Niche idea and Google long-tail keywords

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#1

One of my research tasks for the validation of the idea was to use Long Tail Pro, a keywords research tool which shows long tail keywords for a central keyword phrase.

I can get roughly 6000-8000 (i know its a big range) of quality traffic (global monthly searches) through from potential customers from quite a targeted set of keywords. My question is, does anyone have any experience in saying that that may be a big enough pool to convert a percentage of them into paying customers? Have you launched a business which is in a smaller niche?

Anyone with some validation for me?

#2

My data are probably relevant to you.

Product: $20-$30 image processing niche Windows application. Almost 2 years old now.
Competitors: Two very similar $30 products and several free solutions like gimp and photoshop plugins. These are usually harder to use, therefore non-tech savvy users pay me instead.
Total website traffic: about 2500 unique IP addresses per month, 50-60% coming from google, 70-80% total from search engines.
Average visit to download ratio: 30%
Monthly download to sale ratio: between 7% and 12% - apparently seasonal

Google webmaster data for the last 30 days:
Total search impressions: 9800
Total clickthrough: 1200
Top 5 keywords add up to less than 800 impressions and 100 clickthroughs. 70 of these are the product name itself.
Total number of different search keywords: 350

My top 5 keywords have between 200 and 3000 monthly searches globally according to the google keyword tool. Pretty much all others are below the bar and cannot be measured.

The best part is that these niche long tail keywords have extremely low competition, therefore getting to the top 3 search result spots is very easy. Validation hint: if you see paid google ads appear for a keyword, there is probably profitable demand there. The more ads the more profit to be seen, plan your SEO accordingly.

I hope that helps.

#3

Thank you Zka

So are you saying that 7-12% of the 30% will become paying customers?

#4

Yes. Of course, the rule #1 in this business is that things can be totally different for your product / customers. Industry “standard” download to sale ratio is around 1-3%.

#5

Fair enough Zka. Thanks for your insight

#6

It is very hard to know without actually trying it. But I think it is pretty tough to get a return from Adwords now, unless at least 2 of the following apply (preferably all 3):
a) You really know what you are doing with Adwords
b) Your product has a lifetime value of $100+
c) There is not much competition in your market

Certainly I am finding it hard to get any reasonable amount of targeted traffic for http://www.hyperplan.com via Adwords at a bid price I can afford. Even with a long tail campaign. And I like to feel I know what I am doing!

#7

Sure. I guess I was trying to figure out whether a particular niche was worth exploring. For instance I work a lot with the new Office 365 platform and there are a lot of specific products that can be built around it and could be explored.

Lets take a helpdesk for arguments sake. If Office 365 helpdesk was hitting 1300 global visits a month, and we could charge $199/month for it lets say, would it be worth investigating. This is just an example…

At what point is it worth exploring?