How to Do Effective Keyword Research

Keyword research forms the backbone of all online marketing. As such it is one of the most important steps and time should be taken to do it properly.

Keywords are the words and phrases a user may type into a search engine in order to find information about a particular subject. For the online marketer, it would be very useful information to know what people are typing into their browsers to find a particular product or service.

Say you had a business opportunity that you wanted to promote, it would be a useful thing to know the demand for the product before you entered the market, it saves time and money!

When you know the demand for a particular product or service, you can see whether it is viable and profitable to enter the marketplace. If you already have a product or service and just want to promote it, keyword research would tell you what people are typing into their browsers in order to find certain products. You can then find the keywords with the most demand and target those in your marketing campaigns. More on that later.

So how do we find what people are searching for and what keywords they are typing into their browsers to find a particular product or service? Well, there are several ways to do keyword research.

The best way is the cheapest way and that is to use your brain! That’s right, use your brain. Put yourself into the shoes of your target customer, who are you aiming at? Who are your customers? If you were a customer looking for your product/service, what would you type into a search engine to try and find it? Simply brainstorm and jot down everything! I mean everything, do not discriminate at this point, you can do that later.

In addition to using your brain, you can use software to help you. Here are some free online tools you can use to brainstorm more keywords.

Digital Point Keyword Tool

Google Adwords Keyword

Nichebot

Overture

Simply enter a keyword, such as ‘business opportunities’ and the tool will provide a list of associated keywords. Of course not all of them will be relevant, so pick out the ones that are relevant to your business. For example, if we are promoting a business opportunity we would not want the keyword 'business opportunity ebook' unless of course it related to what w were promoting.

The other way to find a list of keywords is to use commercial software tools, whilst not free, they do provide additional benefits and are very useful to save time. Two of the most popular are:

Keyword Elite

Ad Word Analyzer

Once you have a keyword list, you need to find out the demand for those keywords. The demand is the number of searches the keyword gets per day or per month. The Overture keyword tool is very popular and provides information on the number of searches for a particular keyword made in the previous month. You can do this research with the following free online tools.  

Overture

Digital Point Keyword Tool

Open the Overture tool using the link above. Type in a keyword, in this example we will use ‘business opportunities’. You can see with the Overture tool, that the keyword ‘business opportunities’ received 182,902 searches in the previous month. The other related keywords such as ‘online business opportunities’ has only 6154 searches (still a significant number!).

Bear in mind that the online tools usually show you the demand for a keyword in the USA. This is important because if you live in the United Kingdom and say you were selling wine online, the online search tools may show a monthly search number of say 40,000, when in fact the number of searches in the UK for wine is only 5,000 (of course this is not true!). So, figure would not provide an accurate picture. If your product or service is aimed at a worldwide audience, then the figures will be OK as the USA market will give you a rough idea of the worldwide demand.

There are tools that allow you to find country-specific demand for a keyword so you get a more accurate picture of the marketplace. The following are tools that allow this.

Digital Point Keyword Tool – free

Nichebot – online paid for service

Ad Word Analyzer - software

Keyword Elite - software

If your product/service is country-specific, then you need to get country-specific data.

OK, so you have done some research and brainstorming, got a list of relevant keywords, got the demand data for the keywords and the figures look promising. The final stage is to figure out the supply or the competition! There is no point in promoting a keyword if the demand is high but every other marketer on the Internet is also after that keyword. Take for example, ‘business opportunities’. This is an extremely competitive market and the keyword ‘business opportunities’ may have huge demand, but the data also suggests that the competition is enormous!

So, how do we find out the competition? Well, we want to look at the organic or natural search listings. That is, when you type a keyword into Google, the results that show up on the main page, are the organic results. The narrower column on the right hand-side consists of sponsored adverts that users have paid for to be there. 

The competition is the number of pages listed in the organic search listings. If you look at the top right of the Google main window you will see a number, that is, the number of pages that Google has listed under that search term. Understand that this does not give you the true figure. To get a more accurate figure, put the keyword you are researching, within an apostrophe. So, search “business opportunities” and the number you get is 26,200,000 (without the apostrophe, the number of pages is 187,000,000!). This gives you a truer picture of the competition. 

As you can see, with our example keyword, ‘business opportunities’, the competition is massive at over 26 million pages listed! It would not be wise to target this keyword as we are highly unlikely to get a decent ranking for it. You want to find keywords or phrases with high demand and low competition. What is high and what is low is subjective and also depends on the industry.

I would say a good figure to go for would be a demand of greater than 250 searches per month. You need to realise that this is not a hard or fast rule. If you have a very niche product, such as a ‘red leather cat flea collar’. Then the number of searches will obviously be lower than for a term like ‘business opportunities’. In the case of the flea collar, a monthly search of 10 may be sufficient as the keyword is very targeted. So, the number of searches will depend on what your product or service is like.

And this brings me to the other factor to consider with keyword research. Keyword phrases such as ‘red leather cat flea collar’ is more targeted than ‘flea collar’. As a general rule, the more keywords within a phrase, the more targeted the user is likely to be and the more likely they are to convert into a sale or lead. A more general keyword such as ‘flea collar’ will not be targeted. The user may be searching for what a flea collar does, where you can buy a flea collar or just information about whether flea collars work! Therefore, the more targeted the keyword the better. However, this also means that the demand tends to be lower as will be the competition. As a rule of thumb it would be good to try and get a list of keyword phrases with at least 3 keywords in the phrase such as:

Home business opportunity
Internet business opportunity
Free business opportunity

Etc.

That's the basics of keyword research!
It is important to do good keyword research so spend time doing this.

If you can get the tools you need for free, then why have paid software like Keyword Elite and Ad Word Analyer?

Great question. The main reason for me and most others who take their business seriously is that it saves time! And lots of it! You simply type in the keyword phrases and press go! The software drags out a list of related keywords and also picks out the supply and demand for each of the keywords. You can then sort them and quickly find potentially great keywords very quickly. I use the software all the time and it just streamlines all the work. I love both Ad Word Analyzer and also Keyword Elite, both do a similar function and also with some difference. I would say, Ad Word Analyzer would be better if you are looking at doing lots of pay per click marketing (a later lesson) and Keyword Elite if you are looking more for organic search listings. There is no need for paid software mind you, simply, just use the free tools mentioned above and your brain, they do the same thing, but just takes a bit longer.

TASK

1) Brainstorm a list of at least 20 keywords that users would type into a search engine in order to find your offering.

2) Pick some keywords to expand upon them to make them into keyword phrases

3) Find the demand for those keywords

4) Find out the supply for the keywords

5) Pick the 5 Top keywords with high demand and low competition. If you do not have 5, then do more brainstorming!

We Review Powerful Internet Marketing & SEO Software that can Automate Much of Your Work. Click here to read our recommendations.