DinerDave Does Market Research

Note from Ros: This is the 2nd in DinerDave’s series. Click here to read the first, Affiliate Site Case Study: Introducing Diner Dave

In order to determine what content to put in the pages and posts of DinerDave.com I need to figure out what my target market is looking for on the search engines. Fortunately, there are lots of great tools out there to help with this market research. I used a couple of reputable keyword research tools from Ros’ post on “10 HOT Market Research Sites“, Wordtracker and Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Since I want to provide helpful information on locating restaurant coupons, gift certificates, and reviews, I decided to test these aforementioned keywords first. Here is just a sample of the keywords I plugged in to both Wordtracker and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to determine what type of traffic I could expect. I selected these keywords because each one has an affiliate program associated with it (ie Restaurant.com and Entertainment.com).:

1. Restaurant
2. Restaurant Coupons
3. Restaurant Discounts
4. Restaurant Gift Certificates
5. Restaurant Gift Cards
6. Restaurant Reviews
7. Dining Coupons

The results showed a VERY viable market for these keywords! I’ve included a couple of screen shots from Wordtracker and Google Adwords Keyword Tool to illustrate:

As you can see Wordtracker shows 1,113 searches yesterday on the keyword phrase “restaurant coupons” and Google Adwords Keyword Tool shows 550,000 searches done on the same keywords last month. I wondered how this discrepancy was possible and, after doing some research, I found that Wordtracker gets its data from Dogpile and Metacrawler as opposed to Google Adwords, which is ALL Google searches. Here are the results from my research on some other keywords I plan to use in DinerDave.com:

OK…So what do all these numbers ACTUALLY MEAN to me when preparing content for my blog? After reviewing the data, I made the following deductions:

1. When writing content for my site it will be very important to incorporate the word “restaurant” and “restaurant coupon” several times. According to the data these will be THE most popular keywords to include on DinerDave.com. I was planning on using the words “diner” and “dining” frequently throughout the site, but there are relatively few searches for any variation of “dining”. Good to know!
2. I’ve researched these keywords over the last 3 months and I’ve noticed that, even though the numbers change from month to month, their popularity remains consistent. “Restaurant coupons” always ranks higher than “restaurant reviews” and “restaurant gift certificates”. Therefore, I need to allocate more posts to “restaurant coupons” than any other category on my site. This is great news because my top 2 merchants, Restaurant.com and Entertainment.com, have high conversion rates on these keywords!
3. According to Google Adwords Keyword Tool there is a TON of competition for the top keywords I will include on DinerDave.com. Obviously, I will not be able to outbid other websites for these very popular keywords. However, I have the advantage of marketing my affiliate programs to a 15,000 subscriber email list! This will be the first order of business when making the transfer from DinerDeals.com to DinerDave.com. Plus, there are other less costly methods of marketing my site to fans of dining out (social media, visiting forums, back links, etc…)
4. Even though there is stiff competition for these top keywords, there are still opportunities with other restaurant related searches such as “restaurant gift cards”. “Restaurant gift cards” had 6,600 searches last month, but the competition was not as fierce for these keywords. I could write an entire post on reviews of the best restaurant gift cards available online. I have already signed up for the affiliate program for GiftCertificates.com and will incorporate that link to monetize that post.
5. When I reviewed the Wordtracker data on “restaurant coupons” I noticed some interesting variations I would not have thought of otherwise. For example, I would not have thought to include the keyword phrase “PRINTABLE restaurant coupons” in my content…but it fetched 469 searches in ONE DAY! Not too shabby. I’ll definitely be using that phrase too.

There you have it…and this is just the tip of the iceberg. I now have a list of over 250 keywords and phrases that I could use in DinerDave.com to drive traffic to the site using just these 2 keyword research tools.

Now I just need to incorporate these keywords into my site. In the next post I will explain how I created content on DinerDave.com by utilizing google alerts, email newsletters and reviewing affiliate sites.

Related Posts

1. Niche Market and Keyword Research Process
2. New Keyword Research Tool Available at Wordtracker
3. 10 HOT Niche Market Research Sites
4. Wordtracker Announces Beta Tool
5. 7 Sins Approach to Niche Market Research