Thorough Keyword Research – Our approach

June 6th, 2007

Unfortunately, most online marketers think Keyword Research is just running some basic ideas through WordTracker or KeywordDiscovery. Yesterday, I spent the entire day researching phrases for the North Carolina mountain properties we are marketing.

Here’s the thorough approach I used…

1. Review Source Material and Brainstorm

· Review everything including meeting notes and source material for keyword ideas.

· Write keyword ideas down – I use a full sheet of paper and make clusters of words.

2. Review Other Sites

· Review competing and complementary sites.

· Review the Title, Description, and Keyword tags of the home page and other pertinent pages. Make notes. Look for words that apply.

3. Thesaurus

· Take the resulting list and use a thesaurus to find appropriate synonyms. I use MS Word for this.

4. Latent Semantic Keywords

· Go download and install Quintura. This will use LSI to find keywords that search engines feel are similar and therefore rank similarly to words already discovered.

· This process reveals new opportunities.

· This process also reveals “negative keywords” for PPC.

5. Keyword Combinations

· This is my favorite part. Experiment with Keyword Combinations. This will combine keywords in every possible way to make keyword phrases.

6. Online Keyword Research Data

· Run all the phrases through specialized online keyword software (Keyword Discovery and/or WordTracker) to see which phrases are actually being typed into search engines.

7. Common Sense and “gut feelings”

· Throughout the entire process, you have to use your brain. Look for phrases based on what we know of the client and target audience. Also, don’t go for phrases you know you can’t get or are too broad. The more you do SEO, the better feel you have for this.

8. Google AdWords PPC

· Lastly and most importantly, test all your keyword phrases by running a Google AdWords campaign. Test your ROI. See what works in real life. I like to throw everything into one big ad group for a week and then sort by impressions. That will dramatically fine tune your keyword research.