Online Marketing From Home

Keyword research is one of the basic building blocks you need in order to build a solid foundation for your online business. But, it can be very confusing… Especially for newbies.

I have recently read several forum posts where some important questions regarding keyword research went unanswered and thought it may be a good idea to share some of my views on my blog.

I am not even going to attempt to cover this topic from A to Z and will only share my views on some very basic questions that come up on a regular basis. I am not going to go into things like the importance of using keywords in your title, LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), anchor text, internal linking, etc.

Keyword research is all about understanding your market.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Source: Google on keyword research

I know there are some very experienced marketers that don’t rely that much on keyword research. They know and understand their market very well and don’t need to spend hours researching keywords. But, most newbies can benefit a great deal from keyword research.

There are many different keyword research tools and it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever find two tools that will show the same results. This is often a big source of confusion for newbies!

Two of the most popular tools are the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and the Keyword Suggestion Tool From Wordtracker (free version).

You will never get the same results from Google and Wordtracker. The reason is very simple… They use completely different methods to estimate search queries. So, which one is the more accurate?

Here is how Wordtracker estimates daily search volume:

Number of searches for a keyword in our database
———————-
Total number of searches in our database

x Estimated total number of daily searches on all search engines* 

= Estimated daily volume of searches for the keyword

* Every day, on average, we collect about 2.2 million search terms from Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com (accounts for 0.63% of searches across all engines). By combining these two figures, we estimate that the total daily searches across all engines is 290.6 million searches.

Source: Wordtracker’s Estimate of Daily Search Volume

Let’s assume their assumptions are correct. Even then it should be clear that they will never be able to predict accurate results. They do not get search information directly from Google and their database is not large enough to accurately represent all search queries.

Okay, based on the above many people feel that the Google Keyword Tool has to be more accurate. After all, Google should know better than anyone else how many search queries they get on average for a specific keyword. Well, it’s not that simple.

For example, when we search for the keyword “diet” we get totally different results from Wordtracker and Google.

Estimate according to Wordtracker – 3,041 searches per day
Estimate according to Google – 30,400,000 searches per month (Say 1 million searches a day).

We know Wordtracker is not 100% accurate. But, 3,000 searches vs. 1,000,000 searches! Big difference! Does Google really get 1,000,000 search queries a day for the keyword “diet”? No.

Google gets approx. 1,000,000 search queries a day for all keywords or keyword phrases that include the word “diet”. Big difference!

In other words, all other search queries that include the word “diet” such as “diet plans”, “diet foods”, “diet recipes”, “diet pills”, etc. are included in the 1,000,000 figure we get for “diet”.

Wordtracker, on the other hand, does not include other search queries that contain the word “diet” in their results.

Okay, here we go back to square one you may think! Not really.

Google is great for finding long tail keywords that Wordtracker will often not show any results for.

Bottom line… Based on my research and experience, Google is on average a lot more accurate than Wordtracker for keyword phrases that contain more than 3 words. By the same token, Wordtracker will normally be more accurate for a one word keyword or for a two word keyword phrase.

Many newbies make the mistake of only focussing on demand and supply without trying to understand their target market. In other words, they search for keywords that get a certain minimum number of searches every day and then have a look at the number of sites they will be competing against for those keywords.

You have to understand your target market.

For example, are we focussing on people looking for general information in the hope that they will click on some adsense ads or are we looking for people that are ready and eager to buy a product? They normally use totally different keywords when searching online!

Here are some keyword phrases for a niche that I am current researching in the health industry. I am not going the mention the niche as it is actually irrelevant…

[keyword] symptoms
Symptoms of [keyword]
Information on [keyword]
[keyword] information

The above keyword phrases may be great but do not really make me think that I am dealing with hungry buyers.

How to deal with [keyword]
How to cope with [keyword]

Getting better…

How to stop [keyword]
[keyword] help
[keyword] cure

Now that sounds a lot better!

Newbies often find great keywords but don’t make any money because they are getting visitors that only want free information or getting visitors that want to buy something but are not convinced they are at the right site, etc.

There are many ways of understanding your target market but it’s always a good idea to print a list of keywords and to put yourself in the mindset of the person using that search query. Try to understand who you are dealing with.

Assume you have a problem and want help asap you are not going to search for “what is [keyword]?”

I normally try to group keywords together. For example, I’ll have a heading “Information” and list all the keywords that people are using trying to find information. I’ll also have a heading called “Buyers” where I’ll list typical keywords a potential buyer will search for.

It will take a bit of time but I have often discovered great keywords that I would have ignored at first glance. Sometimes a keyword may not get a lot of searches but there are several other keywords that are similar and when you consider all the variations your target market is using it often makes sense to use some variations of the same keyword which can give you a lot more traffic than using the keyword in isolation.

Keyword research is not only about finding keywords with a high demand and relatively few competitors… It’s really about understanding your market and giving them what they want. You have to get into the mind of your target market.

Francois du Toit

Tags: Keyword Research

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Keyword Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.