Note: This keyword research guide is for beginners only. If you have been doing keyword research and making money as a result, you might want to skip this post.
Photo by Scott Sandars
Despite popular claims, marketing online is hard work. It doesn’t matter which approach you take.
E-commerce sites, eBay store, web sales letters, adsense, blogging and so on. They are all hard work.
Obviously you don’t want to put in those precious hours into your venture only to realize that it’s not working out. That’s where keyword research comes in.
Keyword research is the very first thing you must do when it comes to online marketing, even if you are planning on optimizing your pages for the search engines, simple because it points you to the right direction.
Keyword Research Not Just For SEO
At the deepest level, keyword research is not just about SEO. It has always bug me why I only hear of keyword research in SEO courses, but not say… a copywriting class.
Keyword research is about getting to know your market. It’s about discovering the psychological triggers that makes your visitors buy.
What the words do they use? What is their language? Keyword research is one of the best ways to answer those question.
Keyword Research For SEO
SEO can be a big waste of time if you don’t do your keyword research properly.
Some keywords are too competitive to rank. Some of them ranks easily but those traffic don’t convert. While nobody searches for some of them. What you want to do is weed out all of those and go straight to gold nuggets.
Here’s how you do it WITHOUT the fancy keyword research tools. Goods ones, like Wordtracker, are extremely expensive if you’re just starting out. I suggest you use their free keyword tool or sign up for their free 14 days trial.
With that out of the way, let’s get started.
Step-By-Step Keyword Research
Now, let’s say you’re in the “excessive sweating” market. What you want to do is
1. Go to Google’s keyword tool. This is the best free keyword tool ever (even better than some paid ones).
2. Then you search for the broadest keyword that is relevant to your market. In this case, it’s “sweating”. Here’s what you’ll see.
Google's Keyword Tool Results
3. Export the list to excel.
4. Go through the list and get rid of those with 500 or less searches a month. That’s just my preferences. I like to ask myself, will this keywords be worth my time and effort if I rank number 1?
5. Then go to Google.com and search for that keyword. Let’s say you search for “excessive sweating”.
Here’s why you’ll see
Google's Results for Excessive Sweating
In the top right hand corner, you’ll see the amount of results, which is about 1,2M. That’s too much for me. It’s going to be very competitive.
And notice the read square boxes on the right. Note that they used the term “Hyperhidrosis” instead of “excessive sweating”? Big mistake. Some people don’t even know what “Hyperhidrosis” is… especially people who are looking for “excessive sweating”.
6. Do that for the rest of the terms. When you find one that has large amount of searches but low amount of results, that’s the way to go. if can find some of them, skip to step 9.
7. If you can’t find any, then we’ll have settle for the second best approach. Go to Google.com and search for: “allintitle: keyword”. Replace “keyword” with “excessive sweating” in this case, with no quotes of course.
What this searches for is the amount of websites with the keyword in their title tag. If they don’t have it, then it’ll be easier for you to rank.
8. Look for keywords with high amount of searches and low amount of results.
9. You probably don’t want to target two-tier keywords or shorter when you’re starting out. They are mostly harder to rank for. Instead, try to rank for a large amount of “long-tail” keywords (keywords that are 3 or more words long) until you’ve built a decent amount of links to your site.
10. If you want to take it a step further, head over to Google Insights and search for your keyword. This is useful in researching your market. I was surprised to find out that most people who are looking for “copywriting tips” are from India when I was setting up this website. If you want to find out more about this, check out this post on Google Insights For Keyword Research.
11. Take note of web 2.0 websites like Squidoo, Hubpages and Ezine Articles in the search results. If there is one, that probably means you can rank quite easily. Just create an account in the web 2.0 site and try to out-optimize your competition.
12. Then head to MSN commercial intent tool and search for your keyword. In this case, “excessive sweating”, which yields about 6% commercial intent. I personally try to find those with more than 40%.
“Excessive sweating treatment”, on the other hand, although it only have 210 monthly searches, its commercial intent score is a whopping 60%. But again, the amount of searches are way too low for me.
13. All in all, the term “excessive sweating” is a bad one. I’d probably go lean towards “stop excessive sweating” (I did not actually do keyword research for this market) because:
- Youtube is in the top 10 results. You can make a similar video and out-optimize the competition.
- Commercial intent is higher at 17%
- Monthly search volume is 8100.
- And search results are lesser at 782,000
Additional Keyword Research Tips:
1. In the Google’s keyword research tool, you can search for keyword ideas by generating keywords that are relevant to a particular website. Just click the “website content” radio button and enter the URL of the website you want to analyze.
You can use this on your competitions that are currently ranking highly.
2. In Google’s keyword research tool, you can scroll down to see a list of “additional keywords to be considered” - sorted by relevance. This is Google trying to tell you which keywords are also relevant to what you’re looking for. Make use of them!
Last Words
I hope this guide helps you guys out. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave at the comments section. Looking forward to reading them!
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