Find Keywords With Traffic But Little Competition

Here is a way to find keywords with traffic but only a little competition using your PPC data.

Use at your own risk ;)

Get The Traffic Volume

I load up a campaign with 20,000 or so keywords from misspellings to long tail keywords.

I get the keywords from datafeeds and product api's and also grab my affiliate url. This way when i'm getting my keyword search data (via ppc) I can also make a few affiliate sales.

I like to look for keywords that are getting roughly 250 to 500 impressions on the google SEARCH network for the last 7 days. It's not an accurate science, but I assume these keywords have some volume that make them worth targetting and POTENTIAL to be ignored in the natural search engine results.

I now have a list of keywords/phrases/misspellings with some impressions that are products.

Note: Google adwords is THE best keyword volume tool.

Get The Competition

Now that you have your list of keywords with some volume it's time to find out if any of the keywords have a little competition, because then you want to go create some content for them to rank yourself there ;)

That's simple, just go down your list of keywords, type them into Google, and see which keywords return the least results. Doing this manually will be a pain though, better to scrape the results and go for a cup of coffee.

If you find any keywords with less than 50-100 natural search results you are golden, it should be a breeze to rank for these keywords and the previous step already showed some search traffic for them.

To scrape google, I'm not exactly sure how to do it but this next script might work ;)

$arr = array(
"45n5",
"problogger",
"cdfnetworks",
"zacjohnson"
);

foreach ($arr as $value) {

$value = urlencode($value);
$url="http://www.google.com/search?q=$value";
$data = file_get_contents($url);
$regex = '/of about <b>(.+?)<\/b>/';
preg_match($regex,$data,$match);
if ($match[1] < 1) {$match[1]=0;}
$match[1] = str_replace(",","",$match[1]);
echo $value . " " . (int)$match[1] . "<br />";
sleep(5);
}

Go Build Your Content

That's it. Take your list of keywords that google says only has a few pages and build some content for them. This can be done quickly since there is little competition although taking your time will make sure that when/if the competition comes you'll keep ranking.

Whadddya think? Smart idea? Am I jeapordizing my adwords account? What would you change? Do something like this? Love it?

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed. You can also Subscribe to 45n5 by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.