Keyword Research

Keyword research is something you almost can’t do too much of. Finding effective keywords can help you narrow down what market to get in to, know what product or products to sell, know what pages to build, and more. When doing your keyword research there are two things you have to consider equally–supply and demand. Since most people have at least heard of the economic principle of supply and demand, that’s how I choose to break up keyword research.

Demand

I typically like to start with researching the demand. I want to make sure right off the bat that people are searching for my keywords. If no one is searching then it doesn’t matter how low the supply is. Different people have different opinions on the minimum number of searches a keyword should have in order for it be used on your website, but the bottom line is this–as long as someone is searching for a keyword then there’s an opportunity for you to convert that visitor into a customer. Obviously the higher the number of searches, the more visitors you will have an opportunity to sell, but there is a caveat. That caveat is supply.

Supply

Your keyword supply is the number of people who are already targeting a particular keyword. In the keyword research process, it’s helpful to know how much work you’re going to have to do to get your site rankings. The more competition there is and the stronger that competition is, the more work you’ll have to do to beat them out. I typically recommend doing two different types of filtered searches in Google to get a quick overview of your competition. From the normal Google search bar enter “allintitle:your keyword” and “allinanchor:your keyword”. These searches tell Google to only show you results of those web pages that are using your keyword in the HTML title of their site and those that are using the keyword in an HTML anchor element. The fewer results Google comes back with the better. I typically try to find keywords that have 30,000 or fewer results, but that number changes depending on how strong the competition is. A quick way to determine how strong the competition is for that keyword is to look at how many top-level domains there are in the results. An example of a top-level domain is “www.something.com/”. This is different than a sub page of a site (e.g. “www.something.com/something-else.php”). The more top-level domains there are in the results of your allintitle or allinanchor results the more work you’ll have to do to get your site ranked. We will talk more about researching competitors in the future, so we’ll leave things there for now.

Tools

There are a number of tools that help with completing keyword research. Below are some free and some paid tools with some explanations with their advantages and, where applicable, costs.

Free Tools

Overture’s Inventory Tool - This tool is no longer available. Yahoo shut it down several months ago.

WordTracker - Free keyword suggestion tool. Shows an approximate number of daily searches for a given keyword phrase.

Keyword Discovery - Similar to the suggestion tool available on Wordtracker, the keyword discovery tool shows an approximate number of monthly searches for a keyword.

WebCEO - Downloadable software that gives you some basic tools like a keyword suggester, keyword reporting, web analytics, etc.

SEO Book - This tool takes information from several different sites (such as WordTracker) and then generates its own results for an approximate number of monthly searches. It also provides easy to access links to other free sites such as KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker.

Google Traffic Estimator - A Google AdWords tool that shows you an estimated number of clicks for advertisements on the Google search page.

Google Keyword Suggester Tool - Another free tool from Google that gives you graphical representations of how many searches are performed for a set of keywords. Because the tool doesn’t provide you with the actual number of searches performed, its more helpful when used to compare several similar keywords and to look at trends in search volume.

Paid Tools

WordTracker - Besides the free tools available on their site, WordTracker also provides a pretty comprehensive paid tool. The tool costs $30 for a week, $60 for a month, or $330 for a year. Purchasing the full tool gives you access to keyword suggestions, traffic estimators, competition research, short and long tail keyword results, and the ability to export all your results in several convenient formats.

Wordze - Wordze is pretty similar to WordTracker. It runs $7.95 for a day trial or $45 for a monthly subscription.

SEOMoz - SEOMoz has a ton of helpful tools and some great eBooks. Tools include keyword difficulty analyzers, juicy link finders, crawl tests, popular searches, keyword ranking tools, term targeting analysis, and more. SEOMoz also has eBooks that discuss social media marketing, link building strategies, keyword research and more. Subscriptions to SEOMoz are $50 for a month, $250 for six months, and $400 for a year.