Keyword Research - Is it Rocket Science?
Written on May 7, 2008 by Peter- REBB Founder
Let me tell you right from the start, keyword research IS a science. But its NOT rocket science. It’s not even close. You, me and your next door neighbor can do keyword research. The difference between you and your neighbor is that in the next few minutes, you will know what tools you need to use to do keyword research, the right way.
But before I go into it, let me explain to you why you need to do an extensive keyword research for your site. In a sentence:
“It can be the difference between life and death for your site”
“It can be the difference between 5 visitors and 5000 visitors to your site”
“It can mean superhighway or the dirt road leading to your site”
See my point? I hope I got your attention. Good. Because this is extremely important.
Optimizing your website, social marketing pages, articles, and any other content on the internet for the wrong keywords can mean very little traffic to your site.
Word of Caution: Keyword research and optimizing your pages with the right keywords is NOT the only strategy you should be using to get your site on the first page of Google. There are many other factors that play a big role in the SEO (search engine optimization) game. Things like title tags, meta tags, meta descriptions, on-page optimization, off-page optimization, backlinks, reciprocal links, directories, and many other factors account for high search engine ranking. But doing the right keyword research is a great start to get your site ranking high on those SE. In some cases, the right keyword can get you on the first page of a less competitive keyword search.
So, now that I have hopefully convinced you that keyword research is an important part of your website optimization, let’s talk about the different tools you can use in your research. There are dozens of keyword research tools on the Internet. Google will give you about 718,000 results when you search for “keyword research tool.”
But as the old saying goes, well, its not exactly an old saying, but I like to use it here- “Not all keyword research tools are created equal.”
So, I am going to try to make it simple and give you 3 different tools that you should use for your keyword research. The first keyword is both free and paid, the second keyword is completely free and the third keyword is a paid version but for what you are getting, it’s well worth your money. So, let’s begin…
Wait..before I go into discussing the three tools, I need to warn you. What I am about to say is not going to make some so-called “guru’s” very happy because they are to this day, peddling this tool to whomever will listen. This tool is one of the most popular keyword research tools on the Internet, and at the same time, one of the worst keyword research tools on the Internet.
I am talking about the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. First, if you clicked on the link I provided for you on the right, and you actually arrived at the website, you are in luck. Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool, which is owned by Yahoo, Inc. is almost never up and running. For some strange reason, given the fact that back in 2003, this tool received 167 million searches per day and was a huge competitor to Google, Yahoo decided not to keep it up to date.
The second reason is that if you are lucky enough to load that page, the database has not been updated since January 2007. So for our purposes, this data is pretty much useless, especially in the real estate industry. All in all, I don’t recommend you use that tool.
Now, for the tools I do recommend…
First tool is both free and paid tool. Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool is a great tool for searching the hottest and trendiest keywords currently available. This tool will give you the most popular keywords for the past 90-100 days. Something to keep in mind while using Wordtracker is that it uses 2 meta search engines, DogPile.com and MetaCrawler.com for their results.
According to InfoSpace, Inc. a company that owns both of those meta search engines, dogpile.com and metacrawler.com account only for 0.5% of the entire searches on the Internet. That means that there is at least 99.5% of the search data that is not being utilized in their search including companies such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.com. But for our purposes, this tool can give us a glimpse to what popular terms are being searched on the internet.
Sidenote: Wordtracker also has a free tool called Wordtracker Gtrends Keyword Tool which attempts to give you the numbers of searches and level of competition for each tool. Try it out as well.
Second tool is 100% free and is probably one of the best tools you can use for your keyword research. It’s the Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Why should you use this tool? Well, few reason. First, its Google 
Second, as of February 2008, Google is dominating the global search engine environment with 58.4% market share. That means that over 58% of people in the world, use Google for their search engine searches. Who’s next you ask? Yahoo with a distant 22.9%.
There is only one problem with that tool. Google does not show the exact # of searches. Instead, it displays a bar graph that shows how competitive the keyword tool is on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being the lowest search volume) in regards to Advertiser competition and search volume. This tool alone, when using creatively, can give you a huge advantage over your competition.
Tip: After you type in your keyword and click the “Get keyword Ideas” button, click on the blue “Advertiser Competition” or “Search Volume” links at the top of the table to reorganize your tool from the most competitive to least competitive keywords and/or the most searched to least searched keywords.
The third and final tool, at least for this post (the post is getting a little long), is NicheBot Classic. Now, I want to be straight with you here. This tool is a paid tool but it covers all the bases and I need to share it with you. (By the way, as with all of my recommendations that I have been giving you for the past few months, I am a user of this tool and that is why I am recommending it to you).
This particular tool allows you to get searches from WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, Thesaurus, Keyword Analysis, and Keyword Ranking. The link I gave you above is a link that will allow you to do a free search for your keyword. It will return 100 day count, daily searches for global field, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It will also give you the ability to see the competition for that particular keyword in each search engine.
So, here are the 3 tools I recommend for your keyword research. I have several other keyword tools that you can use but as I said earlier in the post, I wanted to keep it simple for you. But, if you would like, I can give you those tools as well. Just post a comment at the bottom.
Also, please let me know where you stand on keyword research by posting a comment below.
Have you done it before? Do you know how to do it? Are you totally confused? Would you want me to elaborate more in this subject?
Remember, people write courses just on this one subject. Obviously, I can’t cover it all here. So, you need to tell me what you need from me.
Would you want me to make a video of how to do keyword research? Maybe you would want me to provide you with a list of keywords for your particular local market. (If I did that, It would probably be a paid service since it takes some time to do this).
Let me know in the comments below and if I get enough interest, I’ll go ahead and do what needs to be done
To Your Success,
Peter K.
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Pete,
All good advice.
I also like Good Keywords, which is a free tool.
You have to download software, but it’s free.
I also like looking at 4-5 of the top tools, and then comparing the top 10 in each one. If I see multiple keywords in the top 10 for different tools, I know I have a winner.
Great post.
I have not worked with keywords before.
I don’t know much about them.
I do not know how to do it.
Totaly confused.
What about “companies” or “groups” who for a fee purport to promote your website into top rankings. Do they perform? I guess it depends upon the company.
David - anybody can get top rankings on Google within 15 minutes through the Adwords program. You just have to be willing to pay for those rankings. And there are some SEO firms that are good at what they do, but nobody can guarantee you a top 10 ranking for terms like “mortgages” or “real estate” - there are just far too many variables. Best thing to do is to pick a whole bunch of very specialized keywords (like “wholesale real estate investments in west Kalamazoo”) and optimimze for them. It will be a lower volume of traffic, but very highly targeted. Alternatively, learn to reverse engineer your competition’s search engine efforts and work towards duplicating & improving upon their strategies. This is actually relatively simple to do.
i would need lots more info on this. i kind of get it but don’t know where to start or how to incorporate it into my website. thanks.
God point Justin. As I said in the post, each keyword tool only accounts for a percentage of searches. So, if you look through few keyword tools and see some reoccurring keywords, its probably a good indication that the keyword will be a winner.
Peter K.
David, I agree with Bryan. Google Adwords ia a good way to get traffic to your site and get on the first page of Google. However, there are few important points you need to know about Adwords. First, as Bryan mentioned, Adwords is not free and if you don’t know what you are doing there, you can loose your shirt. Google Adwords is a very sophisticated program and if your ads are not targeted enough where your click through rate is, I guess “acceptable” by Google, your CPC will increase. After the “Google Slap,” many people lost their shirt, and even their business.
With that said, I’m not trying to discourage anyone from using Google Adwords. The program can bring tons of traffic to your site. You just need to test, test, and test.
In regards to picking the right keywords, don’t go for “real estate” because you’ll NEVER get at the top of Google for a highly competitive keywords like that. Instead, as Bryan said, optimize for “long tail keywords.” I’ll probably write another post on that topic in the near future.
Thanks again,
Peter K.
Yeah, I had the same problem with Good Key words.com. Usually no response.
[...] Read my Keyword Research- Is it Rocket Science? blog post I made last week. That post will give you several free resources you can use to search [...]
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