How to Conduct Effective Keyword Research
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
The best way to do this (that’s
also at no cost) is using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool was build to help advertisers
doing Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) through Google AdWords filter and pick
more effective terms to place in PPC campaigns; and since PPC and SEO are often
highly correlated, it is also a valuable tool for researching SEO keywords.
Google’s keyword tool let’s
anyone with or without an AdWords account expand and filter relevant keywords
quickly.
To start, type in 5-10 keywords
and phrases that describe the product or service that you want to rank for:
If you are a local business, try
adding the following modifiers before and after certain keywords:
●
Zip code
●
City
●
State spelled out
●
State abbreviation
●
Country
●
County
●
Region
●
City, State
●
“in” city
●
“local”
Once you have a solid list, type
in the capcha and search.
At the top of the results you
will find detail on each of the keywords that you typed in; below that Google
will expand your list and provide up to 100 keyword ideas related to the terms
entered. If you are just learning SEO some of these results may be surprising to
you.
Next, click the “Local Monthly
Searches” header to sort both lists by the average amount of times the term has
been searched in your country or language.
Then scan the list for keywords keywords that:
●
are highly relevant to your business
●
contain a low to medium competition ranking
●
have a sizable number of local monthly searches
The competition ranking is
speaking to the competitiveness of the term as it relates to PPC advertising,
but it can be generally related to SEO as well.
If you would like to save your
favorite keywords, check them off and click the download drop down menu
followed by the selected option. This will let you save your
checked keyword list in a variety of formats.
Keyword research works best if
you do several of these types of searches, constantly washing the keyword list
that you build on subsequent expansions.
Once done you can then either use
the final list of 5-10 keywords as the ones you are going to target, or use an
SEO-specific tool to check the SEO competition for related terms. SEOMoz (paid)
and the SEO SERP plugin for Google Chrome are great
options for this.
To learn more about how to build an SEO foundation, check out Grovo’s expert series
with Zach Ciperski, VP, Coffee For Less, Director of SEO, Elite SEM.
In this video series Zach covers
a variety of topics, including:
●
A history of SEO
●
Choosing the right keywords
●
Onsite SEO optimizations
●
Creating SEO friendly content
●
Basic link building
●
Social media SEO
●
Video SEO
●
User experience and SEO
●
Mobile SEO
See you at the top,
Mike Fleischner
Marketing Blog founder and top-selling author Michael Fleischner has been featured on The TODAY Show, ABC World News, and Bloomerg Radio. 
16 comments :
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This is a great overview! I've heard before how important it is to have an effective keyword search, but never knew how to achieve it. Thanks!
When using Adwords, I would also recommend searching "Exact" keyword ranking results rather than broad. Another thing I would suggest is not relying completely on this tool alone. Even though something is searched a lot, doesn't mean you will be able to beat a phrase with extremely high competition on a Google Search.
Thanks, That really useful for us beginners. I'm currently working on a new website and I'm exactly now trying to figure out how to use the Google Keyword Tool. And guess what? :) Your post comes in handy right in the nick of time! Thanks a lot, bookmarking it.
great post!
This blog post on doing effective keyword research was incredibly powerful. I learned more effective strategies for finding and promoting effective keywords than on any other site I researched. Thanks for such a great post.
Hi,
This is great work and very good information on marketing. This post is really helped me to learn about marketing in depth.
I can see that you are an expert at your field! and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success
The keyword tool is indeed a great resourc, but if you take a close look, the figures Google give out can differ depending on whether you are logged in or not! This needs to be looked at.
Great! Thanks! I was reading your book SEO made simple and it states to use nothing under 3,000 and nothing over 50,000 local searches per month. Well times have changed and its impossible to find anything under 75,000 for my site!
Also, I noticed the commercial intent tool is no longer available. Any suggestions?
Thanks again Michael! Great job!
Awesome overview! This is indeed a great source of keyword search especially when your conducting research and comparing data. Simple yet empowering.
For keywords research two things are important, firstly relevancy of search term with the business offerings, and secondly volume of those selected search term. These are very important considerations that ought to consider to get the best results.
PPC campaign
Great post. A comprehensive roundup of all the good sources I already knew of and few I didn’t. Thanks this wonderful article! I am always looking for new ways to be more useful to my site. Thanks a bunch.
Great post. I guess something to keep in mind is to make sure that exact match is selected in order to get the true stats from adwords tool...
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