Keyword Research - Tools and Tips for search

Advanced search

After you search for a term on Google.com, above number of results you will find "Show Options" button and sub-menu with a lot of options. Among the options you will find option for "Related Searches". If you choose this option, you will be suggested terms and phrases by Google. You will also find a option "More like this" in order to find new suggestions related to this term. This option allows you to get deeper into keyword research and find adequate terms/phrases.

Keyword research

Programs

You can also use some programs that could help you with keyword research like traffic travis, market samurai, keyword spy, keyword elite micro niche finder, keyword country etc. Most of them are premium and paid, and some of them have limited "free" versions. Personally, I prefer simple research without programs involved, like explained in previous posts.

Local modifications

Modification of search for your needs is very important. You could define details like name of town, region, country or whatever suits you. If you are looking for reliable mechanic, you will not look for one from another state or town and keyword "mechanic" could lead you just there. If you enter "mechanic Oakland" you will find what you need. If USA is your targeted market, this local modification is very important for you.

Actually, you can get a lot of visits just with keywords that target locally.

One more suggestion. You do not have to offer local product or service to use local modifications. You use them to get visitors. If you use Adsense then it's perfect for you.

Update: GKT gives very bad results for locally modified keywords. When you research for keywords you will get different keyword variations, but very small amount of them with local modifications. In order to get proper keywords for local purposes you should use old and reliable keyword suggestion tool by Wordtracker.

Longtail Update

Longtails are phrases contained of 2 or 3 words. More words in phrase - smaller competition is, and demand for them is smaller, too. If you determine a lot of easy longtail phrases you could get significant amount of visitors.

You could use Keyword Questions Keyword Research Tool for research of longtail phrases. This tool will offer questions related to your term only. It's a great tool to recognize interests of people for your service/product/keyword and to find out how people found what they look for.

Buying Phrases

"Green Mountainbike" vs "Buy mountainbike". I think it's clear which one is buying phrase?

Buying phrases are often names of brands and products.

"Cellphones" is not buying keyword while "Samsung SGH500" could be good buying keyword.

Buy, Price, Cheap, Cost, Review are buying modifiers.

Keyword organizing

I usually use Notepad or Excel file. Notepad because it's simple and fast so I can copy or paste keyword ideas, while Excel is great for copying, sorting etc.

GKT offers you to export results as .txt .csv or .csv for excel formats. It's very useful option cause you can get up to 200 keywords/terms in GKT at same time, unmark "Use synonyms" and add "Don't show ideas for new keywords. I only want to see data about the keywords I entered." so  GKT will only give data for your keywords, without any suggestions. Download it to .csv file for Excel usage and you will have all keywords on one place.

Instead of the end

As time goes by, you will find KW Research much easier and clearer. After you gain some experience, you will be able to determine much easier what is possible and what's not, what is payable and what's not. One out of 10 niche you explore will match your criteria so you could find adequate solution for your website. I hope you understood importance of KW Research so rest of the job will be much easier to you.

Keyword Research - Competition

Let's get back to main keyword process. Let's say we gathered 50 keywords related to website content. Personally, I prefer a "one page full of content optimized for one keyword".  Now we should check on our competition for certain content and keyword terms.

Keyword research

Analyze competition

Like I explained in previous post, you determined 50 or however keywords for your webpage. Next task is to check how many results Google offers for each one of them. You can find approximate number of results on right corner of search. Now you enter every term on Google with quotes "". When you enter phrase with quotes, Google will only give you phrase match. It means that only that commanded "keyword" will be searched for.

If you want to find more about "cheap bikes" you should enter that with quotes and Google will inform you about number of pages with this phrase on it. If there is "cheap favorable bikes" mentioned somewhere, it will not be counted in results since order of words is changed.

This kind of research (with quotes) will help you to discover pages that target exact term as their keyword. Also, there is search that include title of webpage, when entering "allintitle". Google operator allintitle will tell you how many pages use keyword in title. Title is best on-page utility for SEO and it is desirable to use keyword that is mentioned in title.

When searching with allintitle: it looks like this

allintitle:your keyword           example allintitle:best hammers

you enter this on Google, search and see a number of results.

Even it's not crucial, you should also try to enter desired phrase without quotes and allintitle command. It will help you find out how many thousands or millions of results is there for that phrase. For example if you have 2 keywords and everything else is same in results, you should look for term that gives 500000 results rather than 5000000results.

When checking on competition always look first page of results. If there are results from Wikipedia, Amazon etc, it will be harder to rank for that exact keyword.

How many Google results should I aim for?

So far I have not explained exact numbers because they are relative for users. Someone who knows to run good SEO can aim for bigger goals and use keywords with high competition. To see what am I talking about I'll give you an example.

I've been advised to look for results in the range of 2000 results with Google allintitle: and 4000 results for Google with quotes. Keyword needs to fulfill both norms.

Someone who just started and have no big knowledge about SEO and link building should perhaps target to a maximum of 1000 results with allintitle: and 1000 or 2000 results with quotes. Of course, it's very hard to find those terms that will be searched for but no one said it's easy task. This is just a recommendation, you need to define keywords yourself.

Go to part 3

Keyword Research - How to find adequate keyword/term

When I started this blog, I didn't know I'd like this so much. Something that started as a hobby is turning to be a serious and often blogging. I'm very happy about it. Therefore, we should move focus from simple and basic info to one that could offer a really important knowledge for everyone. This is getting serious guys! These terms will be often mentioned in our next post:

Keyword = word or term you want to be ranked for

GKT / Google Adwords Keyword Tool = https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Organic traffic = free traffic from Google search

Paid/PPC/Adwords traffic = traffic that is paid for

Search Volume = volume, number of search results

Note: Google.com and Google.rs/Google.uk... do not offer same results when searching. Google.com is used when you target USA and rest of the world as market.

Keyword research

Most important tool when using research is your brain. Other keyword tools are useful but not so important as common sense. Enter a term in Google and in first 20 results of search you will get a lot of ideas for keyword you want to use for your website/page. After that try AdWords Keyword Tool to get more info about keyword you determined. Also, when term you are looking for is more complex and important, you will see at the end of page "Searches related to". Only with Google used, we came to a list of ideas for possible keywords.

For every word from that list of 10-20 (or how much) keywords we'll have to do more serious and more detailed keyword research. Google Keyword Tool will give us 200 keywords max and we need to do research by ourselves after that. This process is called "drill down".

GKT have a possibility of researching terms and keywords related to certain website. After you do this, you will get ideas related for your page in very short amount of time. Each of those terms should be analyzed and researched particularly.

How to find best buy term/keyword?

When we reached another level of research and came to close words valuable for your website, we're now looking for basic keyword/phrase so called "best buy" phrase. It will get us best results with minimal efforts.

You may be able to find a good place for phrase that has a lot of Google entries monthly, but small players usually don't do that. Why not? Here are some reasons:

1. It may take one year to achieve something and you could rank for many easier keywords that will together get more visits than this one keyword.

2. More complex terms are often not "best buy" terms. People that search for this term are in surfing mood, not interested in buying. When someone search for a certain car model, bike or exact device, he is in a buying mood.

That is all for first post about research. We'll continue in next post with competition analyses and other subjects.

Go to Part 2