Mark Nunney shows how to start your keyword research for a new site by first finding and then prioritizing your target markets and the keywords associated with them.

Keyword research for a new site can start with a process called the Keyword Research Funnel that goes through the following five stages:

1) Find target markets
2) Prioritize target keyword niches
3) Create first content
4) PPC to verify target keywords
5) SEO for verified keywords

Then when your website has organic non-paid search engine traffic, you can move on to the Keyword Research Circle of Response.

In this article we’ll look at step 1: Find target markets.

Finding your target markets for search marketing involves finding their associated keywords – the words and phrases used to search Google, Yahoo and Bing.

You are looking for big markets at the start of your keyword research process. So if you are selling cars, the markets might include cars, family cars, sports cars and ford cars.

Later you'll move from target markets to target keywords. Those will come from within your target markets' keyword niches like family cars. Eg, cool family cars or big family cars. You’ll find those later in step 2.

Keyword research starts with seed keywords

Seed keywords are the core of a market or keyword niche. Eg, the seed keyword of the donuts keyword niche is donuts.

The donuts keyword niche is all keywords containing donut, including glazed donuts and chocolate donuts.

So if you’re making a search on a keyword research tool like the Wordtracker Keywords Tool, enter a seed word or words, like this:

The image above shows a search configured for the Wordtracker database (the Wordtracker radio button has been selected). But we are going to start by using the Google database. See below:

The seed keyword in the example images above is tea.

You might sell chocolate and start with, well, chocolate.

Starting with chocolate, you might expand and find more seed keywords like gourmet chocolate, chocolate desserts and organic chocolate.

These keywords are all markets (as well as keyword niches) that you might target and build content for on your site. But always follow this rule:

Only create site content you would want whether or not it brings traffic or response.

So no work you do is wasted.

Think about this when you are considering a possible target market. Do you want the content required to target that market on your site?

Let’s explore some different ways of finding possible seed keywords …

What are you selling again?

Ask yourself what you are selling and write down relevant products and markets.

Perhaps you and I together are launching a gourmet tea site that sells tea, including:

green tea
oolang tea
herbal tea
black tea
white tea
yellow tea
specialist tea

Always ask yourself how these subjects might relate to the keywords customers search with. No detailed research is required yet. I just want you to keep reminding yourself that you will be looking for the keywords your customers use.

Save all these potential target keywords in a file called Potential Target Markets.

What do you and your employees and colleagues think?

Think beyond the products you sell. Consider problems you solve and related subjects that people talk about and want to know about. (If you’re an agency ask your clients these questions.)

You are an expert in your field. Write down relevant words, subjects, products, etc.

Imagine you are an osteopath – you might write down some possible seed keywords like these:

back pain
osteopathy
osteopath
neck pain

Add the ideas you like to your Potential Target Markets file.

Listen to your customers

Listen to the words your customers use. Read their emails. Look at forums, Facebook and other social media sites. The words people use are the words they will search with.

Your potential customers might say physio, physician, doctor or back doctor.

Back to tea: customers might be asking for zhu ye qing green tea or porcelain tea sets that do justice to their gourmet tea.

Add the ideas you like to your Potential Target Markets file.

Read the best and most popular relevant websites

Search Google with a seed keyword you like. Eg, osteopath or chocolates or tea (I’m running three examples here side by side – you can handle that, can’t you?). Also make searches like these:

Read the resulting websites that most impress you and take notes about the subjects they cover and the relevant words they use.

For a chocolate site you might find:

luxury chocolates belgian chocolates
cocoa hand made chocolate

Or for the osteopathy website:

cranial osteopathy
sports injuries
visceral osteopathy
trapped nerve
lower back pain

And for tea:

black tea
brewed tea
green tea benefits
oolong tea
cream tea

Always be looking for subjects and words that are relevant to your business.

Add the ideas you like to your Potential Target Markets file.

Always be asking yourself if you can use possible seed keywords in content that you’re happy to have on your website. Eg, articles, blog posts, news stories, videos, photo collections, product pages, etc.

For example, perhaps you find the market niche strawberry chocolates but don’t sell strawberry chocolates. You might still write about strawberry chocolates in the hope of selling something different to those searching for them. But chances are you have something more relevant to write about.

And is our gourmet tea site going to write about cream teas?

Create a new Project and a Potential Target Markets List in Wordtracker

You’ve been saving all your possible target keywords in your Potential Target Markets file.

You’re now going to put them into a Wordtracker List inside a new Wordtracker Project like this …

Create a project in Wordtracker from the dashboard.

Enter your Potential Target Markets keywords into the Keywords Tool as seed keywords.

Look for your target markets in your results and save them to a new List (Potential Target Markets).

Select those you want to add (with the check box.)

Use Wordtracker Keywords Tool’s Related Keywords Tool

I like all the methods given so far but Wordtracker Keywords Tool’s Related Keywords Tool is my favorite. I’ll call it the Orange Tool because, er, it’s orange and ‘Wordtracker Keywords Tool’s Related Keywords Tool’ is a bit long.

To use the Orange Tool, you simply enter a single seed word (or phrase) and get up to 300 related keywords back. The image on the following page shows the first 21 results for separate searches with chocolate, osteopath and tea.

You can only see the top 21 Related Tool results in the above images but if you dig down then you’ll always find plenty of interesting keywords.

Plenty of keywords to consider there. If any look like a potential market then …

Click ‘search’ next to any keywords you want to add to your Potential Target Markets List.

Then click ‘Search & Save’.

The results will be a search in the Keywords (Blue) Tool from which you can add wanted keywords to your Potential Target Markets List as described above.

The Orange Related Keywords Tool is a simple thing but it found the following potential target markets for our tea site:

herbal tea
black tea
green tea
white tea
organic tea
loose tea
tea gifts
iced tea
gourmet tea
oolong
tea bags
herbal
flavored tea
rooibos
teapots
specialty tea
tea leaves
loose leaf tea
earl grey
assam
darjeeling
decaf

There are 46 keywords in our Potential Target Markets List. Here are the top 11 (by search volume):

Choose your target markets

You can spend forever adding keywords to your Potential Target Markets List. Much better to push on. Make adding to this list a permanent process but for now – get to the party.

(If you later find any other keywords you like then you add them to your list and put them through this same process.)

Time to review your Potential Target Markets List. You may have got carried away and added keywords that aren’t relevant enough. If so, delete them.

All remaining keywords should be relevant to your products and services and worth targeting. But you can’t do everything at once. You must prioritize.

You must pick a list of markets to target. To do so, work in a duplicate (copy) of your Potential Target Markets List.

In Potential Target Markets (copy), select 5-15 keywords (the specific amount isn’t important) for a new Target Markets List. The image below shows some Potentials ‘checked’.

Move your selected keywords to a new list and call it ‘Target Markets List’.

Use just two criteria to choose your Target Markets List:

1) Appropriateness. How likely do you think it is you can sell your products to those searching with keywords in the potential market’s keyword niche? Eg, can you sell iced tea, organic tea, japanese tea, cream tea?

2) Size (number of searches). The size of a market is of interest because inside big markets (big keyword niches) we are likely to find smaller keyword niches that we can compete for. These will contain the actual keywords you target.

Our tea site example now has 10 target markets:

Those search figures are Google’s estimates of the number of monthly searches with keywords containing those shown. Google uses a sample of real searches to make its estimates.

In step 2 of the Keyword Research Funnel - prioritize target keyword niches - you look at the same keywords using Wordtracker’s database and the figures will be quite different. Wordtracker also uses a database of real searches but the search numbers shown are the actual number of searches in the database (no extrapolations or estimates are made).

The specific numbers are of little interest. All we want at the moment are some clues that there are searches being made and rough ideas of relative size.

This is just the start. Next ...

In step 2 - prioritize target keyword niches - you’ll find perhaps 5-10 target keyword niches within each of your target markets. Eg, you might choose green tea benefits from within the green tea keyword niche.

You can learn how to do that and the rest of the keyword research process in SEO for Profit.

About Mark Nunney

Mark Nunney has been a successful professional SEO since 2000. He is CEO of The Website Marketing Company and he publishes Leadership & Management Review from ThinkingManagers.com, the business management website.

Mark wrote SEO for Profit, Wordtracker Masterclass: Keyword Research book and co-wrote Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building with Ken McGaffin. He is also the founder and project manager of Wordtracker Strategizer.

You can follow Mark Nunney's SEO on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ and read a Q&A here.