Keyword research webinar transcript

Posted by Mal Darwen on 26 June 2011

What does Wordtracker do? Taking it at its simplest level, Wordtracker and its tools help you find the best keywords for your campaign. It's easy to work with and it leaves you with the business of implementing the work you need to do rather than struggling to organize all these words.

The tools give you an easy to read overview of how competitive each keyword is, so that you can make decisions about where your campaign is to go.

Before we go into that too deeply, a couple of basics.

What is a keyword?

A keyword is the word/words people enter into a search engine when they're looking for something. They might type in pizza or cameras or flights or, as in this case, clocks.

But these are single-word keywords. They don't give you much information and there's going to be a lot of competition for them. More interesting to businesses are going to be longer phrases. So, two-word, three-word or four-word keywords and so on.

Why are they more interesting? Two reasons. Firstly they tell you more about what people are really looking for, and secondly they're easier to optimize for because there's less competition.

Keywords such as clocks doesn't tell us anything other than that the person is interested in clocks. It doesn't tell you why they're interested in them or what they're really looking for.

So it's pretty hard to think about what you should really be optimizing for.

On the other hand, a keyword such as antique black forest cuckoo clocks tells us that not only is the person interested in clocks, but they have a particular interest in old cuckoo clocks from south western Germany. And that's something specific you can optimize for, if you're selling antique clocks that is.

Why do keyword research?

If you use the same language as your customers they'll find you in their searches because you've optimized your site with the same words that they've used to search for.

And they've found your page as a result.

Wordtracker has a unique database which makes it easy for you to find keywords other tools may not report. Our competition metrics make it quick and simple to assess how many other pages have been optimized for each keyword.

And we have a clear interface which means it's easy to keep track of your work and move keywords and lists around quickly.

What we'll do today is work through a real example and explore the thinking behind the process.

This is our home page and you can log into the Keywords using the link outlined in red in the top right-hand corner:

Once you're logged in you're taken to the dashboard:

Most people go straight to 'Start your keyword research,' but it does pay to be a little more organized. So, click on 'Create a new project':

We're then taken to a page where we can give our project a meaningful name before we're taken back to the dashboard, and then we can start our keyword research.

This is our Find Keywords page where much of our work will happen:

You can see the main keyword tool (the blue tool) here by default, and to start your keyword research you can just put a keyword into the box here and click 'Search' here. But let's not do that just yet ...

There's a better way to get started if you'd like to get ahead of the competition. Let's think for a moment about why we're researching keywords. What are we trying to achieve?

For most people it's to attract more traffic to their site, and in the end to get more sales. It's a fact that the more keywords you have, the more pages you can optimize and the more people will visit your site.

To build a website that needs lots of visitors, you'll need not just 20 or 30 keywords, but hundreds.

And for the largest and most successful sites you'll need thousands of keywords.

Wordtracker's tools can help you find the new keywords you need.

We suggest that you start casting your net as widely as possible. Firstly, create a list of ideas and later you'll take each idea. The best way to expand your list of ideas is with the related keywords tool (the orange tool) on the lefthand side.

Let's take a closer look at that, and because I'm English, we'll talk about tea.

Enter a seed word or a short phrase into the seed word box and click on the 'Search' button and the tool will give you up to 300 suggestions for keywords that may be useful to you. Using Related Keywords can expand your keywords on which keywords to use or even which niches to target.

We can see all our related results here and if you're working with an agency and you wanted to share lists with colleagues or clients, you can export the whole list as a CSV file by clicking the link here. And if you export the list it'll go straight to your browser's download folder.

Or, you can go through keyword by keyword building lists based on each relevant keyword in the list. As I mentioned, Wordtracker provides up to 300 suggested related keywords every time you search. So from the first 100 along I can get some great ideas. We've got green tea, organic tea, roibosh, premium tea, loose tea, assam tea, bottled tea. All terms that you might not have thought of immediately even if you were a tea expert.

We'll then sort the keyword results into groups of people searching for different things. And we'll start to investigate each of those niches in more detail.

Clicking the word search next to a keyword-related list opens a half-open dialogue box offering you the option to search ie, conduct a search immediately.

Or to Search & Save ie, to run it in the background while you look through the related results. And you can do this on as many keywords as you choose to.

I clicked on search by organic tea in the related keywords list and this placed organic tea in the main keyword tool. And I got back around 430 keywords containing the keywords organic tea from our database. You can get up to 2000 keywords from the database.

Let's have a look now at Search & Save

If you click on 'Search & Save' then you'll be invited to create Project and List names.

The default Project name is the one we created earlier and the List name is the keyword that we clicked Search & Save at. You can use the Project arrow to select whichever Project you want to put the list into. If you've already got a list in your Project you can use the List arrow to get a dropdown menu to add the keywords to an existing list.

Or you can just type in the boxes and make new Project and List names and then click 'Search & Save to List.' You can carry on doing that all the way through the list.

We can see our progress as we go. We get a little green notification at the bottom of the page ...

... and there's the last list that we made outlined in red to the top right:

In the Project that we're working on, if we click on 'Show all lists' ...

... we get an idea of all the lists in our Project, along with the number of keywords and searches in each list which gives you a quick and simple overview of all your Projects so far.

If you click on the Project name itself (outlined in red, to the left), the Project page will open.

We'll look at that in a second, but what is a project?

A Project might be all the keywords you're collecting for a particular site. If you're working for an agency, you might have a project for each client. Or if you're working on your own site you might have a different project for each category page.

On the project page itself we can see again all our List names, along with the number of keywords in each list, and the number of searches; when the list was made; the data source of the list.

We've built these up quickly using Search & Save, and after just a few minutes we can see that we've created keyword Lists that are grouped together into areas of interest. It's really straightforward.

We can click on any List name to open it. Once we have it open you can see all your keywords and the relevant metrics provided and we can drill down even further into each keyword using Search & Save just as we did in the Related Keywords tool.

So that's the start of our keyword research.

Let's take a moment to recap

You need many, many keywords if your site is to be successful.

We start our research by casting our net as wide as possible using the Related Keywords tool.

We've quickly and easily built up large groups of keywords, and only once we've built up from the list of related keywords should be start to dig into the long tail.

What do we mean by the long tail? We're typically referring to longer keyword phrases that are very specific to what your website is selling and what people are actually looking for.

Here are some examples of long tail keywords:

We can see that if you're in the cribs market that people are actually looking for convertible wooden cribs. Or if you sell laundry detergent you might find that people are actually looking for environmentally friendly laundry detergent.

The long tail of keyword research is fundamental to your online success. It's a really important point so it's worth saying again. The long tail of keyword research is fundamental to your online success.

You see, most searches are conducted on the internet with long tail keywords. Back in 2008 a guy called Bill Tancer who's an internet expert at Hitwise looked at 14 million searches and he concluded that the long tail is so long that the head is of no significance. Bill puts it like this:

If the head of search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one inch head then the tail of that lizard would stretch 221 miles, which means that if you're not targeting long tail keywords on your site that you'll be missing out on up 95% of your traffic. There's a very good article by Stephen Mehaney about using long tail keywords and there's also a very good article by our own SEO consultant Mark Nunney called The Long Tail of Keyword Research and Why Single Keywords are for Losers which shows (with examples from one of Mark's own sites) that shows just how much traffic you can get from long tail searches.

Let's carry on with some keyword research. We'll continue with the tea example. We found some great keywords. Which ones do we want to target?

Let's start looking at the numbers the Keywords tool gives us. Yes, there are lots of numbers there but don't let that worry you. They are there to help.

When you first search on a keyword, you'll get your list of keywords along with a number of searches and you'll also see a Competition figure and a KEI and KEI3. There's one more metric you might like to get before you move on – that's the Google count. You can get this quoted or unquoted by clicking here, in the top left of the results:

After a few moments you'll see that column come down on the right-hand side of your keyword lists:

Now that you've got all the numbers on your list, let's just take a moment to go through and see what all of those numbers mean.

I've got a list that was Search & Saved when I clicked that on the tea list. (The tea keyword in the Related Keywords tool.)

You can see the most popular keywords at the top and the keyword tool automatically sorts them into descending order of search counts.

What does the search count mean?

It's the number of times the word appears in Wordtracker's database of searches. Sometimes when I say this to people they think I'm speaking Greek or something so let's give a little more detail.

For the US this consists of just under 1% of searches in the last 365 days. That's currently around 670 million searches and it's updated every day. And the information comes from our partner search engines which are Meta Crawler.com and Dogpile.com

The competition figure

The number you see here is the number of pages that have been directly optimized for this keyword. So it's a really good indicator of how much serious competition you're facing and the higher that number the greater the competition.

Now as we can see from this screenshot there are 51 million pages optimized for this keyword tea. That's pretty hefty competition. It's going to be hard to rank for that. But what's up further down? We've got types of hybrid tea roses - the searches are high but the figures tell us that there are only four pages optimized for this keyword. So there's potential there. And we click on the word 'competition' and the list will be sorted by that metric, highest at the top. Click it again to reverse the order, with lowest at the top. For more information on this powerful metric there is an article by our founder, Mike Mindel.

Let's summarize. Searches is a measure of how much demand there is. Competition measures how much supply there is.

What a lot of people look for is a mismatch between those two. Keywords that get lots of searches but where there's very little competition.

Now we'll talk about KEI – keyword effectiveness index. KEI helps you find those keywords with lots of searches but very little competition. The higher that figure, the better the keywords' potential. Again you can click 'KEI' to resort the list and show the figures with the highest KEI. With a quick glance at the page it seems that hybrid tea roses has the highest KEI compared to other keywords on the page. You might find that the KEI in one market all the numbers are really high, and in a different niche you might find the numbers are quite low.

So it really varies as to what's a good and what's a bad KEI. We recommend looking at the numbers as being relative to one another rather than as absolute figures. So you can't say that a KEI of 20,000 is great and one of 50 is bad because it depends what the other keywords next to those have as their score.

The Google Count:

The Google Count tells us how many pages Google has indexed for each keyword. It can be a useful indicator of competition, particularly with long tail keywords. But the Competition figure is likely to tell you more about the serious competition.

To recap:

We've built large groups of Lists with the Related Keywords tools.

We've gathered all the relevant metrics for those keywords.

Wasn't that easy?

Which keywords are we actually going to use? I've got a list of keywords here built on the keyword tea. I've sorted it by KEI and I can see that there isn't a enormous amount of competition for the words that are returned. The search counts aren't necessarily huge in this niche but there may well be some things worth testing, and you can get a clearer idea of the most popular searches in that niche.

And we've barely touched on the main Keywords tool - the blue tool. So let's have a look at what this can do for you:

We've got the main seed keywords box on the lefthand side and some options over at the right, and some functions at the bottom of the panel. In the main box you can enter up to 500 seed keywords and get results for them.

At the moment we're doing some work with Google's Adwords API and you can see that at the top of the screen and this allows you compare some Google figures with Wordtracker's metacrawler figures, and we can get Google data from a number of English-speaking countries using the dropdown. I don't want to get into comparing the Google figures with the metacrawler figures as we're still getting to know the Google figures - we don't have a set methodology. There's a useful article on both data sets by Mark Nunney.

The Wordtracker data is often better when you're searching the long tail just because there's a limit of 300 words at a time if you're using the Google data whereas you can get up to 2,000 with the Wordtracker tool. If you're working with the Wordtracker data you can choose between the US and the UK.

Match types:

If you select 'keywords in any order' with, say green tea then keywords in any order would include green health giving tea. 'Exact keywords inside a search term' would include green tea benefits and where can I buy green tea? 'Exact keyword only' would only include green tea - no more, no less.

You could also choose to include plurals and adult keywords, but if you do include plurals make sure you enter your seed word as a singular so that you get both forms back.

We have this bar that appears above the keyword list when it's returned:

The 'Google count' we've looked at already. The 'select all' and 'select none' I hope is self-explanatory, but we can also select according to keyword. If you type teapot in here any tea keyword containing the word teapot can be selected or deselected according to your choice. On our tea list this would bring up terms like china teapot but also longer tail words such as what are the best teapots? You can save selected keywords or delete selected keywords and save works in just the same way as the Search & Save that we saw in the Related tool.

Over on the righthand side we can choose which page we want to look at and choose whether to see 1000 or 100 keywords on each page. You can export the keywords, either just the keywords themselves or all the data you see on the page. When you do that it will again go straight to your browser's download folder as a CSV file. If you want any more information about the numbers we were talking about there's a handy 'metrics explained' link which gives you more detail on those.

I'd like to introduce a quick tip now that will help you find new keywords more easily:

You can add a negative sign in front of any keyword you want to exclude from the terms and those keywords won't appear in your results. So imagine you've done lots of work exploring the tea niche and you're confident that you have all the keywords you need. You might want to exclude terms like Boston or party from future searches. It's a useful feature if you're exploring keywords for your pay per click campaigns and you know that there are terms that you don't want to advertise against.

A few words now about Project and List management.

As you saw we can create a brand new Project from the dashboard page. We did that right at the beginning, or if you click on a Project name on the dashboard page you'll be able to manage that Project and any Lists it contains. There's a rename and delete option in the top righthand corner and some very similar functions on the List view page for renaming, deleting or duplicating lists.

We've covered how to build keyword lists quickly and easily and how to use the competition metrics to assess their potential.

Good luck with your keyword research!