The objective of this stage is to identify as many keywords as possible that are connected to your website, and are relevant to your target audience, and to find out how many searches are performed on each keyword, using the search engines, over a give period of time. The greater the number of searches, the higher the chance that surfers will use these keywords to look for sites like yours.
Keyword research starts with a shortlist of keywords, which is broadened by using tools.
Initial Keywords Shortlist
In order to identify keywords, we use tools that propose keywords related to the concepts that the website focuses on. These tools require an initial list of 5-10 keywords, all highly focused on your business, but also as general as possible. I recommend that you discuss the initial keywords with your colleagues, employees, friends and customers, in order to identify those keywords that will most likely bring quality traffic to your site. By quality traffic, I mean visits of people who are truly looking for a site like yours.
Factors to take into account when choosing the initial list of keywords and expressions:
- What products do you have in stock? It is not a good idea to focus on keywords that will bring customers who are going to be disappointed because you cannot provide the product that they are interested in.
- Which products or services have the highest profit margin? It may be better to focus on a profitable product, even if it is searched for less, since it may have a higher margin.
- Which expressions will potential customers use to search specifically for sites like yours? You need to identify these expressions, rather than those that relate to the wider business sector or industry that your site is part of.
- If you have managed a PPC (pay-per-click) marketing campaign, use the keywords from the campaign that brought in the highest amount of traffic, the largest number of clicks, and the highest conversion rate. Expressions that were successful in marketing campaigns will most likely be useful for organic search as well.
Broadening the List of Keywords though the use of Tools
Once you have your initial list of keywords, it is time to turn to the tools that will help you identify the keywords that really are used in the search engines to find a site that deals with your specific field.
The most commonly used tools are Overture (free) and Wordtracker (fee-based). Both of these tools provide, in addition to a list of keywords that includes your initial list, information about the popularity of each expression over the last 30 or 60 days. Google also provides a tool for recommending keywords, called Google Adwords. This tool does not provide numeric information about the popularity of the expressions, rather it describes the popularity in terms of low/medium/high.
Another fee-based tool which provides data for keyword research is Keyword Discovery.
Details about some of the tools is provided below.
Overture
The original use of this tool was to suggest popular keywords for PPC marketers. However, since the tool is free, it is very useful also for researching keywords for optimization. As you enter each of the keywords from the initial list, the tool creates a list of all the expressions that were used by Yahoo surfers over the last month, that include the keyword from the list, sorted according to their popularity.
The drawbacks of the tool include:
- It does not differentiate between singular and plural, and so it doesn't let you know which is more popular
- It ignores punctuation marks and spelling mistakes, thus reducing the information about phrases that are slightly different, and relating to each one as a distinct phrase
- It is based on information drawn from searches with Yahoo, which is currently used for only about 25% of all searches, rather than on Google, which currently stands at well above 50%. In general, the number of Yahoo searches should be multiplied by a constant in order to get an approximation of the number of searches for the same expression on Google. Since keyword research results in a large number of searches for each keyword, the constant is usually 7 or 8, in order to neutralize these searches.
- The data saved in the database is only 1 month old
Wordtracker
This tool offers a similar set of features to Overture. Its main advantage is that it uses Meta-Crawlers like Dogpile and Metacrawler when searching for the frequency of the use of each keyword or expression. This improves the accuracy of the results, in comparison with Overture, since it neutralizes the results of users looking for their own keywords, and thus artificially improving the popularity of particular keywords.
In addition, this tool offers the following advantages:
- It offers a search of synonyms (using a thesaurus) and conceptually similar words (lateral search, which helps find expressions that are related to the original word, even if it doesn't necessarily include it)
- Allows searching of words that are often written with spelling mistakes
- Differentiates between singular and plural, thus allowing you to identify which is more popular
- Identify the most popular punctuation
- Includes a Keyword Effectives Index (KEI) which enables comparison of the search popularity of each keyword between the site being optimized and a number of its
- The database is updated continuously, and old data is replaced with new data on a weekly basis
Keyword Discovery
In addition to having features similar to Wordtracker, this tool gathers search data from 180 search engines from around the world, among which: Google, DMOZ, Yahoo, Altavista and MSN. Its database contains search data from the last 12 months, which enables analysis of the effect of seasonality on keyword searches.
From the provider of Keyword Discovery, other interesting tools are available: Competitive Intelligence, which helps you find which sites most of your competitors' traffic comes from; and Search Intelligence, which enables you to find which keywords bring the most traffic to your competitors.
Nichebot. is another free tool which combines Overture and a free version of Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, together with Google keyword research results.
Broadening the List of Keywords by Studying your Competition
Use Google to search for the 5 keywords that you found which have the highest number of searches, and study the first 3-4 sites that are displayed in the results, looking at the services or products that they offer. Build a list of expressions from the categories, headlines and names of their products, and compare it with your list of keywords. Add any relevant missing keywords to your list.
Translated by Debi Zylbermann
