Keyword Research Techniques How to find usable keywords!

OK we discussed in the previous page Picking a Domain and the fact you can choose a keyword rich website name instead of a brand-able one. So how do we come up with a keyword in the first place and what is it?

What is a KEYWORD anyway?

A keyword is a word or phrase that is being searched for on the search engines. When someone searches on the internet with a term the search engine provides that person with a set of results. It is these results that you as a marketer want to target. To get traffic to your site you need to be positioned on the first page and the closer the top position the better.

In fact in a recent survey its estimated that 75% of searchers only click on the No 1 position so if you are sitting on position 2, 3 or lower your chances of traffic are very low. There are a few methods in searching out these fruitful keywords and here we will discuss these as well as give a few examples of searching.

There are a few tools out that provide good help when finding keywords but most of these are on a subscription basis or at least a one off payment. As you are starting out capital is of a premium so you may not want to spend any money at this point. However there are a few FREE tools available and I would recommend using these to get going.

Google has a keyword tool!!

Google keyword tool, to use this tool you need to set up an AdWords account with Google. You don’t need to do anything else with the account at this point but later on when you start to get conversions you can use the AdWord account to target keywords and Pay for Clicks and send traffic to your sales page. More later….

At this point you should have a grasp of the niche you are working on so we will start there. Lets say you have decided on dog training as your niche and specifically the training of puppies. Log into your keyword tool and put in the search you are after, in our case “puppy training” tick the radio button for exact and search.

You will now be presented with loads of terms that Google associates with this search term. You will see tabs for competition, global, and monthly searches along with a few other stats. We are not really concerned with the information at this point but I will say that the top ten in high competition are usually very full for both website and Adword campaigns so I would usually avoid these. However I would suggest you don’t take these results as gospel as they are in fact set for Google’s Adword campaigns and not exactly searching users.

What you are seeing though is a good idea for keyword terms etc. You will see an option to download these keyword terms. On our search we were given 800 which I ordered into highest global searches first then downloaded. Now I have a good list to work from.

By the way these terms that Google has given you are referred to as LSI keywords or Latent Semantic Indexing which basically means Google has indexed them to be relevant to your chosen search. So that long list you downloaded is associated to “Puppy Training”. Here is a great article on the importance of these and how to use them to benefit writing.

I think that writing naturally you will drop a few of these into your article anyway so over researching can be counter productive but if you are struggling to get an article to hit the top spot it can make the difference to include a few more.

Click on image to zoom!

OK so we have picked up a list of relevant topic keywords but with 800 where do you start so lets break it down a bit? If we go into our downloaded list making sure to filter by global searches. Highest at the top. Then look at competition.  We want high traffic but medium- low competition so start looking for that combination.  You want to pick out about 10-20 keywords to take to the next step. By the way here is a great affiliate program for the puppy niche if anyone is interested in taking this forward.

Now open Google and enter your term with quotes “” around the phrase and hit search. Scroll to the bottom and click on page 10 if there is one there. Then keep doing this until you get to the end. The number displayed is the total number of competition websites that Google has indexed for this search term. So if we put “puppy training blog” we get 487 websites. Now that’s not bad and could be worth trying to buy that domain but we want to try and get the number below 400 and the lower the better for article titles and posts.

Want to know a faster way to find keywords?

OK that’s the slow way to get a keyword list, here is the quicker route. This is when owning a keyword tool like Jaaxy can save a lot of time for providing you with 20 keywords to start writing about in a couple of minutes. With Jaaxy you can enter in your terms and it will give you the competition along with the monthly searches all from one button press. If you value your time and as  a marketer and you should, an hours time searching would cost say $10. You can own Jaaxy for $19 per month so two hours of searching a month would pay for the tool.

I think its a no brainer but if you are starting out that $19 may be hard to get however consider this, how many luxury items do you indulge on in a given month. Say coffee, cigarettes, chocolate bars etc. Count them up and be honest what would you spend over the month. I know if I counted coffee I would have enough to pay for Jaaxy twice over easy. Now is that a trade off you can consider, cut down on the luxury and subscribe for a month you will not be disappointed? Try it for FREE below.

Any questions please leave me a comment and I will get back to you.