I’ve done a lot of keyword research recently and have come to really value the Google AdWords Keyword Tool as a way of estimating potential market sizes. For example, Home Document Manager and PDF Scan Pro both feature powerful OCR engines, and OCR related keywords convert well for me.

Whilst researching keywords, I noticed an interesting thing (click for larger version):

These are only approximations, but still…110,000 monthly searches (globally) for ‘free ocr’, and 49,500 for ‘ocr freeware’. I don’t spend a lot of effort targeting keywords with ‘free’ in them, but this looks like an opportunity.

There has been some suggestion in the past that Google favours the .org TLD, so you can imagine how quickly my Visa card came out when GoDaddy tells me that freeocr.org is available. So I spent the weekend developing the FreeOCR microsite. On this single page site (not published yet), you can upload a scanned image, and the web application will OCR it, and convert it to a searchable PDF of formatted text file, and email you the result.

The website will, of course, feature Ads for both Home Document Manager and PDF Scan Pro, and so will the email that is sent with each use of the site. I’m reasonably sure that there aren’t other sites that offer such powerful OCR and searchable PDF creation for free, so hopefully I can get right to the top of the SERPS and drive some highly targeted traffic.

I have always been impressed with the marketing efforts of the NitroPDF guys. They do a similar thing with their PDF to Word converter. I plan to offer Word as an output option too, potentially adding another few tens of thousands of visitors.

I’m really interested in using microsites, and will keep you posted as it progresses.

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