How on earth can you do real research to see how your potential customer will ask for your website? You can. It involves data.
Remember, you have a “target” website visitor in mind and you want that target to do something when he or she arrives at the website (be impressed, order your free report, get general information, become a fan of your enterprise, leave an email address, buy a product, etc.) You have worked out at least a few ideas of keywords in your head.
My first stop is a service that costs money. It’s called Wordtracker.com. You can get a free 30-day trial, so if you’re serious about keywordsmithing you test-drive the service. There are two main things to do at Wordtracker. The first thing is to enter the broadest, blandest, “main” keyword you have and then search “keyword universe.”
Coming back to the website example that sold gourmet olive oils, the best broad keyword in that batch is just “olive oil.” Test that out in Wordtracker and hit Universe and you’ll get a whole swarm of keywords that this particular service sees associated with olive oil. In the very top of the list are “extra virgin olive oil,” “virgin olive oil” and “California olive oil.” I don’t know about you, but the California keyword was a bit of a surprise. Another surprise is orthographic. Remember, search engines are terribly unforgiving. “olive oil” was the main keyword, but “Olive Oil” (capped) was in the top 10. Two different keywords as far as the search engine was concerned.
I can then use this same tool to sort out keywords by popularity. Wordtracker tells you how many Google searches were performed for those keywords in one month (you have to check with the service to see which month, but it’s always a past and relatively recent month) in the U.S. (or you can opt for the U.K.) You get a number. Now some people worry about that number in that it’s imprecise. After all, Google isn’t the only search engine in town. Google commands about 2/3 of all searches, but Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and other search engines are left out. Furthermore, the US or UK isn’t the whole world. And I have heard some keyword gurus say that Google tends to under-report. So the number you’re getting isn’t really the exact number of times that terms was searched in some past month in the whole world on every search engne. But the numbers are relative and work pretty well for drawing conclusions.
For instance, California olive oil got just 11 hits. Another key word “benefits of olive oil” got 42.
Using both Keyword Universe and Popularity, you can start to see the most popular keywords. You’ll also see some clunkers and some things off the mark. That’s part of the process, too.
Oh, and as I did the research for this article, I found an interesting keyword with over 30 hits: “drinking olive oil.” Again, a surprise.
The main keyword, olive oil, got about 395 hits. And if you look into the popularity list, you’ll see that people were using keywords suggesting that the interest in olive oil was both for health and skin/hair care.
So what do you do next? At this point you pick out the keywords that seem to meet two criteria:
- They are keywords that you imagine your target readers would use
- They are relatively popular
How popular is popular? Nobody I ever met in Internet marketing could answer this. Popularity is a relative term. If you’re selling olive oil, you go into that business knowing that your market is relatively small–there just aren’t all that many olive oil buyers online. So 395 for olive oil with some of the other related keywords might get you to the point that you can identify keywords that might hit about 500. Realizing this is lowballed, you might double it. About 1000 people are going to go for one of your keywords. Is that enough to build a business on? Hard to know, that’s a separate business call.
Some keywords are monster. Diet gets over 4,000 hits (but “lose weight” barely gets 700–see how keyword research is important?) But niche marketing involves niches which are often very small.
If you’re a writer-for-hire for articles or websites, your client will likely hand you the keywords. Most marketers like to do keyword research themselves because there is a bit of “intuition” and “knack” and “art” to using the data.
Okay, now you have some keywords. What do you do next? Tune in tomorrow and find out!
