Building a Niche Store: The Importance of Niche Keyword Research

If you want to get targeted free traffic for your niche store, then there's no question about it - you're going to need to target specific, quality keywords.

I see many websites who just don't do this properly. Many times they target general keywords which are neither targeted and often times just too competitive to get a decent ranking in search engines.

The nice thing about working with the Ebay Partner Network is that you can take long tail keywords that would otherwise be impossible to monotenize with other affiliate programs (or at least not as easy as this), drive targeted buyers to our pages, and make sales.

Niche Keyword Research Explained

Let's give an example.

Say for instance I am building a niche store centered around the popular women's shoe brand Steve Madden.

Let's hop on over to the free keyword research tool at SEOTools and type in the keyword "Steve Madden".

At the top of the list is "Steve Madden" with 323 Google searches a day. It would be nice to rank decently for this search term because of the traffic, but chances are it will bring a handful of people looking for information about the football player named Steve Madden and these surfers would be pretty useless to me since they would not turn into buyers.

The next term is "Steve Madden Shoes" and this would be the ideal term to rank our new website with. 224 searchers per day looking for Steve Madden shoes so this would translate into a nice amount of sales per day depending on what kind of rankings we had with Google. With 549,000 results in Google it's definitely an obtainable term to rank for, but for newer sites I like to go deeper and find more targeted terms which aren't as competitive.

If we look further on the list we can find the term "Steve Madden Barnum Shoes" with 8 searchers per day. This is where things get really fun. Most sites do not try to rank for small terms like this - but don't make the same mistake and neglect these kinds of terms! Here's 8 people per day which are looking for a very specific product and if you can deliver it to them chances are they are going to buy. Match the right keyword with the right product, rank for the term so you can receive some traffic, and you will make sales.

Imagine if we captured #1 spots on 10 of these uncompetitive, yet highly targeted terms? You would see decent earnings each and every day.

But does Ebay have a consistent supply of this style of shoe? Doing a search on Ebay I find 3 auctions for these shoes, and 8 store listings. Awesome!

Quick Tip: If you use premium keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker they will organize keywords by KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) - these are the easiest terms you can rank for.

After You Have the Keyword

Utilizing PHPBay we can create a quality, unique article centered around "Steve Madden Barnum Shoes". Write as much or as you want - but I recommend at the bare minimum 200-300 words when it comes to your article length. Make your articles sound as personal as possible, don't sound like a fact spitting robot - people generally don't like reading these kinds of articles.

Naturally insert the keyword a couple times, but don't overdo it. Put it in the title, first paragraph, and sprinkled a couple times throughout the article depending on the length. If the keyword appears too much Google will recognize this and penalize it so it will be harder to get a decent rank for it.

Somewhere in the content insert your PHPBay code for "Steve Madden Barnum Shoes".

Next, we need to build links to this article so your potential customers can see it on the front page of Google. I will talk more about this soon.