Finding “easy picking” keywords for your articles

Finding the right “easy picking” keyword for your article is important.

The type of keyword you want should fit the following criteria:

1) targeted to your niche,
2) has reasonably high search
3) has low competition
 
For example, enter the phrase “credit card” into Google or your favorite search engine, including the quotations.

Look out for the search results near the top right hand corner of the browser. In this case, there is millions of entries. This is not a good keyword to use as the competition is too high. It is difficult to get your site to list on the first page.

However, if you use a longer phrase like “credit card for students in college”, the result will be reduced a lot. This type of keyword is commonly called long tail and tend to be bring in more targeted visitors to your site. They tend to have much lower competition and is really for your easy picking.

I tend to use keywords that have 10,000 or less searches a month. Of course, this is not cast in stone. If the niche I am interested has a monthly search of a few millions (such as credit card industry), I will probably raise the bar to 100,000 searches
or less.

The downside to using long tail is that the amount of traffic generated is much lower too.  To make out for the lack in volume, you will need to find at least 10 to 20 long tail keywords. If each one brings you an average of 1000 visitors a month, ten such keywords will bring in 10,000 visitors.

Do use these long tail keywords in your article title. You probably have to modify the phrase a bit to make it look more presentable. Once you have the titles, you will find it easier to write your articles.

The Google external keyword tool is probably the best online keyword tool for mining long tail keywords. It is not perfect but who is complaining since it doesn’t cost a dime:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Of course, if you have the budget, you can invest in a paid tool like Keyword Elite or Micro Niche Finder, which can help speeds thing up a lot.

In short, look for keywords that have four or more words.

Each of them should have about 1000 searches a month on average
and with competition less than 10,000 results.

As I said before, nothing is cast in stone. So, feel free to add in your own criteria.