THE RELEVANCE KEYWORD TOOL

Introduction

One of the first things I do when entering a niche is keyword research. I like to dig around, and try to work out "where the money is".

Very often, there will be just be a few "pockets of wealth" - a handful of keywords that account for most of the sales - just a few keywords, keyphrases or general themes that drive the market.

The problem is, when you first enter a market, you don't know exactly where the money is, and what these keywords are. In fact, chances are you don't know anything about the niche.

And that's where the relevance tool comes in.

This tool build a keyword list, asks you to grade advertisers for relevance, and then, it gives you a profitability score for each keyword. Let's look at exactly how it does that, and how to use the tool.

Step 1.
ENTER SEED KEYWORD AND START THE SEARCH

The first thing you will want to do is to login to the Relevance tool at

http://affiliatekeywordtool.com/relevance

and enter your login name and password (which should have been sent to you)

You will then be redirected to a page that prompts you to enter a keyword and choose your country for you to start your search. If you choose "United States" for example, the keyword searches done will be pulled from Google.com.

Here you need to enter a "seed keyword" ie. a starting point for your research.

NOTE: this seed word sets the basic direction for the rest of your research so is quite important - you should search and research several times if need be - until you are happy that you have the right seed keyword.

For the seed keyword, you should try to enter a term that describes your product here or, what I call "product genre" keywords.

A "product genre" keyword summisea an entire class or genre of products. Let me show you what I mean by looking at some common niches - see below.

The product genre keywords are listed in the "good seed keyword" column; you can see examples of "bad" (too vague) keywords in the right hand column.

Don't enter vague one word keywords, or the names of products.

If you enter a vague one-word keyword (eg "gambling" or "dating"), Google will throw back a scattergun of related keywords, some relating to your product, most not. Entering the name of a product is slightly better (eg. "fat loss 4 idiots"), but not ideal: chances are Google won't have enough data about the keyword to give you any meaningful related words back.

In summary, the best seed keywords to enter are generally 2-3 words long, and describe the product in question.

If you are still unsure about what to enter as a "seed keyword", one good idea is to go go to the Google Keyword tool first, and enter the URL of the product you are thinking of promoting

Go to -- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Then click "website content" and enter the URL - for example http://www.fatloss4idiots.com

Google will now load up a list of terms that relate to the website, many of which will describe the product in question - and make great seed keywords.

Here's some product genre keywords that come up here:

Once you have entered a keyword you are happy with, click NEXT STEP to go to the next stage.

Step 2
PICK THE KEYWORDS TO SCAN

The tool will now now query Google for related keywords for your seed keyword, and load them up in a screen as shown here.

You'll notice 3 columns - keyword, search volume and relevance.

Search volume is the average monthly number of worldwide searches for that word or phrase, according to Google.

These numbers provided are reasonably accurate, except when you get to the lower end of the scale - 2,000 searches per month and below - then they start to get a bit off inaccurate.

Relevance is simply how relevant Google thinks the keyword in question is, to your original seed question. So in theory "google adwords ebook" is more relevant to "adwords ebook" than "sell ebook". This number is far from correct, but it is a useful guideline at least.

Note: you can click on the each header (keyword, search volume & relevance) to re-arrange the data in order.

The goal here is to check all the keywords you think might be relevant to your search - the kind of keywords your competitors might be advertising on.

The good news is, we don't have to be too precise here. In fact, it's best to add as many keywords as possible (we will refine our list in the next stages).

Just click on any keyword you want to add - generally between 5 and 30 will suffice - and hit NEXT STEP.

If you aren't happy with the kind of keywords you're getting on this page, then jut BACK to restart your search.

As always you can search and research until you are happy with your search.

Step 3-
RANKING OUR COMPETITORS' URLs FOR RELEVANCE

Once you've hit NEXT on the last screen, it may take a few minutes for this page to load up.

That's because the tool now has to gather quite a bit of data.

Here, you see, the tool will scan Google for a list of everyone advertising (via Google Adwords) on the keywords you selected, and list them in a table as shown above.

"URL" is a clickable link to the advertiser's page - we'll need to click on these links so we can rate the advertiser for relevance.

"count" is the number of keywords their ad is found on Goole, for those keywords we just selected on step 2. So if we chose 10 keywords in step 2, and an advertiser is found on 5 of them, they will have a count of 5.

Relevance is a number that you need to set (eitther 0, 5 or 10) - what we're looking to do here is to rate each advertiser out of 10 for how closely related to the product we want to promote. If they are our direct competitors, we'll want to copy all of their keywords - chances are we can make money if they are able to.

You will want to click on the links on the left to visit the page in question. Do this for each advertiser.

Again, what we need to do on this screen is decide how relevant the advertiser is to the product we want to promote. If we find someone advertising the exact product we want to promote, or a very close competitor, then we would give the URL a score of 10.

For example, if we wanted to promote an adwords ebook here, we would give Perry Marshall a score of 10 - since he is also selling an Adwords ebook on this site. We might give keywordspy.com a score of 5, since they are selling a product that relates to Adwords (keyword data - vaguely related), but are still selling a slightly different offer (not an ebook, so even though its related to Pay Per Click, we can't give them a 10).

The basic idea here is, the more similar the advertiser is to what you want to sell, the higher the score you should give them.

Note: these numbers are then in the next step to determine the final score for each keyword.

Here are some factors to look at then when deciding relevance:

* type of product - if you are selling an adwords guide, then another adwords guide will probably get a relevance score of 10. If its the same product you are promoting, then it obviously also gets a score of 10. If you don't think the advertiser URL is at all related to the kind of product you want to sell, then you can give a score of 0.

* price point - if you find a product which is the exact same as yours, but it sells for ten times the price, then perhaps a score of 5 (not 10) is warranted.

* page layout and positioning - in some markets, you may find very "homogenous" markets, where every one of the URLs loaded is selling the same thing - and you need something extra to differentiate between the offerings and assign more accurate relevance scores. In short, you will have to look for more subtle differences. For example, some products may be sold with very aggressive long sales letters, while others might be sold on a "soft sell" website where you can browse around and link-surf the site. As you began to understand the market more and more, you will be able to refine your searches.

Assign a relevance score to all your advertisers, and click NEXT

Final Stage

Now, your search is complete.

The tool will spit out all your keywords with the total relevance score on them. The higher score, the more relevant the keyword is to the kind of product you want to selll - and the more profitable.

You can take a high-scoring keyword, and search it again to further expand your research (if fact we strongly advise you to do this).

You can also export these winning cash keywords into other tools, to look for other indicators, see how easy they are to rank for SEO, etc.