A common mistake that website owners make when trying to drive traffic to their sites, is to try to compete for the most popular keywords within their niche.
Let the novices fight over these keywords. They will have virtually zero chance of getting on to page 1 of the major search engines because every man and his dog is trying to use the most popular and competitive search terms.
Just because the Overture/Yahoo keyword selection tool, or Wordtracker says there are no searches for a particular keyword or keyword phrase, that does NOT mean that nobody is using that keyword phrase to look for your product or service.
The above-mentioned tools are the first port of call for hundreds of thousands of website owners. However, that means that the keywords that are thrown up are used by thousands of people as well, making them extremely competitive.
Those tools are also skewed in favor of USA results, simply because there are more people in the USA using the tools than anywhere else.
Let me give you an example…
One of the websites that I own is to do with moving to Cyprus to live.
If you type ‘Moving to Cyprus’ into the Overture/Yahoo keyword selection tool it reports that virtually nobody is using that keyword phrase.
That’s because very few people in the USA are looking to move to Cyprus to live.
However, more than a million people a year from the UK and Europe are thinking about moving to another country to live and Cyprus rates in the top 10 destinations that they are considering (Australia is first and Spain second, USA third etc).
The lesson to be learned here is that I get a lot of traffic to my various sites from keyword phrases that are given a zero or low score by these commonly used tools.
So, if you think of a keyword phrase that you think YOU would use for a particular search, don’t decide against using it, just because these tools return a supposedly low result.
While others are fighting over the most popular search terms, you can be working smart and driving traffic to your sites using keywords that are being totally ignored by others.
Remember…Work smart, not hard!