Keyword Research

Spending time researching which keywords to target for SEO purposes is imperative to the long-term success of any search marketing campaign, and yet it never fails to amaze me:

1. How few online businesses actually allocate time and resources to doing it
   
2. How misguided the research and subsequent results can be
   
3. How companies often ignore the ‘goldmine’ of existing data at their fingertips.

I would like to concentrate on (3).

We find that many of the companies who come to us for SEO advice and services have already embarked on some kind of Pay Per Click campaign, whether it be through Google Adwords or some of the other click providers. Adwords in particular gives the advertiser a wealth of information at keyword-level, including search volume, click through rates, the value of clicks and the earnings per click for individual keywords. So why not use this data and integrate it with your keyword research?

Essentially, keyword research should be used to identify viable target keywords based on:

• Search volume
  
• Relative competition
  
• Relevancy
  
• Commercial viability

Well a successful Adwords campaign can tell you the EXACT number of page views on the Google listings a search term will receive, and it enables you to spot and nurture the ‘golden’ keywords – those that convert and give you the greatest return.

So, use this data! Remember that keyword research and Pay Per Click data are not mutually-exclusive concepts and delve into those PPC stats to find the clues. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes!

Introduction:
Welcome to the Webtistic walkthrough of our new Competition Keyword Tool. This introduction will give you a short walkthrough and a bit of an insight into just how powerful the new keyword tool is, and how you can use it to benefit your business.
-What is the Keyword Tool.
-How Does it Work?
-Importance of a Keyword.
-The Tool in Action.
-Video Tutorial.

Use the Tool

- What is the Webtistic Competition Keyword Tool.

Regular readers of our blog might remember that we launched our debut SEO tool recently in the form of the Webtistic Keyword Competition Tool.
The purpose of this tool was to do what we felt have been severely lacking in the SEO community for some time ( in a format that did everything we wanted it to.)

By developing this tool ourselves we managed to plug the gap that we feel has existed for some time, and we thought that, we can’t be the only people looking for a tool such as this, and so here, for your enjoyment is the Webtistic Keyword Competition tool.

The following blog post will give you a short walkthrough on how to use the tool, as well as offering a guide to the tools finer points, and some usability tips seeing as it is still being worked on.

So, without further ado, follow me down into the exciting world of keyword competition.

Here we have the main keyword page, this is after we have input our criteria and let the tool loose on the web.

The tool allows you to research up to 10 different keywords at any one time, and the results you get back are filtered,  so the top result ranking for that keyword shows up first, with the following 9 below them.

The keyword tool we have developed is designed to take the effort out of a task that SEO’s need to be doing on a daily basis. The tool is available from our site for free at present and it, as well as the other tools we will be launching are all still in a testing stage.

How Does it Work?

That’s a very good question…. It utilises a homemade algorithm that is designed to take into account ratings from other online optimisation tools and from that, generate its own
difficulty rating that it publishes on the results page, as you can see to the right.

By tying together many on and off page statistics, our tool can provide a genuine and accurate reading of difficulty.

Our optimisation tool looks at data such as whether or not the site ranks on yahoo and other search engines, in addition, it looks at:

Whether the site is on Dmoz
If the keyword features in the root domain,
whether it’s in the title, description or H1 tag.

The page authority of the site, the domain authority, and the domain age.

Our tool also takes into account a site’s pagerank, despite this not having been updated in some time and despite the fact it’s being deprecated it is still relied on by many webmasters and SEO’s as a useful indicator.

Importance of a Keyword.

So, ok, you have the tool, you’re prepared to watch our tutorial video and you’ve got your coffee ready for the visual walkthrough. But Why?

Why is your choice of keyword so important? Why should you spend so much time and effort choosing the right keywords for your site?

Keywords form the very basis from which your site will grow, they can be generic, or very specifically targeted. The trick is to identify a relatively small set of keywords that offer you the highest possible amount of traffic, for the smallest possible difficulty. Your keywords need to be relevant, and suitable for your site. They need to cover the main terms that your target audience actually search for. There’s no point in using ‘phones’ as you’re keyword if you sell cakes.

On a similar note, it is probably not worth using phones as your keyword even if you DO sell phones, unless you’re a large corporation. Keywords need to offset how difficult it will be to rank them, with the amount of monthly traffic they’re going to generate.

If you’re a new company, and your main keyword has a local monthly search of 30,000 but a difficulty of 95% – it’s really not worth the effort to try to rank, not until you’ve built up enough authority to try and challenge those who are pushing that difficulty up.

We made a blog post on the importance of keyword research some time ago, that can be found at: Keyword Research

Keywords form the very basis from which your site will grow, they can be generic, or very specifically targeted. The trick is to identify a relatively small set of keywords that offer you the highest possible amount of traffic, for the smallest possible difficulty.

The beauty of our tool is you can search and sort through hundreds of potential keywords to find those which offer you the best chance of ranking highly.

When you’re choosing your keywords, don’t neglect the difference between a singular version of a word and plurals. In addition, variations and slight mispelling’s can all work in your favour. Not everyone on the internet has a PHD or three.

Once you have begun to identify the keywords you want to try, our tool can really come into it’s own, allowing you to put in up to 10 keywords at a time, and get an accurate set of targeted results at the end of the search.

The Tool in Action.

The following annotated pictures give you a brief overview of the tool, and the video below them shows the entire process.

The homepage of the keyword tool is set up very simply. You have the main keyword box on the left, with the example entries for ‘templates’ and ‘free templates’. The right hand side of the screen only shows the search target where you can decide where you want your search terms to originate from, and below that the process button.

Once you’ve selected the keyword(s) you want to look up, and after you’ve selected the country you’re looking for, the process button starts the tool working.
Be patient at this point, it does take some time, but it gets there.

Once the tool has finished loading your results it will automatically take you to the results page giving you the analysis of your chosen keywords.

So, here we are, the results screen is set up to give you the maximum amount of information in an easy to understand and clear manner.

You can easily see the top 10 websites ranking for that keyword, and, within the same section you can also see some essential information such as the sites pagerank, it’s page and domain authority as well as the domain age for the site.

All the factors that are displayed on the results page contribute to the keywords difficulty rating which is displayed clearly on the far right hand side of the results page.

In addition to the factors already mentioned, the results page also analyses the pages that rank top for the keyword you’ve searched for, it looks for the keyword you entered in several on page factors, including: the root domain, page title, description and H1 tag.

These are shown positively or negatively, represented by ticks or crosses respectively…. as shown above.

Once all these results have been collated, the algorithm generates a difficulty rating that we believe to be truely accurate based on the search term, and displayed below the difficulty is a short description, telling you what that difficulty rating means.

At the bottom of the page is the restart button and next to that, the option to export your results to a format you can save them in. The file exports as a .csv for Microsoft excel, but this can be opened in whatever spreadsheet program you wish to use.

And thus ends the picture tutorial, if you still want to see it in action then the video below will give you a short noted walkthrough.

Otherwise, I thank you for reading, enjoy using the new Webtistic Keyword Competition tool and watch this space for news of other new tools we have in the works, and, as always, any feedback is greatly appreciated.

We are often asked about the importance and role of the meta keyword tag. Here is a little information:

• The meta keywords tag is not considered by Google at all
• The meta keywords tag is not considered by Bing at all
• The meta keywords tag is barely considered by Yahoo, and for categorisation purposes only
• Yahoo will be using the Bing search technology later this year so even the very marginal benefit offered by Yahoo is soon to be removed

So, best practice says add upto 10 comma-separated keyphrases in the meta keywords tag, but if you don’t it will make very little difference to your rankings.