Jul

How to Carry Out Keyword Research

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How to Carry Out Keyword Research

Someone waddled into my corner office at the new QuirkStation the other day, and asked me what I was busy with. Quickly minimising my Facebook and Twitter pages, I managed to stammer that I was busy doing something called “keyword research”.

“Oh? How does one do keyword research?” they asked innocently. Realising that I would probably have to do some work now, I pulled up an easy chair, told them to take a seat, and began explaining things in a point by point format, which I will now share with you.

So Why Keyword Research?

As an introduction, let’s quickly look at what keyword research is, and why we would want to do this. We carry out keyword research to gain a better understanding of what users search for in relation to what we offer. This may sound obvious, but in many instances, your idea of the product or service you are offering may differ greatly from a user’s expectations. Using a recent example, my friend’s online scarf empire came tumbling down, as he is pretentious, and exclusively optimised his site around the terms “Shemagh” and “Keffiyeh”, whilst users were instead simply searching for “Arab head scarves”.

It’s important then to understand the “search psychology” of users and optimise your site around the appropriate keywords.

Make sense?

Okay, let’s begin then:

Step 1 – The Initial Brainstorm

Before I do anything, I will usually light a cigar, take my shoes off, put my feet up on the desk (although this is dependent on whether I’m wearing holey socks or not) and take a moment to contemplate what the given website is all about.

Then, opening up a spreadsheet, I will start throwing down as many phrases as I can think of which would be related to the product or service and would possibly appeal to the target market. Go wild here, throw down many variations and cut away the unsuitable ones at a later stage.

Step 2 – The Research

Once I have a number of phrases I turn to the various online tools available to me. The most popular (and free) one is probably the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool which is as effective as it is a mouthful. Let’s quickly look at why it’s so effective:

Gives you search volume figures on Google (although we don’t rely too much on this, will touch on that a bit later). You can break down searches by country (always useful – especially when it comes to Americanised spelling or geo-specific products and services). You can differentiate between Broad Search and Exact Search. Besides offering stats on your chosen key phrases, it also offers you alternative variations you may not have thought of.

Right, so now I’ve pulled some search volume stats on the key phrases I initially came up with. As mentioned, the tool also gave me a bunch of additional phrases I never even thought of, and I’ve now added them to the spreadsheet as well. I will usually create a column for Broad Search as well as Exact Search. Broad Search gives me an idea of how versatile the key phrase could be, and the potential long tail traffic which may derive from them. Exact Search is what I pay most attention to though, as it gives me a greater idea of how popular a given term may be.

Step 3 – Supplementary Research

The AdWord tool gave me some good insight, but I also want some second opinions. In this regard I will have a look at some other tools for supplementary volumes as well as any variations I may not have thought of.

I usually take a spin on the likes of Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker for additional sets of search volumes. Thus, we now have 4 columns of data, Google Broad Search, Google Exact Search, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker. Now we will look at how many pages are competing for these phrases.

Step 4 – Competitiveness

Here I normally do a simple Google query and record the number of competing pages for the given term. So let’s say I’m checking competing pages for the term “Arab head scarves”, Google tells me that there are 278,000 competing pages ranking for this term.

This doesn’t give me the full picture of how competitive this term could be though, so in addition, I also record the exact search for the term (ie: using inverted commas in the phrase – “Arab head scarves”). This would give me a clearer indication of the difficulty in ranking for the given phrase. This gives me a figure of 21,800. I then create an additional column and divide the two sets of figures I have (ie: 21,800 / 278,000 * 100) which gives me a figure of 7.84%. I call this the “competitor intensity figure”, with the understanding being that the lower the figure, the easier it would be to rank for this term.

Step 5 – Analysis

Right, so now it’s time to makes sense of the keyword data. As mentioned earlier, I don’t rely too much on the actual search volumes given by these tools. The Google Adword Keyword Tool telling me that there are 10 000 monthly searches for “Keyword A”, doesn’t mean that I will get 10 000 visits if my site ranks well for “Keyword A”.

I just use this data to determine how popular one keyword is over another. For instance, if “Keyword A” get’s 10 000 searches, and “Keyword B” has 1000, this tells me that “Keyword A” has the potential to generate 10 times as much volume as “Keyword B”. I then weigh this up with the other data I have pulled, including the “competitor intensity figure” and settle on my chosen keywords.

I usually select 3 top level, competitive key phrases per page. These pages should be related though, I wouldn’t optimise a page around “Arab head scarves” and “Arab shirts”, but rather “Arab head scarves” and “Keffiyeh” (remember? Another name for the scarf, stay with me here).

Summary

It’s important to note that there are more simplistic as well as more advanced methods of carrying out keyword research. (Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz has quite an extensive and elaborate method of doing things over here).

What’s important to note though, is that you have enough data to make an informed and educated decision on the correct key phrases to use.

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