Keyword Research: Find The Best Keywords With Free Research Tools

Keyword Research: What You Need To Know About Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important aspect when deciding which are going to be writing about. Of course you can writes about things that you are interested in, but if you are concerned about being ranked in Google, then keywords is where your initial focus needs to be.

Why is keyword research so important? Well, because when somebody does a search in Google, or any of the search engines for that matter, what they type in the search box is what the search engines are going to be looking for. So if your page and your content do not relate to what they are searching for, you page will not come up in the results. Remember, relevancy it key.

So what kind of keywords should you go after? Basically what you’re looking for are the keywords that you have a chance of ranking for and have a decent amount of traffic. Just because a keyword gets a lot of traffic, especially because of traffic, doesn’t mean that is a word you should be going after. What it usually means is that it is going to make it harder to be able to rank decently for that keyword.

For instance, take words like “shoes”, “insurance”, “lawyer”, “dentist”. All of those get a tremendous amount of traffic, but there are two problems with them.

1. There is so much competition for them, it would take years to be able to rank for them.
2. They are not “buying” words. They do not show that the searcher is far enough down in the buying cycle to be really serious about buying something.

You are better off to go after long tail, or not as popular, keywords when you are trying to write your articles. Long tail keywords are generally words that have 3 to 8 words in them. The benefits of long tail keywords is that:

1. There is generally less competition
2. They show more of an intent to buy

The big downside to long tail keywords is that they don’t get as much traffic.

So for example, a keyword like “shoes” may be get difficult to rank for but “red shoes in North Dakota” may be quite a bit easier. It may get a lot less traffic, but on the other hand it is something you may be able to actually rank fairly high for.

I’ll will put it this way:

it’s better to be ranked higher for a low traffic keyword and get some traffic, than to be ranked lower for a high-traffic keyword and get no traffic.

So how do you start keyword research

Well there are a lot of tools out there to help you with your keyword research. The three that I’ve found work best are these:

• Google keyword tool
• Word tracker free tool
• Keyword discovery

All three of these are free and all of them worked very well for your initial keyword research. As you get more proficient and start earning more you can go and get paid tools, even if the paid don’t do that much more for you. I still use all of these free tools even though I have tools that I pay for as well.

The Problem With Tools

The problem with any keyword tool is that all they are really giving you are estimates. They all look at different places and at different times. What they are all they’re doing is trying to guess how much traffic a particular keyword is actually getting. That is why using multiple tools for your keyword research is the safest way to begin. But you still have to use your brain to be able decide what the best keywords are going to be. There is no better tool than the one between your ears. You’ll learn this over time and will become more and more natural to you, but at first it may be a little confusing.

Basically you need to take any of the numbers that they give you with a grain of salt because you will often see wide differences in the amount of searches that they all predict. Sometimes they are pretty close, but most times they are vastly different.

How To Analyze your Keywords

There are two aspects that you need to look at when analyzing your keyword. The first is how many people are actually looking for that term (search volume). The other aspect is competition for that keyword. If there is too much competition, you will have a very hard time trying to rank for that particular keyword.

Here is the system that I follow when doing my keyword research.

First open up a browser that supports tabs, either Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 or 8, or Opera.

Open up four tabs
(if you are using any of the above browsers, just click on the links and they should open in new tabs automatically)

Tab #1: Google’s Keyword Tool
Tab #2: Wordtracker Free Tool
Tab #3: Keyword Discovery
Tab #4: Google Search Page
If you are logged into Google with iGoogle or something like that, you will want to log out, because your results may be skewed otherwise.

Go to your first tab (Google Keyword Tool) and type in your initial keyword (whatever it is you want to rank for). For this example we will start with the word “shoes”. Type in the Captcha and click on GET KEYWORD IDEAS. The initial results look like this:

There are some setting you will want to change. Up above the results is a dropdown box that says “Choose columns to display”. You want to make sure that you have “Show Estimated Average CPC” showing in your results

Your results should now look like this

The next thing you want to do is to sort your results by “Approx Avg Search Volume”. You do this by clicking on it at the top.

Now your results look like this

Depending on what your goals are and how you are planning on monetizing your page, the important columns you will be looking at will be different. If you are looking at monetizing strictly with Adsense, then you want to look at the “Estimated CPC”, “Advertiser Competition”, and “Aproximate Avg Search Volume”. If you are going to be doing affiliate marketing (not PPC) then you are mainly concerned with “Advertiser Competition” and “Aproximate Avg Search Volume”.

When researching for Adsense, here are a couple rules of thumb.

1. Your average CPC should be a minimum of .75. Remember that Adsense only pays you a portion of what they are getting, so you want this number to be as high as possible to have the best chance of making the most money.
2. Advertiser competition should be has high as possible. They higher the advertiser competition, the more likely it is that the Estimated CPC will be accurate. The lower the competition, the lower the actual estimated CPC will be, regardless of what it shows in the results. You will learn that with experience.

If you are doing affiliate marketing, then the Avg CPC really doesn’t make much difference to you. You just want to make sure that the advertiser competition is high, because that tells you that there is some money in it. If there are a lot of people bidding on a keyword, there must be money to be made. Keep in mind that what Google shows you is not always accurate. Later I will show you another trick so you can check how accurate the Advertiser Competition really is.

Here is another rule of thumb I use when doing quick keyword research. I only look at keywords with Average Monthly Search Results less than 18,000. I have found, in general, that these will be the words I will have the best chance of ranking for. Remember this is a rule of thumb and not an ABSOLUTE rule. There are many exceptions to this rule that you can find if you look long enough. However, in this guide, we are focusing on FAST keyword research. After you learn this, you can take as much time as you like.

OK, so here’s one we can try that looks pretty good.

It is kind of long tail (3 words), has a CPC of over .75 (.95), has good amount of advertiser competition, and good search volume.

Now we will look at WordTracker

Looks like it has pretty good search volume (remember that WordTracker shows DAILY results)

It also looks like there are a number of other keywords that may be worth looking at as well. We will want to make note of them to research later.

Next we will look at Keyword Discovery and see what their results say.

It looks like we have a winner so far. We also notice that some of the same results are coming up in Keyword Discovery that were just in WordTracker. Again, we want to make note of that fact for later.

Well our research so far has shown us that this keyword is definitely a possibility, so we can keep going. If our results in WordTracker or Keyword Discovery had shown 0 or 1 results, we would probably want to start over with another keyword.

Next we go to Google. As I said before, if you have an iGoogle Account, you will want to log out of it first.

What you need to do now is to type into the search box, your keyword surrounded by quotes, like so:

“name brand shoes”

What you will be looking at is in the top right hand corner and will look something like this.

What we see here is that there are 386,000 other sites competing directly for this term. Here is another rule of thumb. What you are looking for are results less than 20,000 competing pages. Anything more than that and you will have a hard time trying to rank. You want this number to be as low as possible.

So looking at this, we have found out that this is not a good keyword to try and rank for. But remember the other terms we ran across earlier. We can try one of those. Lets try “discount name brand shoes” and see what happens.

Looks like we have a winner. Only 15,300 competing pages. And from our previous research we already know that it is a term that people are searching for. We could go back and double check in the Google Keyword tool, but it is probably not necessary.

Ok remember earlier I said I was going to show you a little trick to make sure the numbers Google was giving you were accurate. Here is what you do. Down at the bottom of the PPC ads on the right, there should be a link that says “More Sponsored Results”.

If it is not there that means that there are less than 10 people competing for that keyword, which is a bad sign. If it is there, click on it and see how many people are actually competing.

Ideally you want to see as many as possible, but anything over 20 is great.

So our first round of research was a success. We found a keyword with commercial intent that we should be able to rank for. Now all you have to do is lather, rinse, and repeat. And we only did this with one. You will probably want a list of 10 to 20 to do at a time. It will save you a bunch of time.

Another thing to remember is be open to new possibilities for keywords. Don’t fall in love with your keywords. If it doesn’t fit within the criteria you set, toss it out and look for something better. There is always something better out there.

Once you have your list of 4-6 keywords that fit within your parameters, you are ready to start writing your article, post, or whatever it may be.

Happy Researching

Erich Mosier

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