Keyword Research
Keyword Research
Effective Keyword Research will show you How To Find A Profitable Niche Market. Before you decide to do anything in your Internet Marketing career you must understand as much as possible about how to do effective keyword research. There is no other single factor which will determine your success as much as your ability to research and find profitable keywords.
The Importance Of Keywords
When you decide on a keyword, you are making it your marketing focus. Doing the prerequisite diligence in your keyword research will give you the necessary insight to help you take advantage of profitable niches and avoid the dark holes of ultra competitive areas where winning would take years. And make no mistake about it, it is about winning.
Everything on the internet is indexed according to keywords. The World Wide Web is the biggest and most complex library on the planet with one exception - it's also the largest marketplace.
Keywords drive the whole experience.
Search Engine Information Gathering
It's helpful to understand that Search Engines do not scour the web looking for an answer to your query at the moment you type it into the form. They have previously spidered or crawled the internet, saved on their servers the information collected by their software autobots, then indexed each page in a database.
When you enter a search term into the query form in the search engine, it will retrieve pages from their databases according to what the search engine believes best matches your search term.
All search engines do Information Retrevial differently, based on a proprietary algorithm they continually tweak, each search engine places importance on various elements both on your page and off your page. Google is however the most popular search engine and handles approximately 65% of all searches online. If you can rank well in the big G, chances are you'll do well in the others.
How Do People Search
To start the process of finding appropriate keywords to develop for your marketing efforts, you'll need insight into how people search. There are quite a few services online devoted to providing search patterns, but the only one you need is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
Even though this is a Google Adwords product and you might think it's perfectly accurate, it isn't, and you should remember that it's purpose is to suggest approximate values for the keywords you run through the tool. Don't rely on it to be exact! It will only give you a general idea, but it is, in my opinion, the best free keyword research tool available.
How People Find Your Website
There are more than a few ways for people to find your blog or website, some free some not. I am not going to get into paid methods of making your web presence known to the world in this section, I am going to examine how to do research to find keywords and keyword phrases that will provide sufficient traffic to make your efforts profitable.
How To Use The Google Adwords Keyword Tool
The following image shows the front page of The Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
The main concept to remember about this tool is that the results are generated through Goggles Adwords Network. The metrics are gathered from results generated by traffic measured when sponsored ads are triggered by search queries in Googles search forms.
Default Start Page
The page is self explanitory and is ready to use with the defaul settings. All you need to do is enter your keyword or keyword phrase. At this point in time you should enter only one keyword phrase of between 1 to 3 words, no more than 3.
When you are initially doing research you need to think "Niche Market", "Theme", or "Topic" to give you ideas. If you already have a website or blog and have never done this, use the 2 or 3 words that best describe the focus of your website or blog.
Broad Match Search
As you can see above I have done a search on the keyword phrase niche marketing. You can also see the keyword recieves over 40000 search queries per month on global searches and local searches.
The Broad Match Search will give you an idea of the monthly search queries on the topic. So if someone searches for niche it's included, if someone searches for the best niche marketing it will also be included.
It's important to remember that these numbers are only going to give you an indication of volume and show you that there is activity in relation to other terms being queried. These results include so many other keywords, the only real purpose is for verifying a general concept.
Phrase Match Search
The Phrase Match Search refines the results returned to the point where you are looking at traffic for the query that contains the phrase "niche marketing". This is very helpful as many people search using quotation marks and other search techniques intended to narrow down results. You can see from over 40000 on the monthly global volume there are less queries each month for a search containing the phrase "niche marketing" - 33100.
The differences can often be much greater, but if you evaluate the differences between the Broad and Phrase matches, there is still a lot of extraneous searches included. In the case of our keywords a person might be able to assume that the majority of search queries for niche may include the keyword marketing but this obviously breaks down if the logic is used in reverse.
Exact Match Search
You can see the difference between what results are returned for an exact match search as opposed to the previous results for a broad match search. The volume for the keywords niche marketing have gone from 40000 monthly searches to 9900 monthly searches.
That's quite a difference but you have to remember the Exact Match Search returns for the keyword search term exactly only. Results are for search queries in Google for niche marketing only and exactly, no other words at all.
When you are doing any Keyword Research I would suggest that you use the Broad Match Search for finding a general topic or overall theme for your website or blog.
After you have decided on a topic you should use the Exact Match Search setting only. The research you do using the Exact Match Search results will help you define how you can design your site according to the most used target keywords.
If you want to know potential traffic you'll be better off learning to drill down through results using an exact match. More on drilling down later.
Monthly Search Volume
As shown in the image below, you can edit the local search feature to suit your language and location. This is particularly useful if you are engaging in a local marketplace.
If your target market is everywhere, you'll focus on the global numbers. For the purpose of this tutorial, I am only going to use the global setting.
Advertiser Competition
If you use Google Adwords this metric may have a measure of significance to you, but for my purposes here, I am not going to use it because I concentrate on the organic listings only.
Anytime you want to know what a particular metric means in Google, place your cursor over the question icon and a dialogue box will pop up. You can do this whenever you see the icon on any topic and I recommend you do, Google tries to be very explanatory about everything.
Customizing The Google Keyword Tool
Aside from using the Exact Match Search selection in your Keyword Research, we are also going to choose which columns of information to display.
We've already discussed monthly and global search volume and unless you're chasing a local market, hide the column for local search volume. You should also hide the column for Advertiser Competition. I'll show you a way to access competition in another section.
You are going to show a column for Adwords Cost Per Click(CPC). This is an amount Google charges an advertiser to be on page 1 of the search results page triggered for the keyword. You are going to use it to assign a value to the Keyword you are targeting. More about Market or Niche Value later.
Google Keyword Tool Custom Settings
When you open the Keyword Tool you should immediately perform the actions to customize the tool to grab the information thats shown in the image above.
- Set Match Type to Exact
- Hide Monthly Local Search Volume
- Hide Advertiser Competition
- Show Estimated Average CPC
Once you customize the setup you'll be ready to do Keyword Research and begin to find a Niche Market or qualify a market you are targeting.
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