The Ultimate Series on How To Validate Your Business Idea — Keyword Research
Ah, our favourite V word.
Validation is the name of the game when all you have is an idea. It doesn’t matter if your idea is for a tiny side hustle or a billion dollar earth shaking concept, you always need to validate!. If there is one thing I want you to take away from this article it’s to always validate any idea before committing to it.
The first reason it’s important to validate your idea, is cause that’s common sense. You don’t jump into something without knowing if it’s worth it! Forget business, any investment in life should be validated before committing to it. Decisions made based on assumption are not safe bets especially when it involves lots of money, time or energy. Often times we believe that we know everything about something and almost always we are proven wrong. Validation is an exercise of finding out truth without the bias of us being us.
The second reason you want to validate your idea is cause you don’t have a clear picture until you do. Validation is finding out that your idea has no interest at all. Validation could also be finding out your idea has substance because people are searching about the problem but don’t really need a product made just for it. Essentially, validation is finding out EXACTLY whether your idea has legs or not.
What am I looking for when validating an idea?
You’re looking for numbers, responses, engagement from people who would be your customers telling you what exactly makes them want it or not want what you’re making.
Essentially you validate an idea based on the level of interest, quality of attention and the responses from people. This could look like a site metric, the number of positive responses in a survey, or even pre-selling a product.
Now let’s get into the fun stuff. How do you validate an idea? This article is part of a series where we will show you exactly how to validate your idea using different approaches. In this article we look at Keyword Research.
Keyword Research- The Monthly Search Volume of Your Topic
When first toying with an idea, many of us can become our greatest critics and make excuses to why it may not be worth pursuing. Well there is a very simple exercise anyone can do for free to know, if their idea or topic is being searched for.
Google is the world’s largest search engine & therefore the largest information trader in the world. Over 3.5 billion searches are done in a day. That’s a staggering amount and is a great place to start if you want to evaluate what is the level of interest in your topic. The way we evaluate level of interest is by finding out the search volume of the topic.
Almost everyone should start their search on Google since it can tell you so much about what people are searching for in your topic. We’re going to use Keyword Planner, a Google tool to find out what the search volume of your topic is. First things first, head to https://ads.google.com and create an account if you haven’t already.
Once you’ve setup your account, head to Tools on the top right and click on Keyword Planner.
Choose Find new keywords and enter in your topic. My topic is meditation lessons so I will search for “meditation”.
Once you click Get Started, this is what you will see.
So the columns you will see are
- Keyword (by relevance) : What keywords you searched for and keyword ideas that Keyword Planner recommends.
- Volume: What is the volume of searches every month on that exact keyword.
- CPC: how much you would be charged for an ad that a user clicks on when they see your ad under this keyword.
- Comp: What level of competition would you face if you bid for this keyword.
- Avg. Monthly Searches: What is the range of searches per month
- Competition: what general level of competition would you face for this keyword.
Under that you will see two segments. The first one is the keywords you searched for and the second one is the ideas keyword planner recommends.
Now before going any further, make sure you change the Locations if you are searching interest for some other country. Google automatically chooses Location based on where you are which may or may not be relevant for you.
The three main metrics that matter
You only need three metrics to know if your topic has interest from people or businesses. Based on what you find here, you will have a fair idea on how much interest is there on the topic.
Average Monthly Searches
in this factor we can see that meditation is a highly searched term with a monthly search range of 1K to 10K searches. Other related terms like “mindfulness” and “meditation techniques” get a good amount of search volume. This is good news for the aspiring meditation side hustler!
Competition
Competition in Keyword Planner is meant to tell you how much interest is there from companies to bid on that term in your location. High competition is great as that tells you that other companies are willing to spend on this term and therefore customers are willing to pay for a product in this topic. If you were actually going to start creating Ads and have High competition on a search term, that’s not really great news. High competition = high demand and that means higher bidding prices which is not great if you’re a 1 person side hustle.
My competition rating is Low which can mean that there is not much interest from other companies to bid on this topic and therefore there is not much market demand for it. Not good news. It’s important to remember that this is just an indicator of the market and may not be the absolute truth!
CPC
CPC is cost per click, which is basically how much would it cost you for every click in your ad. The reason this metric is important is because it tells you what your “cost of entry” is. Anything between $0.18 to $2 is a good range as the cost per click is a not too high. Paying for $3–8 is quite a bit and can lead to marketing expenses going way too high. On the other hand, if your ad would lead to a purchase of $50 and your only marketing spend is Adwords then $3 to $8 spent for $50 is great!
What we learnt
When we did our validation exercise, we learnt that the topic of side hustle was a low hanging fruit, it did not have as much search volume compared to other terms but it was still quite competitive. This told us that companies were willing to spend money on this term and therefore users were buying products in this topic. That was good news.
We also looked at other search terms related to side hustle, and saw a good amount of search volume in long tail keywords and outcomes. A long tail search term is a specific search term such “how to build an e-commerce side hustle” in comparison to “side hustle”. An outcome is when someone searches for a result such as “become a millionaire.”
Save your learnings and write down 1 insight you’ve learnt.
Always save what you’ve learnt. As a side hustler (or entrepreneur) you want to be able to have a clear idea of what you’ve learnt so you can make decisions based on it. This is especially important for Validation.
Create a google sheet like this one and fill it up with the search terms most relevant for you. This will be your validation spreadsheet for all your research.
In the next blog post, I’m going to look at Google Trends and Google Deep Search. Hope this helps you as it did for us!
