In mid-June 2008, I met my friend who has a canvas painted shoes boutique. She requested me to make a blog that promotes her painted shoes boutique. One of the challenges I came across when building the blog was the keyword research, as none of the online keyword research tools I used were able to return good results of searches for our local language (Indonesia). The tools always showed "0" or "not available." The experience made me doubt that there was a market share available for her product over the internet.

But then I decided to make a market survey about her product, Sepatu Lukis (in English = painted canvas shoes). I ended up asking her several questions. In English I know the term is "painted canvas shoe," but I wanted to make sure which keyword I should target on her blog first. What's the most well-known phrase among people to describe such a product, and can it be sold online?

Me: "Who would likely buy your shoes? I mean your target..."

Her: "Everyone, I think...these shoes can be for everyone. My dad (45 years old) and I wear the shoes." [This answer is too broad and general.]

Me: "Are these shoes popular among a particular community/type of people?"

Her: "Umm...students love these kind of shoes. They like the personalized design and they show them off to their friends. Some music groups/musicians love them too. "

After asking several other questions, I have the following audience for my target survey:

1. College students
2. High school students

I assembled my survey and asked the audience questions such as "What would you call these shoes?" and other questions about their Internet usage. I ended up getting the following survey data from about 115 college and high school students:

• 46.96% said they'd call the shoes Sepatu Lukis (Painted Shoes)
• 30.43% said Sepatu Kanvas (Canvas Shoes)
• 13.04% said Sepatu Kanvas Lukis (Painted Canvas Shoes)
• 9.57%  said Sepatu Lukis Kanvas (Canvas Painted Shoes)

Look at all the different ways that students used to describe one product! After 3 months of optimization and conducting some competitive analysis, we got pretty good results. We rank in the top 10 on Google for our search terms and get 50-70 visits from search traffic daily. We average selling about 10-15 shoes a week. Of course, most of our traffic comes from the sepatu lukis (painted shoes) keyword, as I had predicted.

Does anyone else have an experience similar to what I did? Or would anyone like to give their input on how they do keyword research?

P.S. This is my first post, so feedback and comments are really welcome.