Keyword Analysis and Search Engine Marketing
Tips for Bloggers and Niche Marketers
This is part 2 of my series on Comprehensive Research for Bloggers, it continues on from my previous discussion on defining your keyword research goals, and today I’m going to have a quick look at some of the online tools I use for keyword analysis.
Most of these are pretty standard – if you’ve looked into keyword research before you’ll see a lot of familiar faces, but I’ll try to surprise you with one or two. If you’re just starting out this guide will give you a solid foundation to work from.
The first group of tools I want to talk about are the work horses of keyword research, the tools that let you research directly the keywords users are entering into search engines… almost every analysis you do will start with one of these.
Keyword Discovery
Out of all the ones listed here, Keyword Discovery is probably the most comprehensive keyword tool you’ll find, and because of that, it’s my preferred starting point for most Keyword Analysis Reports.
Keyword Discovery collects its data from multiple sources - metacrawler data (from dogpile, metacrawler etc.) provide their full search log data, while popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are also covered to some degree by partner deals which grab search data directly from browser toolbars and site logs.
You also get the option to segregate the data based on geographic regions which is handy if your research needs to look at some localised trends.
At $69.95 per month it is the most expensive in its group, but the extra advantages it has by having access to a larger database and regional search segmenting makes it more than worth the additional cost.
WordTracker
Similar to Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker gathers its data primarily from metacrawler’s as well as some additional data from a few UK ISP’s. It still has a database of over 330 million keywords and they update their index weekly (instead of monthly like Keyword Discovery). It’s a great tool to use, but just keep in mind that the data is mostly US centric.
Wordtracker has a limited free version that you can try out as well as full subscription services starting from $59/m.
Wordze
Wordze is the newest player in the market and is making quite a name for itself already. Having a similar database to that of Wordtracker, it is extremely easy to use and is the cheapest option of the three main tools.
You can get a 24hr trial for $7.95 (great value if you’ve got a few things stacking up that you want to do searches on) or pay only $45/m for a full subscription.
Ultimately, whether you use Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker or Wordze comes down to personal preference - you’ll find plenty of people praising the benefits of all three, so take some time, visit them all and see which one works best for you.
Google Keyword Tool
The Google Keywords Tool is a free application that let’s you get suggestions directly from Google’s database.
It is missing a few critical pieces of functionality to be truly useful in its own right, but it also has some features that you can’t get anywhere else. It is an essential part of any keyword research program (afterall, it’s free), but you wouldn’t want to use it in isolation… it’s really just there to backup and add to the data you find with one of the above three tools.
A couple of things the Google Keywords Tool won’t do:
Some interesting things it DOES do, that you can’t get anywhere else:
The social media websites that you search will depend heavily on your niche and where that type of content is popular… this data isn’t directly related to what keywords people use to find you on search engines, but it will give you ideas about what themes and angles you’ll want to target to get your content visible on the social media sites. It also has what I consider to be a great advantage in that it gives you another context to read your target market in a bit more detail. Search Engine keywords are essentially just thought fragments (i.e. the user’s intent has to be condensed into a few keywords in order to search the database), but in many of the social media interactions you often get to see the full thought process, and I don’t think that should be underestimated if you’re serious about building quality, comprehensive content.
Yahoo Answers
Without doubt, my favourite place to turn to is Yahoo Answers. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s simply a place where anyone can ask a question and tap into the collective wisdom of anyone else using the site whom might be able to answer. In practice, many of the questions and answers are of a pretty low quality (although their are plenty of high quality ones there too), but regardless of whether you see any benefits of participating in the discussion, the search feature is priceless for Keyword Research.
Click on the advanced search link, limit your search to questions only and you’ll get hundreds, if not thousands of questions returned for whatever niche you’re interested in… this is bit of a preview to part 5 in this series, so I’ll go into it in more depth there, but as far as research tools go, it’s one of my favourites.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a popular source of traffic for many blogs, so searching their database is often an effective strategy if you want to design your content so it has more chance to be tagged in a popular category
While the results you get aren’t always that fantastic, an easy way to see which tags are popular (either all time, or recent), is to go to stumbleupon.com/tag/ and enter some gibberish into the search box, you’ll get two tag clouds that look something like this:
Using twitter for keyword research is something that I’m still experimenting with, so I’m including it here with a bit of a caution.
The great thing about twitter, is that it’s gaining a lot of popularity with computer-savvy users and it’s quite a personal look at peoples thoughts and actions. So if your target market are active Twitter users, then trawling through the twitter-sludge can be an enlightening experience. As messages on Twitter are limited to 140 characters, they are generally a mix of thought fragments and complete ideas.
There are a stack of websites that allow you to search Twitter in various ways, but the two I’m most interested in at this stage are Terraminds (which appears to have completely disappeared over the last week or so - anyone know what’s going on?), and Twemes.
Terraminds is similar to a regular search engine, in that you enter some keywords, hit search and it’ll send back the results of all the tweets (twitter messages) that it finds with those keywords, but importantly it also lists how many results were found - so this data gives you a good idea about how often keywords get mentioned on Twitter.
Twemes is slightly different - it only lets you search keywords where users have specifically typed a ‘#’ in front of the word (often referred to as ‘hashtags’). So you only get to search a subset of twitter data, and only parts users have actively tagged… but that does have some advantages. Every page on Twemes shows a tag cloud that lets you see what the popular tags are (you can look at this data for the last 24hrs, 7 days, 30 days or 1 year)… the trick here (not that I’ve really tested it yet!) is to find a popular tag that matches your content. You can then start twittering using that tag, occasionally pointing to your content and with any luck it should drive some traffic (if people are actively tagging keywords in their conversation, there’s a good chance they might also be following that conversation by tracking that tag)… I’m going to try that right now with this article, although I’m stretching it a bit to find a good fit with related keywords that are running popular (’blog’ and ‘hashtags’ are kind of relevant and appearing on the last 24hrs cloud, so I’ll give them a try along with the more focused ‘keywords’ and ’seo’ tags).
The other feature worth noting on Twemes, is when you search for a keyword, it also shows you other tags that are mentioned in posts where your keyword was tagged - so this could prove to be a good source of finding related keywords, especially those just starting to gain popularity (a good recent example would be searching for ’seo’ which would have alerted you to the SXSW conference which has quickly become a very popular topic over the past couple of weeks (both on Twitter and in blogs).
There’s really only one other tool I want to talk about today that doesn’t really fit into the above category, and that’s:
Google Trends
Google Trends is a handy little tool that let’s you track a search terms popularity over a period of time - it’s a quick way of seeing if the keyword popularity is growing or declining, if it has any seasonal trends, where interest has spiked in the past and even comparing directly with other related search terms.
It also gives you plenty of data on the regions where the term is searched for the most (these rankings are relative to the population in that region, so higher ranked regions don’t necessarily equate to larger markets).
The front page of Google Trends also gives you access to ‘hot trends’, these are updated hourly, and are somewhat sanitised, but occasionally give up interesting trend information that you may want to take note of.
Well, that ended up being about twice as long as I thought it would be… thanks for sticking to the end if you’ve made it this far! In the next part of the series I’ll be looking at Keyword Intent - don’t forget to subscribe to my feed or bookmark this page on your favourite social media site if you’re enjoying these articles, I’d greatly appreciate it.
Technorati Tags: Keyword Analysis, Keyword Research Tool
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[…] the next part of this series I’ll have a quick look at the tools I use for keyword research… so until then, I hope I’ve given you a few things to think about at […]
Great series Martin! I really like how you included using Social Media as a tool for keyword research. Very important if you’re hoping to get some Social Media exposure for your blog.
re:SEO tools - I”m fast becoming a fan of Wordze. Love some of the functionality.
Look forward to reading the rest of your series!
Thanks Jenn - yes, there are some great social media tools out there, the more info we can get about our target markets and how they find and share information online, the better.
Wordze definitely has some good features, although it could use a bit more depth for regional (non-US) searches, that’s probably my only complaint at this stage. It’s definitely good value though, especially at the moment - they have an Easter promo where if you register by the 24th of March, you can get your first month for $14.95 (instead of $45), which is a great deal.
[…] This is part 3 of my series on Comprehensive Research for Bloggers, if you missed the first two I suggest you have a quick skim through Defining your Keyword Research Goals and 8 Tools for Keyword Research that should be a Part of your Arsenal. […]
Wow…that is a great collection of resources
:) I have 3 niche sites I would like to improve keywords for so that will definitely come in handy!
[…] have just released website trends - similar to their keyword trends […]