STEP 2: Time for some keyword research…

IMPORTANT!

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Now that you have a list of at least five products you need to see whether any of them has the potential to generate enough traffic for you. There’s no point in creating a beautiful review if no one is going to see it. So this is going to mean a bit of keyword research.

Now keyword research isn’t one of our most favorite tasks so you won’t see us spending hours trawling through keyword tools to find a huge list of keywords…at least not at this point in the process. For now, we simply want to see whether there are enough people searching for each of our products.

To do this we use the Google Keyword Tool. This free tool allows us to see the volume of searches for particular keyword queries.
(Note that if you have your own keyword tool then by all means use that instead. We recommend Market Samurai. You can try it out for a couple of weeks for free.)

So, head over to the Google Keyword Tool now to begin searching.

Google Keyword Tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The first thing you need to do when you get there is to select the country that you are going to be promoting your products to.

Remember that Amazon only ships to certain countries around the world. We live in Australia but we promote all of our products to the US market so we select ‘English, United States’ as shown in the image below. Just click the Advanced Options link (see image below) to change to your desired country.

In the ‘Word or phrase’ field enter one of the products that you came up with in Step 1 and press the Search button. But don’t just enter the whole product name – start with two or three of the main keywords and try as many different variations as you can.

So for instance if one of the products you found in Amazon is described as the ‘Blue Jane Convertible Day Bed Model XYJ123’ then you could enter the following variations:

• Blue Jane Day Bed
• Blue Jane Bed
• Blue Jane Convertible Day Bed
• Blue Jane Convertible Bed
• XYJ123
• Blue Jane XYJ123
• Day Beds
• Day Bed
• Convertible Beds
• Convertible Day Beds
• Convertible day bed reviews
• Day bed reviews
• Etc…

Let’s take a real life example using a product from Amazon to explain this in more detail.

Example: Panasonic EY6432GQKW 15.6-Volt NiMH 1/2-Inch Cordless Drill/Driver Kit

I’ve chosen a Panasonic cordless drill as one of my potential products so my first step is to create a quick list of keyword variations right off the top of my head that I can use in the Google Keyword Tool. My list might look something like this:

• Panasonic cordless drill
• Panasonic EY6432GQKW
• Panasonic EY6432GQKW cordless drill
• Panasonic NiMH drill
• Panasonic NiMH cordless drill
• Cordless drills
• Cordless drill
• EY6432GQKW
• 15.6 volt cordless drills
• 15.6 volt Panasonic cordless drills
• cordless drill reviews

You can see that there are plenty of variations to go with and I have only just started. So when I type in the first keyword on my list and click SEARCH, I get the following results:

Now before we analyze the results, we just need to tidy up the list by selecting Exact from the Match Type options (see image below).

Selecting an Exact match will display search amounts that match the exact phrase you entered. If you keep it at Broad then Google will display search volumes on similar phrases and variations of those keywords. We really don’t want that at this point so make sure you select Exact.

Here are the results:

For our purposes we want to look at the results under the ‘Local Monthly Searches’ column. In this case, Google tells us that approximately 2,400 searches were performed in a month for the keyword phrase “Panasonic cordless drill”. If we work that out over 31 days in an average month then that is around 77 searches a day. What this means is that you have the potential to get 77 people clicking through to your site on a daily basis if you were ranked in the number one position on Google for that keyword phrase.

However, bear in mind that being in the number 1 position in the Google search engine for a keyword doesn’t guarantee that everyone who searches for that keyword will click your website when they do a search. They could just as easily click the second search result or even the third. But this exercise at least gives us a rough idea of the amount of traffic we might get.

To illustrate this further, here are some figures to get your head around. These figures1 are approximate but in general they will give you a feel for the type of traffic you are likely to get based on your position in the search engines:

#1 position receives 42.1 % of clicks
#2 position receives 11.9 % of clicks
#3 position receives 8.5 % of clicks
#4 position receives 6.1 % of clicks
#5 position receives 4.9 % of clicks
#6 position receives 4.1 % of clicks
#7 position receives 3.4 % of clicks
#8 position receives 3.0 % of clicks
#9 position receives 2.8 % of clicks
#10 position receives 3.0 % of clicks

Now let’s try another keyword: ‘Panasonic EY6432GQKW’

You can see that in this case that keyword has approximately 1000 local monthly searches or 32 people per day.

You can also see as we are doing this that Google has been very helpful and provided us with similar keyword phrases. Now we can add any relevant ones to our list as well.

So after I have finished with each keyword my list might look something like this. (Note: Refer to Attachment 2 for this template)

 This list might be longer if I spent more time but as I said, I try to avoid keyword research so this is enough for me. If you would prefer to continue on and get as many as possible…that’s okay too. It can help for some of the next steps and also when working on generating backlinks and traffic. But at this point, I personally don’t feel the need to go any further as I can see already from this little exercise that this product has a lot of interest with a lot of people searching for it on a daily basis.

You can see from the list above that we have not only focused on specific product keywords like “Panasonic EY6432GQKW cordless drill” but also generic keywords like “cordless drill review”. Your goal is to rank for both product specific and generic keywords so make sure you list both.

• Generic keyword phrases are going to be a lot harder to rank for but they are worth focusing on as they tend to generate more traffic.
• Product specific phrases are generally easier to rank for but can send you less traffic. They do however tend to convert better than generic keyword phrases.

Your ultimate goal with this step is to get a total of at least 1000 daily searches using a variety of keyword phrases. You can see from the example we went through above that this product does that quite easily with 6950 daily searches and we didn’t even scratch the surface to find other relevant keywords.

Now you need to do this exercise for all 5 of your products. Use the template at the end of this ebook (Attachment 2) to enter your data.