I’ve been intrigued recently by a case study that Courtney Tuttle did about what he calls keyword sniping. It’s a terrific concept, and I’ve been hard at work finding new niches to work in. But I’ve run into something of a glitch, and it’s because of ugly people from Pennsylvania.

Here’s Court’s idea in a nutshell: You find a tightly-focused sub-niche, of a high-revenue niche, where there are a limited number of results and a reasonable number of searches. It’s an excellent series of posts, and I don’t want you to miss the meat of his work by posting a sloppy digest of it here … go and take a look.

The example Court uses is Colorado Lasik Surgery. In other words, he’s taken a huge niche that would be hard to crack — lasik surgery — and found a sub-niche by limiting it to a state.

So, because I’m remarkably quick on the uptake, I started doing some research by plugging state names into the free WordTracker tool. But it turns out someone may have beaten me to it. WordTracker estimates search traffic from smallish samples, and comes up with an estimated daily search number. I believe they look at the previous 30 days data, although it might be the previous calendar month.

Here’s the first few results from a search I did for “pennsylvania”:

691 pennsylvania lottery
647 university of pennsylvania
569 pennsylvania and gaming
562 map of pennsylvania
462 colonial pennsylvania
417 pennsylvania house furniture
343 pennsylvania department of education
326 pennsylvania map
264 pennsylvania department of transportation

OK, that makes sense I guess. But let’s look a little further down:

245 pennsylvania plastic surgeon
236 pennsylvania cosmetic surgeon
234 pennsylvania colony
227 pennsylvania plastic surgery
225 pennsylvania state police
220 pennsylvania cosmetic surgery

and then a few positions below that:

165 pennsylvania facelift
164 pennsylvania liposuction
164 pennsylvania newspapers
162 pennsylvania breast augmentation
162 pennsylvania breast enlargement
158 allegheny county medical society in pennsylvania
156 pennsylvania breast implants

So according to WordTracker, of the top 60 or so daily searches that include the word “pennsylvania”, 25 of them are related to cosmetic surgery.  There are only two conclusions to draw.

Either enough people are doing niche keyword research that the WordTracker results are getting skewed, so it pays to double- and triple-check your results before building new sites or … there’s an awful lot of ugly people looking for plastic surgery in Pennsylvania.