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Hi everyone, Keyword research, whats it all about, I hear you ask? Well in this little article I am hoping to address this question and also be able to provide some valuable advice on the subject in the process. I personally, like to use a combination of free and paid tools when I am doing my market research, but in reality most of what you need can be gleaned for free. I’ll outline the basic process using free tools, then I’ll add other comments about tools you can use which require you to part with your cash.

Ok, here goes-

Do a basic keyword search on Google Adwords Keyword External tool. It’s free, and returns a great deal of information straight from the search master it’s self -google! It is located here:

Google Keyword Research Tool

What you are looking for here are keywords that have a decent amount of search volume and are related to your market. Depending on your seed keyword, this will return you hundreds of possibilities. Drill this down to Keywords’s that have an acceptable level of local searches per month. For me that number is at least 1000. For you it may be a little more or a little less. Once you have a number of Keyword’s to check further, take this list and do a basic Google search within “quotes”. This will give you the number of pages that have your exact term in them. Just so you know, I like this number to be under 35,000 but 50,000 would also be acceptable.

I also like to do a website search. This gives you the number of webpages that have the title of their page optimized for the term. I like this to be less than 10,000. This is how many pages you’d really be up against. Taking a random search I did earlier for “radio controlled toys” further, here is an example of the info I would gather on a term from that “seed” Keyword to make a final evaluation.

KW – remote control cars

local search – 5400/month

comp/quotes – 8300 pages

allintitle – 7480

If you wanted more info as to whether or not this was a good KW, (it is!) you could also perform a backlink check to see how many links the sites on Page one of Google have coming to them. There is a plugin called SEO for Firefox that will return this and more information, such as Page rank (PR), Alexa rankings, Yahoo backlinks and more. When going for keywords to use for your sites, think like a searcher. What you might think would be a good KW may not be what your visitors will be typing in. Keywords research is part art, part science.

Ok now for some Other Tools….

I use the above method in conjunction with other tools. None of these are necessary: you can get most of the info you need from the process outlined above, however these make it a lot easier but like everything in life, if its easier you probably have to pay somethin for it. There are three that I use:

Market Samurai – Hands down the best tool around. Handy for not only KW research, but also SEO.

Traffic Travis – A close second. They also offer a free version, which may well be all you need!

Micro Niche Finder – A terrific tool that is improving all the time, it gives you a great deal of info arranged in a way for marketers to best use.

Using these methods will get you ahead of 99% of the competition, who not only don’t know how to perform proper Keyword research, but won’t put in the time! I hope this little post helped. If you liked it and appreciated it then please re tweet it!

Adrian

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