Keyword research is the lifeblood of a search engine marketing campaign – either natural or paid search. If you don’t promote your site with the right keywords, you will waste a lot of time and money for nothing. The obvious place to start your keyword research for a pay per click campaign is the search engine’s own keyword tool. But you can go far beyond that to uncover keywords that are very effective for your business. Following are eight strategies for creating keyword lists.
1. Comb your web site for keywords. Every different way you have described your business on your site is a new keyword or set of keywords.
2. Think from your customer’s perspective. Are the words you use to describe your business really the way other people would describe it? Ask around. Whatever words people are using to search for your kind of business are the words you need to target, regardless of what terms are used in your industry. Don’t get so wrapped up in industry jargon that you end up paying for ineffective keywords.
3. Nichebot. We really like this web site. First sign up for an account. It’s free to sign up. Then type a starting keyword related to your service or product in the text box at the top of the page and hit the Search button. You can change the middle dropdown list to “Overture” to get a better idea of the actual keywords people are using to search in Yahoo!. But don’t overlook the “Word Tracker” option, which will generate a lot of keyword data.
The data will be returned with information such as the number of searches performed for each keyword, the amount of competition, and the KEI for each keyword (”KEI”, which stands for “Keyword Effectiveness Index”, is a value for the keyword based on a formula that considers the number of searches for the keyword relative to the number of directly competing web pages).
4. You can also look through your web logs for the search terms people have used on your web site or to find your web site. This is critical data that few businesses tap into. If people are already using particular keywords to find your site, then those keywords likely warrant extra promotion.
5. If you sell products, you can combine brands with attributes of the products (color, width, size, etc.) to create many specific, late buying cycle keywords. For instance, if someone is searching for “laptop computers” they are likely in an early stage of doing research in the process of purchasing a laptop computer. But if a person is searching or “HP Pavilion 15 inch laptop”, that indicates that he is further along in the buying process because he is researching a specific brand and screen size of laptop.
6. Competitors’ brand names. Most search engines’ official position on bidding on your competitors’ trademarks is that you can only do it if you are the owner of the trademark, a reseller of the company’s goods, or if you provide “substantive” information about the company. I suggest you bid on keywords that contain the brand, but don’t use the brand name in your ads.
For instance, if you were marketing a line of tennis shoes, you might want to create one generic keyword group that contained brands names such as “Nike”, “Reebok” and “Adidas”, and then write an ad targeting purchasers of tennis shoes in a general way, without referencing any of the competition. Some of the brand name keywords may get declined, but probably not all of them.
7. Try to think of keywords that reflect different stages of the searcher’s buying cycle. Early in the buying cycle, they will be looking for more general information about your type of service or products. Later in the buying cycle, when they are much closer to making a decision and doing business, they will use more specific keywords, which might include particular brands and models, or even locations to make a purchase. Try to use keywords that cover the entire buying cycle. It may be worth bidding higher for the more specific keywords because your conversion rate for those keywords should be higher.
8. Spy on your competitors. There are a couple of online services, such as SpyFu and KeywordSpy, that allow you to see what keywords your competitors are bidding on in their paid search campaigns. This information can be very useful. But don’t just assume that your competitors are smarter than you are. You will still need to test to see which of their keywords are effective.
And remember that you are looking for groups of keywords. Unless your campaign is very small, it is unlikely you will want to run a 1:1 ratio of keywords to ads. It will be a very unruly number of ads to have to create and monitor. So you will be assigning ads to small groups of related keywords, and writing ad copy that applies to all of the keywords. So if you’re going to run ads for “gardening”, you might as well run them for “flower gardening”, “spring garden”, and “planting”. The major search engines have some nice dynamic features that make it pretty easy to customize an ad for multiple keywords.
Using the above strategies, you should be able to greatly expand the number of keywords in your paid search campaigns, and generate many new keyword ideas for natural search. I recommend that you first use your paid search campaign to generate data related to your keywords, and then optimize your site for those keywords that convert at the highest rate, unless the keywords are too competitive to target with SEO.
Watch the video related to Keyword research
This video shows how to research good niches using the Market Samurai’s keyword research functionality to develop a list of keywords and order them based on the amount of natural search traffic on Google as well as the number of competing pages. This is one of the most advanced keyword research tools on the market. and is perfect for niche marketing, pay-per-click marketing and natural search marketing campaigns.
Help answer the question aboutKeyword research
Astronomic difference between keyword research tools. WHY?Hi everybody!
Thank you for your answers,
Question: I have reviewed some keyword research tools, and saw a great difference between them. For example Wordtracker gives for "interesting facts" – 44077 daily searches, while Trellian's Keyword Discovery tool says that it is 114. How it can be?
We all know that no keyword research tool has accurate numbers, but why they have so big differences?
Thanks,
Vusal
12 Comments
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Cole Thomas
OK – It depends on what you are using the PBR (phrase to broad match) metric for.
You should use PBR in conjunction with SEOT. Because if SEOT is 2000 a day and PBR is only 30% you are still looking at 600 phrase searches a day which might be better than going for a phrase which only gets 10 searches a day and PBR is 100%.
Note: instead of calculating this you can actually set the “Match Type” to = Phrase or Exact – and then sort the data by SEOT. Market Samurai pulls back all this info.
Do you have a minimum number for the PBR?
My favorite tool is Web CEO – http://www.webceo.com/cgi-bin/go/clickthru.cgi?id=fmdeveloper
You can also try wordtracker.com
I am not aware of any keyword research tools that are "very accurate," and at best they tend to be "somewhat helpful."
There are several issues here. First, no tool is more reliable than the data it is "fed," and neither Google nor Yahoo provide their search data to third parties. WordTracker uses data from a pool of smaller search engine sites, and often shows high traffic levels for very bizarre search phrases. (In my experience, WordTracker's data includes "fake traffic" including traffic from other keyword-research bots.)
In addition, even your own data is not complete: you may find that your bidding draws 150 impressions per day for searches for "where dubai" but in fact, your ad might not be shown for 1,000 other searches done each day. (Your data may also be "over-inclusive," as you may be including searches through the Search Network, which aren't done at Google, or traffic on the Content Network).
Second, search patterns change over time; the number of searches for "Santa Claus' address" rises in December and probably zeroes out from January to October. In addition to predictable seasons like that, there are random fluctuations as well as "surges" (when Jay Leno mentions widgets, there may be a bunch of web searches in the next 24 hours).
There are also "cycles" for certain search terms. For example, searches for "porn" peak on weekends (Friday and Saturday night), while searches for "football scores" peak on Sunday and Monday. For some search terms, it's possible that 80% to 90% of the total searches occur on a single day each week ("lotto numbers"), or even a single day each month or each quarter ("Fed interest rate change").
Another crucial factor to consider is the activity of "fraud operators," who use keyword research tools to identify high-bid keywords; when bid amounts rise, those terms attract more fraudulent activity (because fraudsters can make more money from each click than for low-bid terms), increasing volume.
The bottom line is that you should absolutely NEVER rely on any tools to be reliable — not even within an "order of magnitude" — in predicting search volumes for specific keywords or even "keyword families."
Mark Welch
Internet Marketing Consultant
http://www.MarkWelch.com/
It's true that Aaron Wall's tool is an excellent resource, and widely used by search engine optimization (SEO) professionals. I would also recommend Google's Adwords Keyword Tool.
You'd need to have an Adwords account (theoretically the cost is just $5 because you don't need any live campaigns to use the Tool). It will generate long lists of suggestions based on a "seed list" of keywords. Not only that, but they recently added a slew of features which estimate monthly traffic, seasonality trends, etc. It's really unbeatable. However, it doesn't account for the smaller search engines (Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc) which is why it works well in tandem with the aforementioned.
I also recommend, if you're going to use these tools, to take a crash course in keyword research.
yes, that should be enough/
While I think everyone here has excellent answers I have found it best to spy on what your competition is doing. There are several tools on the following site that can help you with that. Keep in mind that while there are many good keyword generators out there they are only as good as the initial data submitted to them so if you're way off base from the beginning you could end up going down the wrong path.
Look at what others are doing in your niche and you are guaranteed to go the right direction. Make sure you download the FREE eBook as it helps.
http://www.SEO-Power-Tools.com
Its important because you want to identify your target audience and make a website that has content relevant to what your audience needs. Keyword research doesn't place the same relevance as it used to in search engines like google, for spam related reasons.
If you don't do keyword research, you can run into the problem of writing content that promotes your site but doesn't interest the audience. Keywords is part of the battle because, you want people to have a clear understanding of what you are offering.
Keyword Research Reports
Word tracker is one way to go.
How much traffic are you losing simply because you haven't discovered some surprising but powerful keywords?
Finding the obvious keywords for your website pages is simple.
And finding related, high-demand and low-supply keywords which are powerful for your site isn't too hard when you start using Wordtracker.
But what about those keywords that are really surprising? What about keywords you would never think of, but which have the potential to drive tens of thousands of new visitors to your site?
Welcome to Wordtracker Keyword Research Reports
As a Wordtracker subscriber, you'll immediately get free access to the top 1,000 keywords being used across the major search engines – both short-term and long-term.
And for some marketers, that is enough.
But it isn't enough for those who have discovered the true potential of working with some of the most searched-for or newly emerging keywords on the Net.
Serious online marketers and SEO professionals who are looking for breakthrough results turn to Wordtracker's Keyword Research Report choices: from the Top 10,000, all the way to the Top 20 million terms.
How these reports deliver breakthrough results
Scan our Keyword Research Reports from top to bottom. Look for wildly popular, or newly emerging words and phrases that could be used to bring in floods of new traffic.
How does this work? You are not looking for the obvious keywords that will bring people in through the "front door" of a particular site. You are looking for undiscovered gems that can bring huge amounts of traffic in through the back door, side doors, or even a new door.
Maybe you will find an incredible phrase that doesn't work for the home page, but could deliver amazing results for a page devoted to a particular aspect of some product or service on the site.
Maybe you'll decide to build special landing pages for those keywords.
Maybe you won't use the exact keyword from the list, but will run it through the Wordtracker tools to find a related high-demand phrase for which you can optimize a very relevant landing page.
Or maybe when looking through the list, you'll find guidance to develop a new product, name it, and understand what content to write to best promote it – whatever communication paths you use.
The results can be remarkable. But you'll never achieve those results without first finding the best keywords in our reports.
SEO Booko also has some great tools!
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001013.shtml
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
If you want us to create a report for you just contact us at http://www.rockislandgroup.com we are a marketing company in NYC
What do you mean by "Chinese Keyword Research Tools?"
Do you mean online translators or online IMEs (if your computer doesn't allow you to type in Chinese, you can use online IMEs to generate Chinese words by typing pinyin into the input box)?