Keyword research is an important aspect of online selling and consists of finding out what words and phrases your potential customers are actually using when using search engines.
While getting people to your site is nice, your focus should be on bringing people who are looking to buy the types of items you offer to your website.
There are literally thousands of articles available on different aspects of keyword research and everyone seems to have their own favorite methods…some completely free and some involving expensive monthly subscriptions. This article will cover the basics of doing your own keyword research with simple, freely available tools.
Basic Words for Researching
When starting your keyword research, you first need to know what you are wanting to do and decide upon a few initial keywords to look into.
For example, if you have a store specializing in childrens toys, you might start out using just the word toys. Alternatively, you might start with more specific terms such as “kids toys” and “childrens toys”.
Finding high search volume terms
Once you have a couple of words to look into, you need to find out what people are searching for in relation to those words.
To start with, I recommend using the Google External Keyword Tool.
The Google External Keyword Tool
To start:
- Enter your initial search terms, one per line, into the "Enter one keyword or phrase per line:" box
- Leave the "Use synonyms" box checked
- Enter the displayed characters into the box below them.
- Leave "Filter my results" alone for now
- Select "Get keyword ideas"
You should then see results listed below the entry box similar to those below:
As you can see, you get a variety of results back showing the number of searches done locally for the current month as well as the global monthly search volume for each word or phrase listed on the left.
At the top, click “Global Monthly Search Volume” to order the results by volume.
The words and phrases listed at the top are those which most people search for. As you can see, for these phrases most people search for “kids toys”, though there are plenty of people searching for a variety of other words as well.
Depending on the type of keyword research you are doing, you may or may not be worried about competition for particular terms. Fortunately, a quick easy way to determine competition is to take any particular term and put it into a search engine in quotes.
There are a few things of note in the above image:
- In the red box, you see three sites paying to have their listings above all of the normal search results. That denotes that there is some serious paid competition out there for the term Kids toys
- In the purple box, you will see that there are 3.8 million sites competing on the phrase “kids toys” for search engine ranking. Normally you will want that number to be as low as possible…and 3.8 million results denotes that your keyword is probably too generic to compete effectively.
- In the yellow box, you will see sites that are paying to have advertisements displayed for the term “kids toys”. These you don’t need to worry about unless you plan to do paid advertising yourself.
- In the green box is your primary competition. Specifically, the results on the first page are your primary competition. Ideally, you will want to end up as the first result if at all possible.
Checking the competition
Once you have limited your term down to something with a smaller result of competing sites ( the purple box ), you should then visit at least the first three sites being displayed and see what google thinks of them in terms of page rank ( 0 being the lowest, 10 being the highest ).
For this, I recommend using mozilla firefox and getting the google toolbar plugin for it as the plugin can be set to display page rank of any site you visit and quickly let you see how many backlinks a site has as well as what they are.
As you can see, if you were to try and compete on “Kids Toys”, your primary competitor would be Toys R Us…and google gives them a page rank of 7…so you would have your work cut out for you.
If you selected “Backward links”, you would find that there are over 1000 links to Toys R Us from various sites. While you cannot tell if they are quality links or not, a thousand links can be a bit hard to overcome.
If you selected “Similar Pages”, you would find sites which google considers similar to the Toys R Us site, of which it lists 28.
Personally, I would fine tune my search phrase to try and have weaker competition in terms of search ranking. Perhaps you are selling educational toys…doing a search for that term (in quotes) returns only 21,600 competing sites, one paid advertiser at the top of the results, and the highest ranked site has a page rank of 2 and only two backward links. Of course, that phrase only has 6,600 monthly search results…but taking the number one spot (which typically gets over 50% of all clicks by users) would be trivial.
Google Trends From Wordtracker
Another handy tool for keyword research is google trends from Wordtracker. While the results aren’t terribly up to date on their free tool, you can find a variety of different phrases…and by selecting the three bars in the "G" column, you can see how much competition there is on a particular term as well as the number of visitors per day for that term.
This information can give you a rough idea of how tough the competition is, though I prefer using the google toolbar as above.
Google Insights for Search
Another nice tool, especially when you have a few different keywords you want to compare, is Google Insights for Search.
Just place your terms in the "Search terms" box at the top, specify the region and dates you are interested in, and select search.
As you can see, you will get regional interest, a list of search terms ( related to the specified phrase…change this with the dropdown ), and a list of searches that are increasing in volume.
Here you will see that “toys for kids” looks to have the highest number of results for “kids toys”, but a ton of people search for store names in relation to kids toys. When you see that kind of brand recognition, it is typically best to find a different search phrase.
Final words…
While volumes of information exists on keyword research, for increasing traffic to your website without paid advertising, the most important things to consider when doing keyword research are the demand for your possible keyword and the quality of the sites which come up in the top few results. You can certainly choose to go up against stiff competition, but you will get results a lot faster if you start out by focusing on getting your site to show as the top result for less competitive terms.