How To Do Keyword Research

What  is Keyword Research

Keyword research is a practice used by search engine optimization professionals or optimizers to look for and research actual search terms that people are doing when doing online searches. These search engines search engine optimization professionals research keywords in order to achieve better rankings in their desired niches. The goal of this is to find low competition keywords but have a decent search volume.

Unfortunately, skipping keyword research is one of the biggest and most common mistakes of those who are starting an online business. They think that setting up a website and then submit it to search engines for indexing is already enough. Their business will just prosper and things fall into places. Or so they think. They’ll  just realize later that their competitors are way way ahead of them.  The same thing applies to all newbie bloggers. They blog about everything-under-the-sun now and ask later “How do I get visitors? I have ads but don’t earn a decent amount?” By the way, skpping keyword research is also a mistake I made.

How to do keyword research?

The first thing you need to do in conducting a keyword research is to determine the niche you want to rank for. Let’s have “Manny Pacquiao” as our example. To check for the number of search results, just search for “Manny Pacquiao” on Google (I prefer Google).  Pacquiao is very popular boxing fighter so expect for more than ten million results. Don’t lose hope, you will not be competing with those web pages. Search for “Manny Pacquiao” this time with a quotation mark  (“) before and after the  keyword. By using quotation marks, you are telling Google that you want it to find a webpage that has ”Manny Pacquiao” in it and it should be the exact “Manny Pacquiao” word. Take note that the number of search results may decrease or increase but the process does not end here.

Let us now determine the  number of competing web pages by using operators. Operators vary depending on the search engine you are using. An operator may work on Google but may not on Yahoo. Here is a list of search operators that may be proven useful in SEO and keyword research.

• Google:

1. allintitle: (all of the query words in the title)
2. allinurl: (all of the query words in the URL)
3. intitle: (that word in the title)
4. inurl: (that word in the URL)
5. link:
6. inanchor:
7. allinachor: (Google restricts results to pages containing all query terms you specify in the anchor text on links to the page.)
8. intext:
9. allintext:

• Yahoo

1. sitee:
2. link:
3. linkdomain: (links that points to one domain)
4. url:
5. intitle:
6. inurl: (a specific keyword as part of indexed urls)

In our keyword research example, we will  just be using three of those mentioned above: “inurl:” “intitle:” and “inanchor:” Search  for intitle:”manny pacquiao” inurl:”manny pacquiao” inanchor:”manny pacquiao”.  This should dramatically limit the number of search results. Based on the image below, there are 461,000 webpages competing for that keyword. This may not sound good but you can try to rank for other Manny Pacquiao-related keywords and by the way, using site operators is not the only thing you can do for keyword research.

Note: You can opt no to use quotation marks but it will not return results with exact phrases.

Keyword Research Tools

Sure there are great and working SEO and keyword research tools like SEO PowerSuite but if you are just starting or unwilling to shell out an  amount, there are still other alternatives. You can use the SEObook tool (they also have this good SEO service.  If you can let them the keyword research for you) and Google Keyword Tool.   I use the latter one most of the time  as it is just a web application – no download necessary. It shows the global and local (defaults to United States) search volume as well as competition. It also shows the approximate Adwords Cost Per Click (CPC) which can you help you find profitable keywords. You will be surprised that that there isn’t really that much competition for the keyword “Manny Pacquiao” if compared against the related search volume. You can read my post Top Paying Keywords With Low Competition for more information on  how to use this tool.