I was scanning through some headlines online and came across an article called “Insomnia fuels a run in drug sales”. It talks about the increasing use of drugs to overcome sleeplessness. Our lifestyle doesn’t look like it is getting any less stressful and so this looks like a growth area. Add in the imminent recession and record number of mortgage foreclosures and it looks like there will be a lot of sleepless zombies in our workforce in the near future.I wanted to walk you through some of the steps I take to investigate an idea and so this seemed like a good topic. Each domainer/webmaster probably has their own favorite way of researching topics and key words but here i will give you some of the basic tools.
My first stop was Google Trends where I searched for insomnia and used “keyword” as a control. You can substitute your own keyword. Why use a keyword? You need a word where you have a feeling for the search volume so you can compare against the other term i.e. insomnia. Google Trends only gives you relative numbers, not absolute so you need a keyword benchmark that you use each time. As you can see there seems to be a reasonable search volume.
Next stop is Google Adwords. I use their keyword tool to get an estimate of search volume, advertiser volume and related keywords. The capture below shows you how this is done.
A small piece of the results are shown below. I have the results sorted by advertiser competition.
The advertiser competition is strong which means that there are plenty of ads available for this topic. The search volume on the first two terms is low and about average for the third. You can also see that the tools suggests keywords and phrases for consideration.
Next I will do a search in Google using the term insomnia. I use a tool in my FireFox browser called SeoQuake (I believe it is also available for IE). A search in Google using SeoQuake looks like this:
As you can see under each search result, there is a list of the Page Rank (PR) and the number of incoming links etc. This helps you judge the strength of your potential competition.
The next step is a reality check. I usually ask three questions:
- How much do I know about this topic to create unique quality content? (if I am creating a website) or How much do I know about this topic to find domain names that could receive type-in traffic or would be valuable in the resale or end user market?
- Do I know what the searchers are looking for? (not always as obvious as you might think)
- Are there simpler, more popular search terms that mean the same thing?
To answer question number three first, the term sleep or sleepless would seem to be simpler and probably have a higher search volume. Now we repeat the previous steps. Going back to Google Trends, I add sleep and sleepless to the terms. As you can see, by far the most popular search term here is sleep.
To answer question number two, look carefully at the ads that turns up when you search for these terms. Examine a number of websites and see what they offer and what ads they show. Put yourself in the shoes of the searcher and ask yourself what problem they are trying to solve. Perhaps you can group searchers according to the problems they are trying to solve.
To answer question one, be honest with yourself. If you do not know enough, ask yourself if it is worth your time educating yourself. If this is an area you want to be in, then the answer is almost always yes. Hidden in this question is also the issue of competition. How hard will you have to work to compete or can you identify a niche? Is insomnia a term to can target specifically or will sleep sites also target insomnia? Yes, sleep sites will target the insomnia keyword and so I would not consider this as a method for limiting the competition.
Finding a niche is an art in itself. For this topic, you can look at the causes of insomnia and perhaps target a specific group of sufferers. What do insomniacs do with that extra time? Can you harness that energy and turn it to a productive end and a profit for yourself?
This gives you a flavor of the type of thinking that goes into choosing topics whether you are a domainer or a website developer. This same process can also be used to expand on keywords for a topic where you already hold domains or websites.
Have any favorite tools of your own for research? Let me know.
