A few thoughts on keyword sniping.

Posted by stuart as , , ,

Court has an excellent series running at the moment on keyword sniping.

The idea is pretty simple, and I think he explains it better than I probably would:

Keyword sniping involves an extremely focused effort on a single keyword. The idea here is to choose a single keyword, and to set up an entire site (or even an entire group of sites) with the sole intent of ranking for that one keyword.

It’s a great post, well worth the read, even if just for the motivation to get off your ass and give it a try.

In the post, Courtney gives good, solid, step by step instructions for analzing and choosing your keyword, setting up your site, and pretty much everything in between.

So I’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon, and done some keyword research, picked my keyword, bought a $0.99 .info domain from mydomain.com ( coupon), and set up my site (I have four posts up, the rest will go up in the next day or two.

Now let me add my thoughts to Courtney’s post, with a couple of things I think could be added to the post to make it even better.

In the post, Courtney uses three criterial to choose your keyword to snipe. I’ll list them below, and my thoughts on each of them:

They get searched for over 200 times per day (obviously the higher, the better). Wordze and Wordtracker both show you daily search volume. - 200 times a day is not a lot of search volume. Let’s say you do manage to grab the top spot in the SERP’s for your chosen keyword(s), you can expect to get somewhere between 20 - 40% of the clicks for that search term. With 200 searches per day, that equates to somewhere between 40 to 80 visitors per day. If you can manage a 10% CTR on these visitors with your PPC program (such as AnSense), that’s four to eight clicks a day. At a generous $0.25 per click, that’s $1 to $2 a day. You’ll need lots of these sites to make any real money. I’d suggest going for terms with much higher search volume, but by doing this you’ll be moving into areas with much higher competition against people who really know what they’re doing.
They have less than 1,000,000 competing pages (less is better). You can find this out by doing a search for your keyword in Google with quotes around it: “your keyword here”. - This is interesting, and, I believe, flawed logic. Yes, you can see how many pages there are with the exact match term you are targeting by placing quotes around the term, and Courtney’s logic behind this is that you’ll easily out-rank sites which are a broad term match for the phrase, but this is simply not the case. I’ve seen numerous cases where sites with broad match matches outrank sites with exact matches.
They have some kind of value to an advertiser. (Anything that can be bought and sold has value, anything that has commissions has value). Some keywords will have more value than others. - This is key - and once again, the higher the value, the harder the competition will be to rank for the product.

Courtney also talks about purchasing a domain name which includes the keyword you are choosing. The logic behind this is sound, we all know that site with the keyword(s) in the domain name rank better for that keyword in the long term, and if you decide you want to sell the site down the track, it’s a simple process (although why you’d want to sell a site which is generating revenue and requiring no maintenance is beyond me!)

But here’s another option:

If you have a blog which is already receiving a fair amount of attention from the seach engines, plop your new keyword sniping site in a subdirectory of that domain.

I’ve shown repeatedly that you can rank for a search term in less than 24 hours in a subdirectory of an existing site. As long as you name your subdirectory with the keyword you are sniping, you can rank well, and quicky for your term.

Sure, you can’t then sell the site, but as I said above, if it’s making money with no ongoing work, why would you want to?