A Better Way to Estimate Keyword & Niche Traffic
This concept was originally posted in Dan Raine’s Immediate Edge training course (Google it). I saw it recently in this Thirty Day Challenge (Google it) contest going on that claims to turn even the most novice internet user into a millionaire (which training course doesn’t?). Either way, this is a solid tip and answers a lot of my own questions when doing preliminary keyword research for a particular niche.
The concept Ed proposes is quite simple: Take a keyword/phrase that you rank #1-2 in Google SERPs and compare it to another keyword/phrase you would like to rank for to project the amount of traffic that phrase will receive if it were ranked #1-2 in SERPs. This technique obviously requires you to rank well for a particular keyword before you can begin researching, but most of us already do. If you are just starting, Ed has given the phrase Male Yeast Infection out for free, and tells us that he was receiving 500 uniques per day in the #2 spot.
Taking that data in to Google Trends, we can compare any keyword phrase and quickly see what kind of traffic we can expect from Google from our new niche. Not a revolutionary technique, not ground-breaking, but a very solid tip.
Try It Out
Step One:
Pick a niche. Here is an interesting random niche generator since I’m lazy right now and don’t feel like giving any creative ideas. I probably wouldn’t recommend using this for business purposes as I’m sure the results are pulled from a database. It’s good link-bait either way.
Step Two:
The niche it picked for me was “concrete mix”. Pulling this in to Wordtracker tells me concrete mix (phrase match not broad term) should net me 97 uniques per day. That isn’t an incredible amount of traffic, but when I pull the same keyword in to Google Trends it tells a little bit of a different story:
So, who to trust? I would suspect Google on this one, folks. You also have to take in to account the fact that since this technique has been published, I suspect a lot more search activity has been going on for the phrase male yeast infection, and would therefore affect the outcome of your research. The best way is to use your own data, or simply look at data from 4-5 months ago with that phrase.
Another thing to note is that if your phrase is netting under 200-250 uniques per day, it will not show up on the Google Trends graph. In that case, you’d simply scroll down the page to look at the bar graphs. In the example below I’ve defined a more specific niche topic, “Concrete mix design”. Since it gets under 100 searches a day, it’s listed in the bar graph section. I can deduct that most of the viewers are of the English language, so this still gives me a great deal of precision in estimating traffic.
Some hippie threw together a nice but dirty tool that checks Google Trends, Wordtracker, and Google all at once in different iframes for the phrase match. You can check that out here.
Good luck!
Leave a Reply