SEO Learning

Keyword Research Strategies

Use the Most Relevant Keywords

Yesterday we discussed the precise targeting offered by keywords. But even if a keyword is valuable, it might not be valuable to your business. For example, if you are a dentist in Chicago, it is not worth the effort to try to rank for the word dentist. Why? 99% of the people searching for that phrase do not live near Chicago, and are irrelevant prospects. What you would want to rank for, if you were a Chicago dentist, would be things like

• Chicago dentist
• Chicago dentists
• dentist in Chicago

Understanding Searcher Intent

Even within a niche like dental work, there are more specific types of dentists people search for, like implant dentist and cosmetic dentist. If you offer these types of services you would want to rank for keywords like

• Chicago implant dentist
• cosmetic dentist in Chicago
• etc.

Free Keyword Tools

There is a wide array of free keyword tools on the market. My favorite keyword tool is the SEO Book keyword tool – it is fast and free, powered by Wordtracker, and allows you to quickly export your keyword data.

Every keyword tool has some data errors or anomalies. Don’t expect the tools to give you exact numbers, just rough ranges. If you are in doubt as to the accuracy of one keyword tool you can compare it against other keyword tools. And you can use an AdWords ad campaign to test keywords – a topic we will discuss tomorrow.

Here are some additional cool keyword tools

• Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool
• Google’s Traffic Estimator
• Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool
• Microsoft’s Ad Intelligence (which is a plug-in for Microsoft Excel)

If you have any questions about any of these keyword tools and are a subscriber please ask in our keyword tools forum.

Gather More Keyword Ideas

• Anything people would likely search for to want to buy your services is a potential keyword.
• You can look at emails from customers or customer questions as potential keywords.
• If you have been publishing a site for a while and have analytics data you can use the analytics data to find keywords.
• You can analyze competing sites looking for keywords.
• There are literally hundreds of ways to come up with keyword ideas.

Group Similar Keywords

After you get a list of keywords start grouping related keywords together…

• You should be able to target related phrases like ‘Chicago dentist’ and ‘dentist in Chicago’ using a single page.
• Chicago cosmetic dental work is a different concept than ‘Chicago dentist’ is, so you should create a separate page targeting that that term and why prospects would want to buy that service.
• You can use Microsoft Excel, Open Office, or Google Docs to start aligning keywords and related modifiers with your URLs. We have an example spreadsheet in our member’s area here

Tomorrow, we cover how to use PPC ads (such as AdWords) to discover the value of keywords to your business.