Using Keywords Part 9: Identify and exploit niche markets

Posted by Ken McGaffin on 12 February 2008

If you want to build a thriving business, you must identify the niches within your market. Decide which ones you want to target, then tailor your message to the audience.

Segment your market into its niche elements

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, environmentally-friendly cars and so on.

Figure 9.1: Auto manufacturers promote their vehicles to a variety of niches within their market

It’s likely you chose your last car based on its safety record, mileage rating or whatever set of criteria was important to you. The key to success in selling cars, or anything else, is to target each of these groups and speak directly to them.

Pinpoint key market segments

Similarly, if you want your online business to succeed, you’ll have to uncover the niches in your market and decide which ones are worth pursuing.

Figure 9.2: Speak to your audience in language they understand

Keywords help you find and assess new markets

Wordtracker’s Keywords tool can help you identify and quantify niche markets.

Keyword research tells you what people are looking for online and so it can help you assess the size of the market for any particular product or service. There are three stages involved:

(i) Find the most popular keywords in your niche market.

(ii) For each popular keyword, see how it is used in longer search terms and use the volume of searches to estimate the number of people searching for that particular keyword.

(iii) Unearth related keywords that reveal hidden niches. Then calculate the volume of searches to give an estimate of the size of the market (and examine the level of competition you face).

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 expanding online for the very first time.

The bank and the credit card market

The bank could decide to target everyone who wants a credit card (a highly competitive market). Or they could look for specific niches within the credit card sector and target each with a specific message (it’s likely that there will be less competition in some niches, making these more attractive).

Here’s how we’ll set up the Keywords tool to explore how people search around credit card.

(1) Choose between Google and Wordtracker data:

• Pick ‘Google’ if you’re just starting your research and want to get an idea of the size of the market. You’ll get up to 200 new keywords each time you search.
  
• Choose ‘Wordtracker’ if you’re looking for long tail terms, as you get up to 1,000 keywords at a time.

We’ve selected ‘Wordtracker’, as we’re looking to expand our list of keywords and want to get as many ideas as possible.

(2) There are three choices under Wordtracker for Match:

'Keywords in any order': This means a search for credit card will match credit card, credit card at low rate, and card for credit.

'Exact keyword inside a search term': A search for credit card will match credit card and credit card at low rate but not card for credit.

'Exact keyword only': A search for credit card will only match credit card.

Note the settings I have used for our example:

• 'Exact keyword inside a search term', which we learned will show all the search terms that include the exact keyword credit card.
  
• 'Include: plurals'. This means the 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 only the singular, credit card.
  

(3) Choose the 'territory' that’s most appropriate for your business – the US or the UK.

Now click the 'Search' button and Wordtracker will return up to 1,000 keywords, all of which will contain the exact phrase credit card:

Our bank should scan the list of 1,000 keywords and delete terms that are not of interest. It finds two potential niches that match its business strengths – prepaid credit cards and business credit cards.

Now it’s time 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 search count of 1,410 does not suggest a very large niche. That would be a mistake - this 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 cards 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 'Search' quantity.

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 search within the business credit cards option by clicking ‘search’ next to it.

The additional search returns over 400 keyword phrases containing business credit card - the keyword niche - and here are the top terms:

Notice the 'Searches' total is now 10,351, many more times the 1,410 listed for the single keyword business credit cards.

So, the bank may well take the decision that attracting a percentage of the 10,351 people searching in the business credit card niche is a good market to be in. We can easily ‘Save Selected’ or ‘Export’ this list of 400+ keywords using the click options on this screen.

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, the Keywords tool provides the answer.

Here are the settings to use and the results:

Find keyword variations

Wordtracker has given me six variations of the keyword. Now I know that the majority of the searchers use prepaid credit cards as their keyword.

Now I can go back to the setting and click 'Exact keyword inside a search term' and 'Include: plurals' to get a count for the whole niche.

Have a look at further articles in this series:

Wordtracker returns over 500 keyword phrases, with a Search total of 5,880. If I am interested, I can ‘Save Selected’ or ‘Export’ them. I can also choose any of the keywords and do another search to discover additional keywords to use.

From this initial exercise the bank can see that business credit cards is a larger niche than prepaid credit cards. The lesson here is that initial results indicated a similar level of searches for each of the single keywords. But, by investigating each niche, we know that the business credit cards niche is larger.

Keyword	Searches for Keyword Only	Searches for the keyword niche
prepaid credit cards	1,306	5,880
business credit cards	1,410	10,351

You shouldn’t be thinking about targeting a single keyword. Targeting a keyword niche is much more likely to give you a good return on investment. You can find out more about targeting keyword niches in Mark Nunney’s article, How to optimize a page successfully for over 10,000 keywords.

Expand your thinking

Next, the bank should make sure 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 repeating the process of digging deep into the long tail using the ‘Find Keywords’ feature.

Once that research is completed, the bank can continue its assessment of the value of each niche. For instance, the bank will want to check out how much competition it faces. To do this, they would click ‘Get additional metrics.’ For more information about how to use each metric, we recommend reading Mike Mindel’s article Finding profitable keywords just got easier with Wordtracker’s Keywords tool.

Now for the baby shop

Let’s imagine a shop that sells baby products. It’s been in business for about 10 years and has built a good reputation and a healthy turnover.

The business owners have decided to expand its online presence.

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

Again Wordtracker’s Keywords tool 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 600 keywords, with a Searches total of 2,929. Now, how about natural baby products? How many people are searching for them?

Natural baby gives us another 286 keywords with a total of almost 691 Searches, giving a total number of Searches of around 3,500.

So, we’ve already unearthed a number of useful keywords.

But, that’s not all you can do. You can use the Related Keywords tool to find new terms that don’t contain your ‘seed’ keyword. You will notice that at the top of the Find Keywords screen, the related keywords tool can be set to either Show or Hide. When you click Show, an orange box opens up on the left side, as shown here. You can then Find keywords related to … organic baby.

An additional 300 keywords appear. When we searched for the term organic baby on the right hand side, it was included in every single result, eg, organic baby gifts, organic baby clothes, organic baby blanket and so on.

But the related keywords in the orange box are different – they do not always include the original keyword. For example, doing a related keyword search for organic baby will return keywords such as:

• Eco-friendly
  
• Natural baby products
  
• Cotton
  
• Green
  
• Non-toxic

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 then exploit each 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”

To what extent does your chosen niche fit these criteria?

Get a risk-free 7-day trial of Wordtracker's Keywords tool

A subscription to Wordtracker's premium Keywords tool will help you to:

• Generate thousands of relevant keywords to improve your organic and PPC search campaigns.
• Optimize your website content by using the most popular keywords for your product and services.
• Research online markets, find niche opportunities and exploit them before your competitors.

Take a risk-free 7-day trial of Wordtracker’s Keywords tool and we'll send you a series of seven 'Profit from Keywords videos' that are guaranteed to help you find the best keywords for your business.

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

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For more articles in this series, have a look at:

Using Keywords Part 1: Expand your keyword lists

Using Keywords Part 2: Optimize your existing content

Using Keywords Part 3: Generate search engine friendly content

Using Keywords Part 4: Squeeze every bit of value from pay per click

Using Keywords Part 5: Choose keyword rich names

Using Keywords. Part 6. Optimize your press releases

Using Keywords Part 7: Build keyword rich inbound links

Using Keywords Part 8: Use keywords in offline advertising