You know, keyword research (or topic research) is one of the most useful skill for digital marketers.
Master this, and not only you’ll be able to know what your audience wants, but you’ll be wise enough not to choose the wrong fights.
And I’ll show you how I do keyword research for my affiliate websites, step by step.
1. List all the products that can be sold in your niche.
Let’s say your website is about dog (I know, it get used as an example way too many times).
Some products that I can think of is dog leash, dog house, dog toys, dog bed, etc.
Once you have a list of all the products, move on to the next step.
2. Input those keywords into KeywordTool or AnswerThePublic with various prefixes.
One of the first prefix I would use is ‘best’.
- best dog leash
- best dog toys
- best dog bed
You get the idea.
You can use best, top, or good.
Scrape all the results spewed by both tools, save it in an excel file.
And then, move on to the next step
3. Add more variations to the main keywords you just scraped.
Let say you want some derivatives of ‘best dog leash’.
Just add ‘for’, ‘with’, ‘that’, or ‘under’.
Punch them into both tools again (I prefer KeywordTool for this one).
You’ll get long tail keywords like the following:
- best dog leash for big dogs
- best dog leash with carabiner
- best dog leash under $50
Okay, now you’ll get more keywords, scrape them and save them. We’re going to need them for the next step.
4. Group keywords by their category and similarity.
Now you have the main keywords, which are:
- best dog leash
- best dog toys
- best dog house
And you have the derivatives after doing step #3.
Group them with the main keywords on the top.
So, for example, in the best dog leash category you’ll have something like this:
- best dog leash
- best dog leash under $25
- best dog leash for kids
- best dog leash for big dogs
- best dog leash for small dogs
Now move the last step.
5. Remove keywords with similar intent.
After all the scraping and keyword generating, there will be a lot of keywords with similar intent, such as:
- dog leash for big dogs
- best dog leash for large dogs
- good dog leash for large dog breeds
They all mean relatively the same thing, right?
We don’t need to create separate posts to target each of those keywords.
One in-depth and thorough post is enough to target all those keywords.
After all, Google no longer use exact keywords for search results. They find out the intent of the search and show the best results that are relevant.
So why not list those keywords as just one keyword?
In this case, ‘best dog leash for big dogs‘ is enough to represent all those variations.
But you don’t have to remove all the variations just yet.
You can sprinkle them in the post for more keyword variations and LSI keywords.
That’s it. Now you have all the keywords/topics you need for your niche website.
And all you have to do now is create the content for each of the keyword you just found.