*Target Niches.*

While “mens clothing” in the previous example may be one of the most popular clothing related searches, it unfortunately has a lot of competition. If you do a search on Google, you’ll find it returns over 1 million results for that phrase. While this type of phrase may gain you a lot of traffic, achieving a top ranking may prove difficult and time-consuming.

In addition, you will normally find visitors who search on very broad keyword categories purchasing less often than someone who knows exactly what they want. A good example of such a niche phrase would be “custom baseball hats.” The benefit of “custom baseball hats” is that it’s both a popular search phrase and it only has about 2000 pages on Google competing against it. That’s much less competitive than the 1 million results returned for “mens clothing.”

WordTracker calls the popularity and competition ratio the “KEI” or Keyword Effectiveness Index. The higher the KEI, the more effective the keyword will be for you.

Therefore, targeting relatively popular niche keywords has the following four advantages:

1. Niche keywords still produce a nice flow of traffic if you’re careful to pick ones that still have good popularity.

2. Niche keywords will significantly increase your chance of success. Achieving a top ranking will be much easier with a niche keyword phrase versus a very broad, highly popular phrase. No top ranking can be guaranteed in an organic search engine like Google. There are simply too many variables. Therefore, you’ll greatly increase your chances of success by choosing less competitive keyword phrases. Work smarter, not harder as I like to say.

3. Niche keywords will save you time. While you could use various tools and research to achieve a top ranking for “mens clothing,” the time required to do so may not be worthwhile. Let your competitor waste their efforts on the ultra-competitive phrases. In the same amount of time they spend trying to achieve a single top ranking for your industry’s most popular phrase, you could achieve top rankings on twenty other phrases.

4. Niche keywords yield more sales per visitor. That’s because these keywords are more targeted. Therefore, these prospects have a better idea of what they want. If they find it on your site at the right price, then your chances for a sale are much greater.

The full article can be found here:
Top 5 Tips for Choosing the Best Keywords
Most helpful read indeed.