By David Chase
You can always take your best guess at what keywords people use the most to find a product or service in your market, but there is a far more efficient way of doing it. There are many tools out there that cut down the time investment considerably. I can’t stress enough the importance of an exhaustive keyword list. Its campaign-suicide not knowing every last word people use to find the products in your market.
I’ve worked in websites that have 40,000+ keywords. If you follow my advice in this article you’ll be able to generate keyword lists in the thousands with very little effort.If you don’t get anything out of this article - get this: Go the extra length to find hundreds if not thousands of keywords in your market.
Note: It is important to use a bevy of tools when compiling your list, each software has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Here are the search tools I use to build a large list of keywords:
Wordtracker offers a free trial (most people use Word Tracker’s $250.00 subscription) although it is one of the most acclaimed keyword research tools in the industry it does have its limitations. The thesaurus and misspelled tools are really good for bringing unique variations of your keywords to the table. But those last two options aren’t available in the free version.
Overture Keyword Selector Tool’s free search count data is far more accurate than any of the other tools. Use WordTracker to find many variations of keywords but don’t trust its “count” and “predict” data. Rely on Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool for accurate search counts.
Note: I would multiply Overture’s keyword search data by 5x’s to gauge the demand on Google, and then by 8x’s to gauge what the total search demand is amongst all search engines for that word.
Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool also brings some unique keywords to the mix. It might be a good idea to add each individual keyword you get from WordTracker & Overture into Google’s suggestion tool and see if there’s anything you’re missing.
Note: Google usually suggests keywords you would not typically find from the other two tools
Now, look at every individual page of your site as its own entity. Write down 5 words or phrases that could describe each page on your website. Now take the words and phrases you’ve come up with, use each one individually by entering it in the above tools. Take note on a seperate document or spreadsheet of each suggestion the search-tool yields. You should have hundreds if not thousands of keywords by the time you complete this exercise. It's really that easy. If you have some dollars to burn you can try Keyword Elite. It automates this process entirely using the tools listed above.
Keyword research is no longer guess work, with the amount of tools at your disposal you no longer have to spend weeks compiling keyword lists for all of the important pages on your site. There’s no longer an excuse to find only the “popular” ‘in your face’ keywords. By doing this exercise during your keyword research, you’d be surprised at how many small keyword ‘catch’ pages you could build that have virtually no competition.
Again, don’t just settle for the major words getting all the attention, dig deep, than even deeper until you can’t find anything new to add to your main keyword list. You’d be surprised how many people fail to see the value in this. Don’t be one of them.