Keyword Research Guide

Keyword research is the foundation of any successful website. If you’re looking to make money from advertising or products or from services then it’s essential that the right people find your site.

Keyword research not only tells you which words people are using to reach your site from search engines, it’s also a way of gathering deeper insights into the market you’re in or are planning to enter.

Politicians, copywriters, authors and poets already know how powerful words are. Words have the power to stir our emotions. Words can compel us to fall in love, go to war, to laugh and to cry. Advertisers know that the right words are the difference between millions of people buying a product or it being left on the shelf gathering dust.

Keyword research can be the difference between your site making millions or nothing at all. If you’re targeting the wrong keywords then you’re wasting your time. You could be putting resources into the wrong areas. It’s pointless spending time and money to rank higher in Google, Yahoo and Bing if that keyword isn’t likely to make you any money.

This keyword research guide will give you the knowledge you need to discover what words will be profitable for your website. You’ll learn:

• What keyword tools to use
• How to correctly use different keyword tools
• Why search volume isn’t a good indicator of how profitable a word will be

Keyword research is important whether you plan on using PPC or SEO. This guide is the first page in our series on how to make money online. In the upcoming series you’ll learn how to use your keyword research for Pay Per Click (PPC) and for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Here’s our guide to keyword research and how you can outsmart the competition and make money on the internet.

Table of Contents

Traffic vs Intent

One of the biggest mistakes that people new to internet marketing make is to pay too much attention to search volume and not enough to the intent of the searcher

After all, who cares if 5m people search for a keyword every month if very few people actually buy anything from those searches?

There are three main types of searches conducted by people. These are

Informational – the user is gathering information on a topic or product.
Transactional – the user is searching for a product or service to purchase.
Navigational – the user is searching for a particular website or wants to find content on a website

Of course these days consumers will research for a product before buying so sometimes informational queries do overlap with transactional queries. You just don’t want to fall into the trap of targeting broad keywords that aren’t likely to lead to sales.

If you owned a credit card company, which of these keywords are more likely to lead to sales?

Credit Cards
or
0% balance transfer credit card deals

While you’ll still get some sales for ranking for the “credit card” keyword, the amount of resources it will take to get to the first page of Google simply won’t be cost-effective for your business.

With the term “credit card” people could be looking for information on credit cards, news on credit cards or just generally browsing.

By targeting the more specific term “0% balance transfer credit card deals” you’ll get a much better return on your SEO or PPC investment.

Long Tail vs Short Tail

Keywords can be split into two main groups, short tail keywords and long tail keywords.

Short tail or head terms are usually broad while long-tail keywords are more specific.

The term ‘long tail’ was coined by Chris Anderson and is used to describe the strategy of targeting less-competitive niche markets rather than the hugely competitive broad keywords.

One example of a head term would be “books” while the long tail might be “Name of book + author”, i.e. “Paul Auster New York Trilogy”. While the long-tail keyword won’t be searched for anywhere near as often as the short tail term, the keywords are far more specific and so much more likely to result in a sale. You can think of the broad terms as almost like window shopping. They also suggest that the user is in the very early stages of researching their purchase.

The long-tail keywords are generally used by consumers once they have performed some research into the topic and have an idea about what they want to buy.

Here’s a stat from this fantastic article on long tail keywords

“If search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.”

The statistic above clearly shows how important it is to have a plan in place that doesn’t only target broad head-terms. In order to drill-down and find out which keywords your audience use you will first want to test out some keyword research tools.

Keyword Research Tools

Finding the right keywords for your business doesn’t have to be difficult. To gather vast amounts of user data in the past, you would need to conduct your own expensive market research surveys.

Thanks to the internet, there are now a number of different tools at your disposal that will tell you everything from the amount of people searching for different keywords each month to the keywords that your competition is using to attract visitors to their website.

One mistake that people make is to assume which keywords their customers are likely to use to find out more information on a service or make a purchase on a product.

Arguably the most popular keyword research tool is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool will provide you with the basic insights and overview of the niche you are targeting.

It is incredibly simple to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You can either include some keywords related to your field in the form on the left-hand-side or you can input the name of your domain.

Once the results appear then you will need to select “exact match” on the checkbox on the side. This will give you a far clearer indication of the number of searches that are performed for a particular keyword each month.

Here’s some more info on the different match types and what they mean.

Another free keyword tool offered by Google is Google Insights. Google Insights will give you better insight into the seasonality of keywords. As you can see from this graph, the keyword “pumpkin” peaks at the same time each year because of Halloween

There’s also the helpful option to export the results to a CSV file. You can also see some of the newer searches that are related to this keyword. This will help you to better understand the keyword modifiers that your potential customers are likely to use (more on keyword modifiers in the next section)

If you want to develop a keyword list with a tool other than Google then Wordtracker is a useful option. The free version will only give you 10 or so keywords, but they do offer a 7 day free trial. It is a useful service, with the caveat that it only has search volumes from smaller “meta search engines” like Dogpile. So you won’t be able to find detailed information about search volumes, but you may get some useful ideas from it.

Armed with just a few tools you’ll be able to gain a far greater insight into which keywords that your customers are likely to use.

If you need some more keyword tools then check out this list here.

Keyword Modifiers

This is a good chance to find out which keyword modifiers your audience is likely to use. A keyword modifier are words like

• cheap
• discount
• luxury
• best
• top
• offers
• vouchers

So if your main keywords are related to garden furniture then your keyword modifiers will look like this

{discount} + garden furniture
{luxury} + garden furniture
garden furniture + {offers}
garden furniture + {vouchers}

Every industry has different types of modifiers that people tend to use. Also, it’s worth bearing in mind that the type of modifier you use will attract different types of customers. Anybody putting “discount” or “offers” is likely to be looking for a website where competitive pricing is of paramount importance, whereas, a person searching using a modifier like “luxury” is likely to be looking for products or services that they perceive to be high-quality and aren’t as likely to be scared off by higher pricing.

This is where your knowledge of your market is important. Only you can know which type of customers you are targeting.

How to Find Keyword Modifiers

So just how can you find out which modifiers your customers are likely to use?

You can start by adding in the wildcard symbol before and after your keyword.

Go to Google and type your keyword (in this case, we’ll use the example of “Garden Furniture”).

* garden furniture
garden furniture *

Using the wildcard will give you an indication of the types of modifiers that your competitors are targeting.

From looking at just the first few pages of Google, we now have a couple more modifiers that we can use. The new modifiers are highlighted below:

• buy
• luxury
• sale
• special offers

You can also use a tool like Google Insights for further research.

Here are a couple more modifiers taken from the Google Insights tool

• garden furniture uk
• cheap garden furniture

Another useful tool is Social Mention. Social Mention will allow you to better understand what keyword modifiers people use on blogs and Social Media sites like Twitter.

Download the CSV file called “keywords” on the right-hand side of the page.

Here are few more modifiers we can use with the keyword “garden furniture”

• services
• luxury
• lawn
• offers
• displays
• tips
• guide

Additional Keyword Research: Community Research

Although keyword tools can certainly help you to make a decision on which keywords to target you’ll still need to do some research of your own if you want to gain a competitive advantage. Round here we’re fond of the saying “a fool with a tool is still a fool”. If you want to outsmart your competition then you need to think beyond the tools available and start to really drill down into researching places where your audience already hang out.

Use forum search tools such as the two listed below to find forum threads where people talk about the the topic of your website.

http://omgili.com/
http://boardreader.com

You’ll gain a much better appreciation of your market if you are really trying to connect with your target audience. Understand which sites they visit, which words they use. If you understand their current frustrations then this can be a great source of inspiration to you. If you know what makes your audience frustrated then you can look at this an opportunity to provide something new that they will like (whether that is through content or a product) and hopefully convert them to using your site or product more regularly.

Often keyword tools will only give you a basic overview of your market. It could be that there are other opportunities that you are missing out on by not going deeper into the keyword research phase.

You also need to remember your more savvy competition will already be using these tools and will probably try to target precisely the same keywords you want to target. This is where you need to outsmart your competition. Using Google Adwords Tool can be particularly frustrating. A keyword with reported volumes of less than 10 searches a month can still bring in visitors in the thousands each month. Don’t get fooled into using only one tool or method of keyword research or you’ll never realise your site’s potential to make money.

PPC

Where possible it’s always a good idea to use PPC to inform your keyword choices. If you use Google Adwords or MSN Adcenter, then you can quickly see which keywords are worth focusing your time upon. Set-up goals on your Analytics package so you know which keywords are converting.

Ideally, you want to run the PPC for as long as you can to ascertain the best performing keywords. Export the data and then use this as the basis for your SEO campaign. You can then target the keywords that you know will actually convert into sales.

PPC deserves an article of it’s own. We’ll be writing a detailed PPC guide in the near future, but it is certainly worth investing some time and money in to during the initial phase of any campaign.

Analytics

If you have a website already then you need to be able to track what is happening when visitors do reach your website. There are a number of different web analytics packages available, but for most websites, Google Analytics will do an adequate job of tracking how visitors interact with your site. Google Analytics also has the additional bonus of being totally free.

If you have a website and aren’t using any web analytics software then you really are shooting yourself in the foot. You really need to understand the behaviour of visitors who come to your site.

Web Analytics software will usually tell you which keywords brought visitors to your site. From here you can begin to better understand the strengths of your existing content. The keyword section in Google Analytics will show you which keywords are working for your site. You’ll be able to view how long visitors stay on the page, how many pages they view and which pages are most popular on your site.

Once you’re armed with this information it is far easier to begin to make more informed business decisions. If you run an ecommerce store then you’ll ideally also have set-up Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics. This will tell you the conversion rates on each keyword. At the absolute minimum you need to set-up “goals” in Google Analytics. You can set-up goals for newsletter subscription sign-ups and web forms.

Look at the keywords that are already bringing visitors to your site and see if there is potential to build out another keyword list that you might have missed out on previously.

Webmaster Tools

Another useful tool for website owners is Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools will help you identify any basic technical errors with your site. The tool also provides a very useful breakdown of keywords that your site is ranking for on Google. From here you can see the average position of each keyword, how many impressions each keyword has each month (approximate search volume), the approximate number of clicks you receive each month along the click-through rate.

Google Webmaster Tools is useful as it will inform you about keyword opportunities. If you are ranking on page 2 for a particular keyword then you can use SEO to promote that keyword until you reach the first page where you’ll have a better understanding on the potential search volume of the keyword. The keyword list might also show that you are ranking for unexpected keywords. Export the keyword list to a CSV file and see if it is worthwhile including any of the keywords into your SEO campaign.

Conclusion

Once you have developed your keyword list then you’ll have most of the information you need for the foundation of your internet marketing campaign. Whether you decide to concentrate on SEO or PPC, knowing which keywords convert will be vital to your business and website.

In forthcoming articles we will show you how you can use keywords in your SEO and PPC campaigns. If you have any questions then don’t hesitate to get in touch.