Keyword Analysis Research
Here’s a short post on how to do quick and dirty keyword analysis research.I usually start with a broad term. For example, for this post I first typed just the term “keyword” into one of my favorite keyword research tools to see what would come up. It turns out there are a lot of people who don’t understand how to research keywords so it was a long list of phrases like :keywords for health insurance.” Not seeing the result I wanted I tried again. This time I typed in “keyword research” the surprising thing about this was that I found there were triple the number of people using the term “keyword analysis research” as opposed to just keyword research. The end result was that I decided to optimize this post for the term with the greatest number of searchers.
Now don’t rush off and think that what I just described is all there is to it. Even for the quickest and dirtiest of keyword research you should always do two more things. First, you should always check the number of search result pages. To do this go to Google or your favorite search engine and type in the phrase you are considering with quotes around it. It turns out for example that a search for “Keyword Research” returns 1,560,000 pages in Google even though it will only get an estimated 31 searchers a day. In the meantime there are only 988 results for the term “Keyword Analysis Research” with an estimated 95 searches each day for this term. That’s not always the case and if I had found it to be the other way around I might have decided to focus on the shorter term rather than the longer. It’s a balancing act between the number of competing pages and the amount of potential traffic.
The other thing that I do is to test Word Tracker against what Google says people are searching on. To do this I usually log into my Google Adwords account, but if you don’t have one of those Google makes this tool available for free for folks who don’t have an Adwords account. It won’t give you exact numbers of people who are searching, but it will show you if Google determines there is any significant search volume for it in the past month. It does this with a bar graph. The reason to do this, is that WordTracker doesn’t have access to the number of searches being done for a phrase in Google. In fact WordTracker has a rather limited number of search engines they can pull from, so they must extrapolate based on the estimated search volume those engines do get the total volume of all searches for a particular term. So, if Google doesn’t show in search volume for a term, it’s back to the drawing board.
You can do a lot more in-depth keyword analysis research, pull in several other tools, graph it all and cross reference it, but if you’re wanting a quick method this works great.
[...] So the next time you are thinking about “article link building,” stop and ask yourself how much more targeted traffic you could get from a well optimized article. If you don’t understand how to determine the best keywords to use go to my short post on researching keywords. [...]