Underground Competitive Intelligence and Keyword Research

Having your website up and running is the first step, but one thing that I learned from Michael Cheney is that you need to optimize your website for your specific keywords, so that you can start climbing in the search engine ranking.

Keyword research will make SEO so much faster and PPC so much cheaper. And you can do this research for FREE with the tools I'll show you!

Here are some of the tools that I use for my keywords research:

- Market Samurai (free!)
- Google Keyword (free!)
- www.spyfu.com (free!)
- www.wordtracker.com (free trial)
- www.hexatrack.com (free!)
- www.KeyCompete.com (free trial)

What you are doing with your keyword research is you are narrowing your market into your specific niche. You are using a laser beam instead of a flashlight.

So instead of a broad market like?computers, you could narrow it down:

Computers → Laptop computers → Apple Laptops → iBook

See how you have just taken a broad market search term with a ton of website and competition, down to a specific niche with fewer websites and less competition.

You are targeting your specific customer this way too.

You are essentially carving your own slice of cyberspace on the internet with your keyword, that you will then create websites, articles, videos and other content around your keywords.

The coolest thing about the tools I've shown you earlier is that as you are searching for your keyword, you are arming yourself with a TON of competitive intelligence and know how to set up your website the right way the first time:

- Competition- who is using you keyword?

- Volume- how many searches a day?
- Trends- are they steady, increasing, declining, or seasonal?
- Commercial intent- how likely is someone to buy something from you based on searching for your keyword?

The commercial intent is one of the coolest things for you and me?because who do we want? Buyers!

We want them to buy from us because of the content and the value that we are giving away.

You want to do your keyword research not only to figure out where the niche is.

You want to make sure that as you're building pages you're using that keyword research data and figuring out through PPC which ones are converting the best to then go and build out your websites.

This will tell you what keywords to write articles about or what keywords to go build Squidoo pages around.