licorice planet

Keyword Inspiration

 

The process of keyword research usually starts off with a seed list – words that send you down interesting paths and trigger deeper research. The better your seed list, the better your ability to generate a comprehensive keyword portfolio. 

 

 1. Junk Mail

To sell something, your advertising offline or online must relate to things that people understand – you have to know and use the words that people are familiar with. So the junk mail that drops through your letterbox is a rich source of the words that people use – in other words, keywords.

I recently picked up a credit card application envelope and wondered about the words they used. I saw the words ‘introductory 0% APR for cash advance checks and balance transfers until April 2008′. On the back side it said “no annual fee”. Take some of those words, search on Wordtracker and you’ll trigger lots of keyword phrases. Here’s a sample of related keywords from hundreds on the envelope:

Once I opened the envelope there were thousands of additional keywords to be discovered. The fake credit card had the words instant, platinum, and points on it. In some spots they went out of their way to even put the keyword ideas in a bulleted list!

So scan your junk mail, subscribe to direct mail marketing, catalogs, and magazines that target your industry or consumer base.

2. Television programs

Some of the most popular online keywords come from popular cultural experiences. Anything that makes the Oprah Winfrey show is going to get serious search traffic and reality TV is amazingly popular. The Yahoo! Buzz Index tracks popular search queries, and has a category devoted just to American Idol.

3. News articles

Some things make the news because public relations firms pitched them, but those that are there outside of public relations pitches are typically there because of significant public interest.

I was recently interviewed by Forbes about Google’s Supplemental Index. When I checked my server logs I found that hundreds of people searched for related keywords to find my site. Now that the issue made Forbes there will be even more people talking about it and even more search volume. Headlines, sub headings, and key points in news articles are great keyword sources.

4. News tracking

There are a near infinite number of ways to track news online.

Many top news sources, like the Wall Street Journal, provide email updates of key stories.
Google allows you to subscribe to keyword based news search results and blog search results. Their news product also lets you search archived news to view old news stories, and recommends new stories to you.
Google mixes popular news articles in their organic search results for broad related keywords.
Social news sites and social bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us surface new and interesting stories. You can also search their archives to find information that was bookmarked in the past.
Topix.net aggregates news from a variety of sources and makes it searchable by location, source, or keyword.

5. Blogs and Buzz

Individual blogs are stealing market share from larger news outlets.
You can subscribe via RSS to popular or trustworthy related or competing editorial channels. Some ideas become important, viral, and newsworthy because a well read person talked about them.
Some services like Techmeme automatically track current popular stories.
Technorati shows what bloggers are searching for.

6. What’s Hot Right Now?

Most major search engines give searchers a glimpse into what is popular. Yahoo offers their Buzz Index, Google provides their Zeitgeist, and AOL offers Hot Searches. Google also offers Google Trends, which estimates seasonal search volumes, and allows you to filter by Geographic regions.

7. Hot Commercial Keywords

Amazon allows you to search through their current best sellers by category, and eBay offers a paid Marketplace Research service which allows you to see what items are frequently searched for on eBay, and at what price points the related auctions closed at. Amazon customers review products and eBay also offers a reviews section. Reading through their guides and reviews can help you uncover patterns to how people compare and classify things.

8. Question answering services

Many search engines and other large internet companies offer question answering services. You can search through sites like Yahoo! Answers to see what types of questions consumers in your marketplace have. Start with broad keywords and they will lead you to more specific keywords.

Most topics also have related community forums where people ask questions and keep up with industry related news. You can search through Google Groups, use BoardTracker to search through forums, or use your favorite general search engine to search for keyword + forums.

9. Directory link structures

If you know a particular page or section of your site is doing well but do not know how to expand on the topic leverage someone else’s research.

Look at the internal link structure and page content of competing sites, the structure of major directories like the Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, or Business.com, and the table of contents of related books.

10. Other Fun Keyword Tools

Visualize it: Quintura and Visuwords create graphical representations of related keywords.
Competitive Keywords: KeyCompete lets you view what keywords competing sites are bidding on. Spyfu shows keywords they are bidding on and organic search rankings. Also, check out SEODigger.com
Read Ad Copy: Read the ad copy of competing sites and read the ad copy of the ads that Google AdSense would target to your page.
Related Searches: Many search engines and meta search engines show related keyword clusters. Google Suggest auto completes searches based on popular related searches. Google also offers the Google Sets tool to help you come up with keyword sets, and Microsoft offers a search funnel tool, which shows the keywords that were searched for before or after a particular keyword.

And don’t forget your analytics and server logs. If you already rank for something then search engines already trust your market position for that keyword. Use keyword research to expand the areas where you are already trusted.

Why Keywords Matter 

Why do some sites get alot of traffic and others zero, the following diagrams helps to show why this happens. The following site will get ZERO search engine traffic:

The following site will get SOME search engine traffic.

The following site will get LOTS of search engine traffic.

 Three Good Reasons To Target Long-Tail Keywords!

 

 

 How do I find out what these keywords are? …and why are they so important?

In professional terms, what we are talking about here is the concept of targeting so-called long tail keywords.

Long Tail keywords are those 3 and 4-keyword phrases which are very, very specific to whatever you are selling. You see, whenever a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy. In virtually every case, such very specific searches are far more likely to convert to sales than general generic searches that tend to be geared more toward the type of research that consumers typically do prior to making a buying decision.

To help illustrate this phenomenon, let’s take a look at the typical step-by-step buying path that a customer travels on the way to a making a purchase.

To help illustrate this phenomenon, let’s take a look at the typical step-by-step buying path that a customer travels on the way to a making a purchase.

1.Consumer becomes aware of a product.
2.Consumer seeks information about that product in preparation for possible purchase.
3.Consumer evaluates alternatives to product (features, pricing, etc…).
4.Consumer makes their purchase decision.
5.Consumer pulls out their credit card and completes the transaction.
6.Consumer then evaluates the product after buying it and decides if they want to keep or return it.

Using the above six step path to a purchase as our model, you can probably already see that you want to target the consumer who is somewhere around step 4…

Consumer makes their purchase decision.

…because once they have made their decision to buy something, that’s when they start using very specific search phrases to seek out their target purchase.

Now for the GOOD news…

Highly specific multi-word phrases tend to be far easier to rank well for than the more generic single keyword or double keyword phrases.

Here’s a specific example. Let’s say your site sells guided mountain climbing tours in California. At first, you might consider targeting a generic phrase like travel. After all, an adventure tour is generally the type of excursion people like to participate in while traveling on vacation.

However, if you tried to go after that phrase, you’d be facing direct competition from big sites like Yahoo.com, CNN.com and Travelocity.com. It’s unlikely you’d be able to knock any of those sites out of the top 10 unless you’re willing to invest a pile of money and a mountain of time.

But, even more important, travel isn’t the best phrase for you to target anyway. That’s because many people who search using that phrase are looking for items such as plane tickets, ocean cruises or just doing very general research on where they might like to go. They’re probably not saying to themselves…

I’m looking for someone who sells guided tours for beginners to climb Mount Shasta so I can take my family on a fun trip this summer.

“I’m looking for someone who sells guided tours for beginners to climb Mount Shasta so I can take my family on a fun trip this summer.”

If they were, they’d be entering something different than travel.

Even if you were to target a more specific phrase like mountain climbing you’d still be up against heavy hitters like About.com, Wikipedia.org, and the USDA forest service. And, unless you sell everything related to mountain climbing for every mountain around the world, the traffic you’d get for that keyword isn’t likely to convert to many sales.

So let’s look at some of the keywords that are specific to what you’re selling—keywords that you can start ranking for and generating traffic and sales right away.

Here are a few highly specific keyphrases that relate to customers who are much later in the buying cycle—at least at step 3, probably at step 4 and possibly step 5:

california mountain climbing tours
beginner mountain climbing in california
guided mountain climbing tours
mount shasta family climbing tours

Of course, these are just a few examples. I’m sure you could think of many more. However, the point is twofold;

1.The long tail keywords are much easier to rank for.
2.People who search by using long tail keywords are far more likely to become buyers!

More Good News…

Of course this suggests that you should be creating pages that zero-in on snagging searchers who use long tail keywords. And, since there are potentially so many different long tail combinations that searchers may use to buy what you offer, that means you’ll likely be creating more pages.

Well the goods news is that Google likes sites that have more pages. It makes the site look more substantial, more natural, and even more real in the eyes of the world’s most popular search engine. Bear in mind that your “unique” pages need only be variants of your main offering(s) but focused on a specific long tail niche.

Therefore, each and every page will have a unique title, description meta tag, h1 header tag, and body content that emphasizes your offering by using the long tail keyword that you choose for each specific page. It isn’t rocket science, but it sure does work well to snag consumers at the optimum stage of the buying process!

So, instead of focusing on just two or three highly competitive general keywords, target the dozens or even hundreds of easy-to-rank-for long tail keywords.

Also bear in mind, however, that the downside of focusing too much effort on the long tail is, if you target phrases which are too specific, you might not get enough traffic to sustain your business. That’s why it’s best to have:

a few pages sending you large amounts of less-targeted traffic, and

a large number of pages with each sending you small amounts of highly targeted traffic.

But overall, it’s best to think of it this way; would you rather rank for one keyword which sent you 1000 visitors a day or 200 keyphrases, half of which sent you 1 buyer a day?

After you do the math you’ll see that 100 buyers are much better than 1000 site visitors who are only doing research. And there is no question that the use of ultra-specific keywords demonstrate a greater intent to buy on the part of the customer. This simply leads to more sales which is, of course, what you are really after.

There’s just no substitute for Research

In the end there is no substitute for doing your keyword research and determining which keywords have enough traffic to make them worth going after. And this effort must be dovetailed with doing your competitive intelligence research to determine which keywords you’ll be able to rank for based on the sites you’d have to compete against.

So, now you have the tools it takes to get…

1.easier rankings

2.higher sales conversions

3.and many more pages indexed in Google

…all of which will certainly lead to a much more profitable bottom line!

Pushing your keyword research beyond the norm 

 If your web pages are not focused on the right keyword phrases then you may find that other pages are much easier to find in the search results than yours. And while most webmasters claim to be doing keyword research you may hear that fewer people seem to be able to find excellent niche phrase keywords.

In this article, I am going to outline some tips to help you quickly perform genuine keyword research, find much better exact phrases and take advantage of the hidden “windows of opportunity.”

Before I do, let’s talk a bit about what the challenges are for most of us and that this may help us think of “keyword research” in a different way.

Understanding the common limits to exploring data

The challenge of performing good research usually is based on the fact that most people really don’t naturally want to explore data at all.

Have you noticed for example, how difficult some legal contracts are to read when they are WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS? WHY ARE CAPITALIZED LETTERS SO DIFFICULT FOR US TO READ PARTICULARLY WHEN THEY ARE ALL CLUSTERED IN A PARAGRAPH OF TEXT? THE ANSWER IS SIMPLE ENOUGH.

Did you know, most of the time, our brains do not actually read text at all. We tend to “recognize words” based on the upper contour of the word shape. However, when typing in all capitals, it takes away all shape so both the bottom and the top of each letter are identical.

This takes away our ability to recognize a word at a glance and it forces our brain to literally work harder and read each word.

When it comes to performing keyword research, do you think that most people naturally tend to research data? Although we say that we do, we really do not. Our natural tendency is to try to explore very narrowly, the most prominent keywords that are already lodged in our minds by “reason of experience.”

We want to “logically” guess at the keywords that we “understand” to be the “most logically related,” based on our past experience. But seldom do we ever think to explore keywords that are common, everyday terms because they seem to be “unrelated.”

Yet the truth of it is this…

“The more we rely on your built-in research capacity logically, the more we are going to be discovering exactly the same keywords as every else, who is doing exactly the same thing as you are.”

A much wiser objective is to begin to increase our threshold of true keyword research by purposely exploring more data and doing less guessing at the keywords we think make sense. This free style approach will allow you to discover much more of the hidden evidence of a searcher’s behavior.

Okay, then this now understood, let’s talk about Wordtracker.

Tips for expanding your keyword research beyond the normal

Remember the power of turning on comprehensive search to do your research.

1) While many people attempt to tell Wordtracker what keywords that they “think” are important, it is far wiser to open up Wordtracker and let it tell you what a specific marketplace is doing. For example instead of guessing at a phrase like “prices for antiques” you might simply research the single word “price.”

These were just a few examples discovered instantly by entering only a single word “price” and letting Wordtracker tell you how the word was being identified:

“price guide for antique clocks” KEI 1568.0

“price on antique victorian rocking chair” KEI 2,116.0

“cheap prices on italian gold bracelet” KEI 2,500.0

“kenmore washer and dryer prices” KEI 600.0

“best price on GE appliances” KEI 936.0

2) Consider exploring a “portion” of a keyword phrase as a single “root word” and let Wordtracker’s powerful right and left hand word stemming, reveal how that portion is actually being used within multiple phrase clusters.

Examples: Here the root word was the term “print.”

“free thank you cards to print” KEI 456.1

“songs to print for guitar” KEI 729.0

“keyless finger print” KEI 912.7

“free logic problems to print” KEI 1301.0

3) Stop thinking of keywords in terms of just a hunt for the right words. But try exploring keywords as “topics of interest” which will often relate back user search behavior and even industry related trends. Examples: Root word “shelves”

“woodworking display shelves” KEI 625.0

“over the window wood shelves” KEI 625.0

“pantry shelves and racks” KEI 645.3

“glass shelves jewelry display” KEI 961.0

Examples: Root word “Locate”

“Where Can I Locate Someone in Texas” KEI 784.0

“locate someone using military records” KEI 841.0

Example: “search”

“Obituary Searches” KEI 11224.0

4) Explore the common every day words that may seem to be initially very boring or common to you. These words can often unlock search strings that are very telling about the searcher’s interests or needs.

Example: an ordinary word like “draw” produced these…..

“Drawings of Angels” KEI 69.4

“Learn How to Draw Dragons” KEI 149.0

“How to Draw Flames” KEI 159.9

“Mythical Dragon Drawings” KEI 232.3

“Grim Reaper Drawings” KEI 514.7

“Drawings of the Phoenix Bird” KEI 698.0

“Drawings of the Grim Reaper” KEI 1571.7

“Drawings of Angel Wings” KEI 1608.0

“Hydraulic Pump Drawings” KEI 3669.0

“Pneumatic Drawing Symbols” KEI 5700.2

“Mechanical Drawing of a Backhoe” KEI 18,881.0

5) This is a tough one, but try to stop using so much logic. Give yourself permission to explore random ideas and common words and even portions of your customer’s dialogue to you. There are interesting revelations to be found by more random and less logical exploration.

Examples: Root word “why”

“why do people use terrorism” KEI 1056.2

“Why is mercury chosen for use in thermometers” KEI 8281.0

“why shouldnt people smoke” KEI 13225.0

Examples: Root word “how”

“how to get in google” KEI 894.1

“how to get rid of snakes” KEI 4188.0

“How Do Pneumatics Work” KEI 7363.0

“Hydraulics How They Work” KEI 13,728.0

“How Do You Start a Motorcycle Dealership” KEI 56,406.0

6) Do not just get hung up on high KEI values with low competition.

This is a great place to start your research, but try and take away at least one idea away from every screenshot and realize that there are ways to compete for the low KEI phrases too. It just means you have to work a little harder to win, but you can do it. If you need help to build your top placement skills consider taking an online course or attend a local SEO certification Workshop.

7) Explore more than just “keywords.” But watch for the behaviors that are revealed behind the keyword phrases. They are often telling you something about the conditions that exist in the life of the searcher and what is important to them.

Examples:

“Uses of Mood Color” KEI 3841

“Use of Test Tube in Laboratory” KEI 2401

“Use Of Mercury In WWII” KEI 1936.0

“Use of Miss Ms in Titles” KEI 784.0

If you are researching keywords and exploring data on a specific product line, be sure to think about related online tools and other resources that you could be optimizing for, such as calculators, tests, profiles, maps, driving directions or other important related possibilities.

“discount camcorder batteries” KEI 575.5

“rechargeable power tool batteries” KEI 455.1

“surveyor batteries” KEI 770.1

“surveying batteries” KEI 902.0

“electric candle tart burners warmers” KEI 2401

“Home Made Waste Oil Burners” KEI 1032

“Rechargeable Radio Batteries” KEI 415

“Medical equipment Bulbs” KEI 812.3

“Heraeus tanning bulbs” KEI 1225.0

“led closet light and battery” KEI 676.0

9) Explore behaviors based on common or unusual questions being searched for on the Internet.

“What Does Your Percent Body Fat Mean” KEI 859.5

“What Is the Size of a Standard Volleyball Court” KEI 1,922.0

“What Is Error 663 And How To Fix It” KEI 43,365.1

“Car Wax Cloudy What To Do To Fix It” KEI 43,886.5

“My Computer Keeps On Restarting How Can I Fix It” KEI 48217

“How Much Does It Cost To Fix Car Scratches” KEI 63,551.3

“How To Fix An Ipod If It Shows Error” KEI 6303.5

10) Be sure to investigate the acronyms and meaning of acronyms on keyword suggestions you may see. Does SEO really mean search engine optimization? Perhaps it means Seasoned Equities Officer or South Eastern Ohio or perhaps one of the other 114 definitions revealed in http://www.acronymfinder.com

In conclusion: There is no need to worry about finding unique and effective long tailed keywords using Wordtracker. The challenge in finding the best phrases is usually limited only by our threshold of logical thinking. Often the more logical we are, the more we will end up with the same keywords our competitors are all going after.

Keyword research is on skill where you can literally discover “trails of gold” by giving your self freedom and liberty to explore data illogically. That may not sound like intelligent thinking, but until you try it, you’ll be missing out on many extra-valuable keyword phrases and missing out some amazing behavioral trends.