Recently, I got asked:
What was the best article about keyword research you’ve read in your life?
Guess what my reply was? I said there was no such thing as best article about keyword research. Here’s why.
Keyword research can be done for all kinds of different purposes. Keyword research for PPC is not the same as keyword research for whitehat organic SEO, which is not the same thing as keyword research for blackhat SEO, which is not the same thing as keyword research for affiliate marketing. I have never seen a single article adequately covering all of these types of keyword research at once. Sure there are people specialized in keyword research, such as Dan Thies (who has positioned himself as a go-to person for keyword research) – and Dan did write a lot about keyword research and it’s all worth a read, but since he started his new SEO Fast Start thing his old blog is completely neglected and in the new one there are just bits and pieces about keywords.
Keyword research is only as good as it can be applied to the actual activity it has been done for, hence depending on the purpose of keyword research you will need to concentrate on different parameters of keywords.
For whitehat organic SEO, you need to know what exactly your potential visitors search for and how many competitors target the same keywords. If you manage to find a keyword that get searched quite a lot but not many competitors are targeting it, this could be a goldmine. But just checking how many results show up for a certain search is not enough. My favourite way of separating real competition from all the unrelated stuff in the SERPs is checking the exact match results (i.e. search results for the key phrase in quotes). Furthermore, you need to know how strong the competition is to realistically evaluate your chances to rank and what kind of effort it would require. Considering Google’s current algorithm, some of the most important factors to pay attention to are the age of the domains in the SERPs, amount and quality of backlinks.
Keyword research for PPC factors in cost per click as well as existing competition. If you are setting up a PPC campaign in Google AdWords, Google keyword tool can provide you with enough data to get you started. The key to a successful PPC campaign is in finding keywords that bring you the conversions you are aiming at but do not have too many competitors bidding on them so that costs per click are low. However, there is a thin line between keywords with low competition and non-converting keywords. High competition level shows where the money is – but of course if the market is already highly saturated it is difficult to get a share of that market. Another tool that comes very handy for anyone doing keyword research for PPC is SpyFu – it literally lets you spy on your competitors and research the keywords they are bidding on. (It provides a wealth of information for organic keyword research as well but for PPC, it is a must)
Keyword research for blackhat SEO is primarily characterized by large amounts of keywords used – blackhat model is based on generating sites rather than creating them manually and automating everything from keyword research itself to link building so blackhats can afford high volumes of activity. Another typical trait of keywords used for blackhat is long tail. The logic behind this strategy is there is less competition in the organic SERPs for long tail keywords, hence it takes less effort to get a site to rank. Given the large numbers of keywords used, low traffic for each individual long tail keyword is not an issue any more – 1 visitor a day for each of, say, 5,000 keywords used by a blackhat sums up to a nice amount of traffic. But one of the main drawbacks of automated keyword list building is, if the tools used for it are not good enough at filtering nonsense keywords and “honeypot” keywords (i.e. pseudo keywords used by Google to catch spam) here is an example of what you can get, and it’s not even the worst case.
Keyword research for affiliate marketing does not normally get singled out as some separate keyword research specialty – but I believe it should. Regardless of what method of driving traffic affiliate marketers use – PPC or organic SEO – there is something they should always take into account. Namely, the keywords they use should be highly targeted. The more targeted the keywords are, the better conversion rates an affiliate marketer can achieve (this is the difficulty some website owners sometimes face when trying to switch their monetisation model from AdSense to affiliate programs).
Finally, here are a couple more keyword research tools besides the above mentioned that can help in keyword research for any purpose. The biggest problem you face is getting information about the search volume of a keyword. Since Yahoo does not provide reliable access to this info any more and Google only shows relative values, you need to turn elsewhere for it. One of the older and well known tools is WordTracker which gets its data from Dogpile and Metacrawler (take this into account when trying to estimate the search volume elsewhere) – now that it offers a free trial of its full functionality you can figure out if it suits you before buying a subscription. Another tool that was launched recently but is also worth a try is WordZe which gets its data from internet portals and ISP logs, hence their data is search engine independent. Both tools, especially WordZe, provide a lot of other information besides the search volume for individual keywords – they help you find related keywords, get the competition level for them, and so on.
In any case, whatever you do, remember that it is your site and your business model that should be your starting point for keyword research – research the market, check what others do but in the long run it all boils down to what suits you best.