Yesterday we talked about Niche Research tools, today I will tell you about Keyword Research. Keyword research consists of the following steps
1. finding keywords.
2. Assessing Competition.
3. Choosing Targeted and achievable keywords.
Step 1: Free and Premium Keyword Research Tools
Google Keyword Tool External: This is the first tool that you should be using as this is like getting getting the information from horses mouth. This is not completely accurate but it is as accurate as it gets in keyword research. It also tells you about competition level for PPC. Remember it doesn’t tell about SEO competition.
Google Search Based keyword Tool: This is another useful Google Tool for finding keywords. You can even go to specific categories based upon your niche and find the most searched keywords in that category.
Google Search Insights: Great tool, it tells you how the trends of a particular keyword span out over the time of year. You can expect the a keyword like “Christmas gifts” will be searched more often near the time of Christmas but there are less obvious correlations which you can find out by using this tool.
MSN Adcenter Labs: MSN provides a variety of tools for a variety of functions. I haven’t used them much so far, but I think they are worth playing around with for advanced Marketers.
Wordtracker Free Tool: This is the free version of premium tool from wordtracker. One of the industry’s best tools.
Keyword Discovery Free Tool: This is a free version of another premium tool. This is the best tool for finding long tail keywords.
NicheBot (Paid and Recommended): This is premium tool and you can get a trial for $1. This combines all the great tools in one place and also makes it easier and automated for you to check out competition which would otherwise take a number of hours. If you have to buy one keyword tool, this is the one that you should buy. Its cheap and a great tool.
Keyword Spy ( Recommended for PPC): If you are a PPC affiliate marketer and you want to spy on what your competitors are bidding on, then Keyword Spy is the leader. Keyword Spy tells you what are your competitors most profitable keywords, Ads and landing pages are. Its a Top Notch Tool.
Step 2: Assessing the SEO Competition
After the keyword research, you should come up with at least a hundred keywords. Once you have selected a list of keywords, you need to find out how competitive it is to rank for it on the search engines. Lets take an example, if I have come up with following keywords for my next site
Acai berry
Acai berry detox
Acai Berry supplement
acai berry benefits
acai berry side effects
and so on…….
I will take each keyword and search for it with ” keyword ” around it on google. for example I will search for
“acai berry side effects”
and then look at the number which google shows the results out of and for this google indicated
Results 1 - 10 of about 831,000 for “acai berry side effects“
So for this keyword google has 831,000 pages indexed, so its not an easy term to rank for if this is your first site.
I would suggest that you don’t go for more than 200,000 pages competition. As you will get more experienced, you will be able to compete for more competitive keywords.
So you have to do this for each keyword and then filter out the ones that you don’t want to compete for and find the keywords that you want to target.
If done manually, its a daunting task, think of doing it for 100 keywords or even more. But Nichebot does that for you automatically.
Step 3: Choosing the targeted and achievable keywords.
Choose keywords with competition less than 200,000 on google as I said above.
Also keep in mind that the keywords should be searched atleast 1000 times per month on google or it wouldn’t be worth that much effort.
This concludes out today’s post and I hope you found it useful.
Thanks
Tony
