How To Keyword Research

Date: December 1, 2007 | Author: Edward Clarke | Category: Search Engines

You’ve got products for sale or services to provide and you need to know more about the way the market define these goods and services so more people find them when searching. Keyword researching, we should say keyphrase researching, is an essential part of the search engine optimisation process.

Let’s look at a couple of tools that can assist us in defining our products and services when we keyword research. We need an example product to work with, let’s say, ladies boots. The reason? it’s a popular product, sold in every high street and is hugely competitive online when you’re selling them. Ready?

Using Google Suggest

Google Suggest is a tool that allows Google to ’suggest’ terms and phrases that people type in to search for goods and services. As you type in the search box, Google will suggest terms on a character by character basis. Why Google? If you look at the variety of website statistics that I do, you’ll see that Google is by far the largest referrer of traffic. Anyway, back to Google Suggest. If you click the link at the beginning of this paragraph it will take you to Google Suggest. Next we need to start typing.

suggest1.jpgLook at the image. You’ll see that as I type the term ‘ladies’, Google will suggest many associated keywords. It looks like ‘boots’ is a popular term too, we knew it would be as Google has suggested it and it appears there are approximately 2.7 million results. Let’s move on though.

Next I type the word ‘boots’ and this brings up more phrases that are associated with the phrase ‘ladies boots’. We begin to see a pattern of information emerge here. The results we’re seeing are words that people are typing and we can also see the numbers of results for this term. The numbers of results in itself isn’t too important. The higher the number the harder it is to compete but it’s the words we need as these form the content on our websites.

suggest2.jpgOK, we know more about our market demands based on Google Suggest. There are certain customer requirements that are being searched for and it appears that it’s the extremes of sizes as well as cheap (everyone loves a bargain, obviously). This may be a consequence of high street stores only stocking goods for the ‘average’ customer. Whatever the case, we now know some useful phrases and target market requirements that we can apply to our websites.

Have a play with Google Suggest and see what you can learn about your products and services in the eyes of your market.

Google Sandbox Keyword Tool

sandbox1.jpgThe Google Sandbox Keyword Tool takes what you’ve learnt using Google Suggest and then adds some more ideas into the mix. More than that, it shows searching and advertising strength for the given terms which is really useful information so we know what we’re dealing with. Take a look at the image and you’ll see four columns.

  1. Keywords, both specific and recommended additional.
  2. Advertiser competition weight. The more there is the stronger they are.
  3. Last months searching average.
  4. The years searching average.

You’ve got some choices here. Looking at the image we can see there are some very popular terms that we can target. The key is to identify keyphrases that have good searching volumes, and if you use Googles pay per click system, Adwords, low advertiser competition.

You’ve got two free highly useful tools that educate us about the market and the way they seek products. I even used Google Suggest to research the title of this article, ‘How To Keyword Research’, which you’ll see by typing it in.

  • What can you learn using the tools above?
  • Always be aware of language and dialect variants of foreign markets. In the UK, we call ourselves UK. Other countries may refer to us as England or Britain. This could impact your hotel being listed if you’re targeting Europe or the US, for example.
  • Does your website reflect the information you’ve researched?
  • What changes can you make to your website to reflect these phrases?
  • What questions do your customers ask that aren’t being displayed with these tools?

Thanks for reading.