts. Now that you have a very strong possibles list of secondary keywords, the real work begins.
What if your keyword phrases are much more obvious, such as with a celebrity fan site? Then, you have to get a bit more creative with your keyword research.
What I decided I needed first was a sorted ranking, from highest to lowest, of the figure skaters that receive the most search queries on Google. To do this, I had to have a basic list to start with. Since the popularity of most figure skaters follows a trend relevant to their competitive history, I decided to simply start with the list of ALL the winners from ALL the 2008 U.S. Figure Skating National Championship events, including pairs, ice dancing, men, and ladies, from all divisions, including Senior, Junior, and Novice. I found the results list in tabular format on Wikipedia, and copy and pasted all the text tables into a text file.
Once I had it in a text file, I re-copied the entire list to the clipboard and pasted it into an Excel workbook. Excel is smart enough to take regular old text that’s in some sort of columnar format and break it into columns in a spreadsheet. I did this because I had no desire to hand delete the placements, scores, and other data for each skater by hand, line by line. This trick will save you about 15-30 minutes for a list of this length.
After deleting the unnecessary columns, I had to copy back out the pairs and ice dancers to separate their names, but that only took a couple minutes. I was left with a list of 240 names, which I could immediately plop into the Google keyword tool, just like in my normal process.
The results, when sorted by average search volume, were interesting. In general, figure skater names are NOT a heavily searched topic. The name that had the highest monthly search volume, with nearly 50,000 monthly searches, is Scott Smith. However, Scott Smith is a fairly common name, and the name of an author and a politician, both of whose sites ranked higher than the figure skater. The next highest searched for skater name was Johnny Weir, with about 12,000 searches per month. Kimmie Meissner was third, with about 9,000 average searches each month.
Rachael Flatt ended up 19th on the list, with only about 720 average searches per month. Google did not have enough data to give me historical trending for searches on her name. Based on this research alone, I would actually be better off building a detailed fan site for one of the more commonly searched for skaters. In fact, additional research showed that Ashley Wagner not only receives 8 times as many monthly searches as Rachael, but also has room to rank well with SEO efforts, and does not have a very well optimized official site. WIth some quick checking, it turns out that AshleyWagner.net was available for registration (don’t worry, I fixed that situation). 
Ashley finished just barely behind Rachael at the U.S. Nationals, and is currently ranked 13th in the World, to Rachael’s 19th. She ranks up there with Kimmie Meissner and Caroline Zhang as one of the current “media darlings” of ladies figure skating today.
Just alone in the course of writing this article, I was able to identify a potential market opportunity and take steps towards capitalizing on it.
Considering the fact that figure skating is a sport where popularity of an athlete can come and go so quickly, and an athlete’s peak performance period is relatively short, usually only 2 to 3 years, there is ever changing opportunity to capitalize on the up and coming batch of skaters, which takes just a couple hours of Internet research to find. This is definitely a sport where the savvy Internet marketing attempting to capitalize on the relatively short-term popularity of a subject athlete can easily and quickly capture a top 10 search position early, and quite possibly maintain it with intelligence and work throughout the short period of that athletes moment in the spotlight.
As already pointed, just doing this exercise pointed out a market opportunity, which I immediately moved to capitalize on. Within a few days, I will likely have a “fan” site up with the intention of deriving traffic, which I will likely divert to some of my other, more monetized, ice skating related online ventures.
For Rachael, however, the data is even more meaningful. With her search traffic so low, and being an actual fan of her incredibly beautiful and artistic skating style, the question becomes: What can I do, if anything, to build her PR base and popularity? In addition, what will be the result of this current skating season on her popularity and career? As a strong contender for the 2009 National Championships, as well as a strong contender for the 2010 U.S. Olympic Team, her career could be just starting to take off in terms of public spotlight and endorsement deals. If the opportunity becomes available to work with her talent agent, the possibility for building a tiny, side public relations business becomes brighter, which could be not only fun as a fan, but also financially rewarding.
I hope that this exercise in niche selection will prove insightful to readers, and help you learn more about the thought processes that go into niche selection and the importance of knowing a bit about the market you are entering.
Until next time,
Jassen Bowman
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