Using Keywords: Identify and exploit niche markets by Ken McGaffin, 12 February 2008

If you want your business to succeed online, you too must find the niches that exist within your market and decide the specific ones you want to target.

No auto manufacturer would tell you that they sell their cars to people who want to drive.

They break their market down and talk about who they are targeting, and depending on the manufacturer their chosen niches could be people who want family cars, 4x4s, luxury cars, convertibles, safe cars and so on.

If you want your business to succeed online, you too must find the niches that exist within your market and decide on the specific ones you want to target.

Wordtracker is a great tool for helping you identify and quantify niche markets. Keyword research tells you what people are looking for online and so helps you assess the size of the market for any particular product or service. To explore the size of any market, there are three stages involved:

1. Find the most popular keywords in your niche market.
2. For each popular keyword, see how it is used in longer search terms and use the total predicted volume of searches to estimate the number of people searching for that particular keyword.
3. Add up the total predicted volume of searches for each popular keyword within the niche to give an estimate of the size of the market.

In this lesson we’ll look at two hypothetical cases – a bank looking for potential opportunities in the credit card market and a baby shop moving online for the very first time.

The bank and the credit card market

So the bank could decide to target anyone who wants a credit card (probably a highly competitive market and not a good idea) OR they could look for specific niches within the credit card sector and concentrate only on those (probably there are specific niches that have not been exploited by other banks and this is a very good idea).

Here’s how we’ll set Wordtracker up to explore how people search around 'credit card'.

Note the two important settings I have used:

• 'exact keyword inside a search term' will show me all the search terms that include the exact keyword 'credit card'

• 'include plurals'. This means that my results will include the most popular search terms for both 'credit card' and 'credit cards' – if I had entered 'credit cards' in the search box, I would have missed all the search terms that included the singular, ‘credit card’.

Now hit 'research' and Wordtracker will return up to 1000 keywords all of which will contain the exact phrase 'credit card':

The bank scans this list of 1000 keywords and spots two potential niches that match its business strengths – 'prepaid credit cards' and 'business credit cards'.

Now it’s time for the bank to dig deeper into the keyword information for those two niche markets.

Comparing niche markets

At first glance, it may seem that 'business credit cards' with a predicted daily search of 560 does not suggest a very large niche. That would be a mistake - Wordtracker is a precise tool that reports the counts only for the exact keyword that you enter, not the number of times that phrase appears in the database overall.

The count for 'business credit card' is for those three words in that exact order – no more and no less.

Searches such as 'small business credit card' or 'business credit card offers' will not be included in the prediction.

Yet these keywords are certainly important in exploring the overall size of the niche and Wordtracker allows you to find all of them. All you have to do is ask Wordtracker to look for the keyword 'inside a longer search term'.

Here are the settings to use:

Note that this will return the largest number of popular results. Uppercase and lowercase predictions will be combined and I’ve also searched for 'business credit card' with the 'include plurals' box ticked. This returns both search terms with 'business credit card' and 'business credit cards' included.

The research returns over 700 keyword phrases and here are the top ones.

Now we can export the 700+ keywords to an Excel spreadsheet and total the prediction column to get an estimate of the overall number of daily searches for business credit cards.

This estimates the market at around 8,000 searches a day – many times more than the prediction of 560 for the exact keyword phrase ‘business credit cards’.

So the bank may well take the decision that attracting a percentage of the 8000 people searching is a good niche market to be in.

Now let’s have a look at the other niche that interested the bank – 'prepaid credit cards'. An immediate question comes to mind here – do people type in 'prepaid', 'pre paid' or 'pre-paid'. Again Wordtracker provides the answer.

Here are the settings to use:

And here are the results:

Wordtracker has given me six variations of the keyword. Now I can go back to the setting and click 'exact keyword inside a search term' and 'include plurals' to again get the largest count possible.

Wordtracker returns over 230 keyword phrases and I can export them to Excel and see that the total predicted number of daily searches is around 2600.

From this exercise the bank can see that ‘business credit cards’ is a larger niche than ‘prepaid credit cards’ even though the original predictions for each keyword would suggest the opposite.

Keyword	Predictions for Keyword Only	Predictions for keyword inside a longer search term
'prepaid credit cards'	687	2600
'business credit cards'	560	8000

Next, the bank should make sure that it has found all the important keyword phrases in the niche market. That means looking for related terms such as ‘business finance’ or ‘business banking’ and repeat the process of digging deep into Keyword Researcher.

Once that research is completed, the bank can make a good assessment of the value of the niche.

Now for that baby shop

They’ve been in business for about ten years and have built a good reputation and a healthy turnover. They decided that they now want to expand their business online.

They have noticed that over the last year or so that there’s been a trickle of inquiries in the store for organic products. Could this be a good market sector on which to build their internet presence?

Again Wordtracker can help.

Here are the settings to use:

This time I’ve chosen ‘keywords in any order’ so this will return keyword phrases that contain both ‘baby organic’ and ‘organic baby’. Here are the results:

Wordtracker has found around 360 keywords. By exporting the results to Excel and adding up the daily predictions, we get an estimate of over 8,000 daily searches. Now, how about natural baby products? How many people are searching for them?

Natural baby gives us another 120 keywords with a total of almost 3000 daily searches giving a total number of daily searches of around 10000.

These methods allow you to dig deep into the Wordtracker database and extra a high volume of useful keywords.

But that’s not all you can do with Wordtracker. You can use the Keyword Universe to find related terms.

When we dig deep for the term ‘organic baby’, it is included in every single result, e.g. ‘organic baby clothes’, ‘organic baby bedding’, ‘organic baby soap’ and so on.

But related words are different – they do not always include the original seed keyword. For example, doing a related keyword search for ‘organic’ will return keywords such as:

natural	environmentally friendly
all natural	environmentally responsible
natural products	eco-label
healthy	green business
healthy planet	buy local

The baby shop can then review this list of related keywords (you get up to 300 with Wordtracker) and decide which ones are relevant to the business. The owner can then follow the steps we’ve already taken to dig deep into these new keywords and assess the potential size of the market.

Exploiting niche markets

The research we have described in this final lesson allows you to estimate the size of any market online. You can exploit each niche market by following the steps we’ve outlined in earlier lessons.

But of course, the big question is - should you exploit each of the markets you have found? That’s a business decision only you can answer based on the strengths and weaknesses of your business and what you really want to do.

However, to help you make that decision let me quote the father of the marketing industry, Philip Kotler.

He says "An ideal market niche would have the following characteristics:

• The niche is of sufficient size and purchasing power to be profitable
• The niche has growth potential
• The niche is of negligible interest to major competitors
• The firm has the required skills and resources to serve the niche effectively
• The firm can defend itself against an attacking major competitor through the customer goodwill it has built up"

If you have any questions or would like to hear more, please email us at support@wordtracker.com

Have a look at further articles in this series:

Using Keywords - A Primer. Part 1: Optimizing Your Current Web Content

Using Keywords - A Primer. Part 2: Generate Search Engine Friendly Content