There are a lot more interesting poker topics than bonus codes and online cardroom reviews. I get the feeling that a lot of poker webmasters don’t focus very hard on poker keyword research though. But poker keyword research can be one of the most affordable and cost effective ways of SEOing your site.
Using Google When Brainstorming for Poker Topics
Poker keyword research begins with deciding on a topic for your website. “Poker” is a fine poker topic, although it’s a little broad, and a website that hopes to cover the entire topic of “poker” in general might be a little too ambitious for some. A beginning poker webmaster might be better-served by picking a subtopic of poker, or maybe even a subtopic of a subtopic.
The first thing I like to do when picking out a poker topic is to take a look at what’s going on in the search engines when you type in the word “poker”. This is more of a brainstorming technique and a getting a general feel for my topic technique than anything else. The first thing I see when doing a Google search for the word “poker” is a link to a definition on the top right. That immediately gives me an idea for a poker topic I could write about – poker definitions.
Then looking through the search results, I see some other phrases, like “online poker”, “poker games”, “free tournaments”, “texas holdem”, “uk poker”, etc. I could keep digging, but I see some potential here already with the idea of uk poker.
Now I’m going to take a look at some of the competition for these phrases. I like to do an allintitle: search in Google to get an idea of how competitive a phrase is. For “poker definitions” I get 3390 results from an allintitle: search. For UK poker, an allintitle: search brings back over a million results. I think I’ll go with the poker definitions niche for this example site.
Registering Exact Match Poker Domains Isn’t as Hard as Everyone Says
The next thing I like to do is try to get the exact match domain name in the .com, .net, or .org. And as luck would have it, pokerdefinitions.net and pokerdefinitions.org are both available. So I’m going to register both of them.
Moving From Poker Topics and Subtopics to Poker Keyword Research
Most people immediately scurry over to the Google Keyword tool to do their keyword research. Or they use KeywordDiscovery.com or Wordtracker. All of those are great resources and work really well. But I like to do something a little different. I like to look at synonyms. So I’m going to visit thesaurus.com and make a list of synonyms for the word “definitions”:
- answer
- comment
- commentary
- explanation
- solution
- terminology
Those keyword phrases all look great, and they can all be attached to the word “poker” to make subtopic pages for my new niche site. “Poker Comments & Commentary” would make a great name for a blog. “Poker Explanations” gives me lots of ideas for content articles. “Poker Answers” would be a great section, especially if I could get people to actually write in with poker questions.
Related Phrases
I also do some thinking about related phrases. When I think of definitions, I think of dictionaries. I also think of glossaries and encyclopedias. I think of references, quotes, and almanacs. Besides just listing definitions for poker words, I can create several hundred pages of content that are all designed to make pokerdefinitions.net or pokerdefinitions.org into a really solid poker reference site. In fact, pokerreference.net and .org are available to, so I might change my mind about which domain I use for this project. “Poker Reference” is a broader topic and would require more pages of content to do well, but I like making large websites. I like writing and organizing lots of content. And I particularly like the amount of traffic a large content website sees.
Don’t Stress About Monetization
The first question someone from PAL would ask is, “Won’t it be hard to monetize that kind of traffic? Won’t the conversion rates be low?”
If I put up a 900 page site that ranks for 3 phrases each, and each of those phrases gets 1 visitor a day, then I’ve got a poker site that gets 2700 visitors a day. With that kind of traffic, I can sell flat rate advertising. I can also make money as a CPA affiliate.
I’d rather have a 1% conversion from a site getting 2700 visitors a day than have a 10% conversion rate on a site getting 27 visitors a day. My point being that if you have poker-related traffic, you can monetize it. In fact, poker is the last niche where you have to worry about whether or not you’re going to be able to monetize your site. If you run a content rich site on any poker topic, you’ll see money, and probably sooner rather than later.
Doing this kind of poker keyword research is what enables you to create a content rich site. Because before you can write a lot of pages of content, you have to have a lot of poker topics to write about.