Using Keywords pt 2- Starting Your Keywords Research

Using Keywords - Google Keywords Tool

This is probably the best keyword research tool available, and best of all, it’s free! Technically, it is the Google Adwords Keyword tool.  It was basically designed to help people who use PPC – Pay Per Click for promotions. But anyone can use this information to pick out domain names, for article marketing, to enhance your organic SEO rankings, to see what other people are doing with their websites, and on and on.

The first thing to understand is that this only returns results from Google’s search engine. Granted, this is the monster search engine, but it is also important to have the information that other search engines can give you, and there are other keyword tools that will do that for you. I will cover several of them later on in this series.

But for now it’s all about the big G

Getting Started.

First of all I suggest getting a  Gmail account. It’s free, so sign up if you don’t have one, or log on if you do.  Now, you don’t need to do this to get access to the tool, but to be able to use other Google features you will need an account.

A word about your browser. I highly recommend using Firefox. Not only is it safer than using the Explorer browser, it also has many add on features that will make your overall internet experience much more efficient and easier. One thing I do is to open up several tabs at once so I can easily go back and forth between different pages.

Navigate over to:  http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

Reading over the page you will see that you can get your results tailored to several languages.  So adjust that if necessary.  Then you will see: “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?”  Descriptive Words or Phrases, or Website Content.

Descriptive Words and Phrases

This is where you can type in your keyword or keyword phrase on a subject and see what terms people are using when searching for that particular subject.

Website Content

One smart thing to do is research your competition. If you find a website that you like or one that comes up on the first page in the search engines, (your competition), you might like to find out what keywords they are using. So put in their web address and see what come up. I recommend going through the web addresses of the entire 1st page of the search results. Why? Because these people are doing something right with their keywords, among other SEO tactics.  And it will give you a ton of ideas.  But don’t just copy what they are doing!

If you already have a website, you can put the web address in and Google will return suggestions based on your content.

At this point we want to go with the ‘descriptive words and phrases’ option. For our example we will use ‘dogs’ as our keyword. Make sure that you click on the ‘use synonyms’. This will increase your result options. Fill in the captcha characters, click on the ‘find keywords button', and off you will go.

The Keyword, ‘Dogs’, shows over 30 million monthly searches a month. Wow! That’s an enormous amount of people searching that subject and you can also safely bet that the competition to get their attention is intense.

The default page lists;  ‘keywords’,  ‘advertiser competition’,   ‘local search’ – which are the results of the last available month, and 'global search' – which is the monthly average of searches over a year.

The competition column has a bar which is filled with color, depending on the amount of advertiser competition.  The keyword ‘dogs, is rabid with competition. (sorry)

In the upper right hand corner you will see “Choose columns to display”, open up the drop down menu and select ‘show all’. This will give you an even bigger picture of what is going on in the ‘dogs’ marketplace.

You will be able to see the average cost to use PPC for particular keywords. If you look at the average bid on  the keyword ‘dogs’, it is only 67 cents, which isn’t too bad. But before you get excited, understand that everyone who types in the words ‘dogs’,  is not looking to buy something and given the amount of searches you will quickly blow through any PPC budget you have with very little results.  Later in this series we will look at keyword searches that indicate that someone is interested in purchasing a (dog related) product.

If you are writing articles and have adsense on your website, you can see what people are paying to advertise for certain keywords, and then you tailor your keywords to fit into the article to get better paying adsense advertising on your site.

In the next article we will start using keywords and drill down into the results to try and determine what our best options are.

Be Fearless

Billy Ojai