Finding Golden Keywords With Traffic Travis Part 3

Aim of article: To narrow down our list of keywords and decide on the best one to use.

Cost: $0

Time to complete: 10 minutes, low effort.

What you will need: Spreadsheet and Traffic Travis

This will be the 3rd installment in our journey to find awesome keywords that are worthy of your time and energy. If you need to, you can review part 1 here and part 2 here. When we left off last time, we had a large list of around 340 keywords which we then filtered down by difficult to 197 easy or very easy to rank keywords. At this point, we are looking to narrow our list to one or a few keywords that are the absolute best of the best. Let’s aim high and take the top 20 (as sorted by our global keyword value column).

In case you are not following along, you should be looking at the following keywords:

1. hydraulic
2. air filters
3. door handles
4. siemens careers
5. rexnord
6. hydraulics
7. smc fan control
8. door hardware
9. parker pens
10. protool
11. parker co
12. water purification systems
13. siemens wiki
14. parker colorado
15. water filter systems
16. donaldson cross reference
17. schlage locks
18. donaldson filters
19. siemens stock
20. reverse osmosis water filter

There are some here that we want to avoid because of branding issues. Keywords like “siemens careers” and “rexnord” are company names and are what we want to avoid.

*Note: It is okay to make pages targeting these keywords if it falls into your niche; we just want to avoid making an entire site around them.

Take those keywords out and we end up with this list of 10 keywords:

1. hydraulic
2. air filters
3. door handles
4. hydraulics
5. smc fan control
6. door hardware
7. water purification systems
8. water filter systems
9. reverse osmosis water filter
10. cabinet knobs

Take this list of 10 and put them into Traffic Travis’ keyword competition tool (SEO>Competition). If you recall, we did this step in part 1 as well.

*Note: Remember the settings: Advanced Settings> Top 10, uncheck phrase search, check InTitle and check InAnchor.

Click “fetch” and let it run.

This time, we are going to look at the Report column. With this function, Traffic Travis will give us a more detailed look at the competition factors for each of our 10 keywords.

Let’s start with the first keyword, “hydraulic”.

You can see right away that it should be fairly easy to rank a site as high as #4. theleeco.com is a PR4 site but is not optimized for our keyword what so ever. Above that, it gets a little tougher (but not too bad, remember, we already filtered out the difficult keywords).

Our biggest challenge is going to be beating out the Wikipedia. Depending on the niche, I may suggest ignoring that and aiming for the #2 spot because most people know what Wikipedia is and may decide to skip it, but that is another topic for another day. Anyway, “hydraulic” does not seem like a good selling keyword. I wouldn’t expect someone searching for this word to be ready to buy anything. This would be a better keyword for an AdSense site but it would be tough to compete against Wikipedia since information is our aim.

We will continue down our list of 10 but for the sake of time, I am going to skip right to “water purification systems”.

This is exactly what we are looking for! It is a keyword that you can sell products with and/or create an informational site with AdSense. The PR of the top 10 sites will be a factor but very few of them are specifically targeting our “water purification systems” keyword. In fact, only 3 of the pages have our keyword in their title or description and none in the top 5 do.

Better yet, it looks like we can include 2 of our other keywords in this niche site: “water filter systems” and “reverse osmosis water filter”. This looks like a real winner.

That wraps up part 3 of our search for the golden keyword. In part 4, I will be showing you how to find some good long tails to go along with our “water things and stuff” niche.