Keyword Analysis (Search Engine Optimization) In Internet Marketing

Keyword Analysis (Search Engine Optimization) In Internet Marketing

This article will be an introduction to keyword analysis. If you’re doing any sort of written marketing (blogging, articles, squidoo lenses, press releases) and ESPECIALLY if you’re using Google AdWords, you need to do keyword analysis. I say especially for Google Adwords because the written forms of marketing I mentioned are low-cost or free, whereas you can lose a lot of money quickly on Google Adwords if you don’t know what you’re doing. There is much more to know about Google AdWords than keyword analysis, so don’t start marketing on Google with only this as a background.

I currently do my keyword analysis using a tool called Wordtracker. As far as I know, Wordtracker gives the most comprehensive results for keyword research. I would recommend a subscription to Wordtracker (as opposed to the free WordTracker tool) if you have the money, because you will get more results and there are other options which the free wordtracker tool doesn’t provide. If you can’t afford it though, the free tool is still great, and definitely much better than nothing.

So, the idea behind keywords is that you want to optimize your content for search engines (search engine optimization) by tagging your blog posts, articles, etc. with specific keywords. This will allow people to find your content through searching the net. You want to use keywords that people search for a lot, but that relatively few people are using to tag their own content.

To start, let’s go to the free WordTracker tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. As an example, I’ll use one of my other blog posts, Gorilla Marketing Tactics to illustrate keyword research. I initially wanted to blog about cheap marketing methods. I had heard of low-cost marketing referred to as “guerrilla marketing”, so that was the keyword I started with in WordTracker. Type “guerrilla marketing” (without quotes) into the free WordTracker tool. The results you see are search terms compiled by WordTracker based on actual search engine data. The number you see on the left is the number of times that keyword was searched for in the past 160 days. As you can see, there are probably a lot of terms shown here that you wouldn’t have thought of yourself.

Since these are common terms used by actual people searching the net, you want to tag your content with one (or a few) of these keywords. Before we continue however, I should mention that at this point, there is one huge advantage you will have with the paid WordTracker tool. The free WordTracker tool only gives you keyword suggestions containing your keyword, i.e. every result you see right now will have “guerrilla marketing” in the phrase somewhere. The paid version will also give you keywords related to your search, which include misspellings.

To illustrate what I mean, if I type “guerrilla marketing” into the paid version, I get results such as guerilla marketing (notice the missing “r”), gorilla marketing, marketing, small business, alternative marketing, and so on. As you can imagine, this is incredibly helpful. You can click on each related keyword to get further results as we have done in the free tool.

This should be a lesson to you (if you don’t have the paid version of WordTracker) to always search for any possible misspellings of the terms you’re searching for. As an example here, type “guerilla marketing” (misspelled with one “r”) into the free WordTracker tool. “Guerilla marketing” has more searches (92), than the properly spelled “guerrilla marketing” (45). Not only that, but there are way more related keywords to use.

As a general guideline, you should choose keywords with 20 or more searches for it to be useful to you. So let’s choose a few keyword possibilities for the blog post. I’m going to choose:

1) Guerrilla marketing (45)
2) Guerilla marketing (92)
3) Guerilla marketing tactics (51)
4) Guerilla marketing strategy (31)
5) Gorilla marketing (51) (suggested by the paid version of WordTracker)
6) Gorilla marketing tactics (28)

You now want to see how much competition there is for each keyword. You don’t want to use a keyword that a lot of other people are using, even if it has a ton of searches because it would be likely that no one would find your content. To determine your competition, go to Google. Type in each one of the keywords above with brackets around it. This will give you the number of other people using the same keyword to tag their content (don’t confuse this with the number of times a keyword is searched for). The results from this are:

1) Guerrilla marketing (702 000)
2) Guerilla marketing (690 000)
3) Guerilla marketing tactics (18 200)
4) Guerilla marketing strategy (5740)
5) Gorilla marketing (43 900)
6) Gorilla marketing tactics (443)

Ideally you want this number to be below 5000 (up to about 10 000). I could have chosen the keyword “guerrilla marketing strategy”, but because “gorilla marketing tactics” had such incredibly low competition, I used it instead regardless of the funny spelling mistake. In case someone comes across my blog post and thinks I’m a complete moron for the misspelling, I do note the correct spelling in the post.

Whatever content you’re writing, there will be a place for you to submit your keywords, so make sure you do so, i.e. don’t only use your keywords in your content, you have to officially submit them. You should also have your keywords in the body of your content at least three times or so (this will give you better results in search engines), as well as in the content title. You can of course use more than one keyword, and should ideally have four or five if possible.

As a final note, Google does also offer a free keyword analysis tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, which does have related keyword results, but I personally much prefer WordTracker, and find it to be more comprehensive. Also, Google does not provide exact numbers in the results, as WordTracker does.

That does it for this article. Make sure you do your keyword analysis before posting any content!