Researching Good Keyword Phrases
If you’re going to market your website on the search engines, you have to know what keyword phrases you are going to market to. Now, its not enough just to come up with a list of phrases off the top of your head and say “Well, these words are about my website and so I’ll use them.” Instead, take some time and do some research about which phrases get the best traffic and have the lowest competition. This is where you want to start before you try and tackle a very competitive phrase like “weight loss”.
So where do we start? First we need to find out what phrases actually get traffic. There are two main tools for doing this which are the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo! (Overture) and Wordtracker. Both have their benefits, and Wordtracker seems to be a little more updated. Also, you can go to DigitalPoint for a tool that uses numbers from both. DigitalPoint will give you a daily number for both. Personally I prefer to see a monthly number so when using DigitalPoint I’ll multiply the number by 30 just to see what the number of searches for the month was. I’d recommend only even considering phrases that are at least over 500 (1000 is another good number to start with).
When coming up with phrases you really want to get as many as you can. Look at different variations and subcategories that you can also include in your research. Set a goal of coming up with at least 40 relevant phrases for each idea that you’re researching.
Once you have your list of keyword phrases and the number of searches, next we need to find out what the competition is on these phrases. I’d recommend doing that at least 2 ways. Go to Google and in the search bar type in allintitle:”keyword phrase”. Of course, don’t just write in keyword phrase, instead put in one of your keyword phrases from your list. Then hit search and see how many results you get. This number tells you how many sites Google knows about that have that phrase in the title of the site. The second type of competition search you’ll want to do is allinanchor:”keyword phrase”. This one tells us how many sites are using the phrase in anchor text. If you want to go the extra mile you could also look at allinurl: and allintext: as well. Keep in mind that most of these numbers will vary quite a bit from each other because they’re looking at different things.
So once we have all these numbers what do they tell us and how do we use them? Well, what we’re looking for are phrases that have a good number of searches but a low number of competition. I usually look most at the allintitle and then watch out for a really high allinanchor. Mainly just look for phrases with the lowest overall competition. These would be the phrases that you have the best chance with at the beginning.
One thing you should all know about this information: its just one of the best indications that we have. You’ll still have to put a lot of time an energy into link building and other techniques to really get your site marketed, but by doing this type of research we can at least get an idea of where we need to focus our attention. I hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions, comments, or clarifications!
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The problem with researching on keyword is that they always vary, a high paying and popular in SE keyword today, might lose its value next week, so it demands the writer to stay up to date almost on a weekly basis, which is not always possible. Just my 2 cents.
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SEO little pro, I look at keyword research more as a snapshot to help push me in the right direction. If I don’t do any research at all, then I could pick a market where I really am going to have a hard time getting any good rankings. I agree with you though that if you really wanted to keep up on it you’d have a lot of work to do every week. I think this is where diminishing returns comes in…. So instead take it as a snapshot to see if it looks like a good idea, then work hard to make things happen in the idea that you’ve chosen!
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Hi Dan,
Thanks for the information re DigitalPoint, I found it beneficial, even just changing the presentation of some of the words on my website.
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Susan, I’m glad you found the information helpful!
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