Keywords – Research is the Key

When starting an online campaign, it is most important to first do some keywords research. This will include looking at the commercial value of the keyword you are considering. Two good examples of this are the tattoo market and the dream analysis market, both of which have quite a lot of searches, dream analysis even more so. There are quite a lot of searches there, yet commercial value on that particular keyword is low. Most people are looking for free dream analysis, and they’re not really going to buy anything.

You might do your research tick off traffic and tick off low competition and say, ok, here’s a keyword I can go after. Then when you actually come to the market and try to monetize that you’re not really going to have anything.

I think a lot of people get scared away from markets that have competition, and if anything, I think Jeff Johnson talks about this, you want to go after markets with competition because it shows there is money there. All you have to do that is just a little bit better.

We do a lot testing at Market Samurai with the traffic component, relatively recently, Google started providing some sort of insight into how much a particular keyword’s getting. Through some of the testing I’ve done, I’m seeing massive discrepancies. For example, you can have number one position ranking for a keyword and not even get one tenth or even much less than that, click throughs on that particular keyword.

I think ultimately that’s the thing about testing, you take it with a grain of salt and you do look to multiple sources. Just like with share trading you don’t buy something just based on one signal, you look for multiple signals to be saying the right thing before you take action on something.

Most people get so tied up with analysis paralysis, and particularly with the product we provide, we provide data that people can just get so obsessed about and it’s good that it does provide some discipline and some rigor to what can be a very risky business if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I like to do an AdWords campaign first and actually confirm the data. I know that the AdWords data should be a percentage of what the full number of searches are and AdWords will tell you the number of impressions that your ad got as well. So if you’re looking for confirmation you could spend a little bit of money to get that insurance that the traffic is behind a particular keyword. Proper keywords research is key.

I certainly do the AdWords, throw it to a site and test the commercial value and the conversion and the traffic before I invest heavily going into that market.

So one of the first stages, both pay per click and SEO is obviously to do some keywords research. With SEO obviously you can take those keywords and load them into your pay per click and start to do your monitoring of conversion and that sort of thing and tweak things.

Once I’ve done the research, I consider how many keywords to pick out and where to start.

I try to pick a small subset of keywords that are tightly semantically grouped with each other that meet certain traffic competition and commerciality filters that I put on them. So I basically say I’m looking for keywords that have a decent amount of traffic, so it’s going to be worth my time, with a decent amount of commercial value.

Obviously it’s going to be the way my competition threshold based on what my SEO asset base is in terms of my other sites and my ability to get links. So I like to think of this cluster of keywords as essentially becoming categories.

If it is a blog on my site I typically have somewhere between six to twelve major keywords or something behind my site. But there’s definitely some semantic clustering of those keywords. They’re related to each other. That is really one of the cool things behind Google keyword tool. They’re actually giving you semantically relevant keywords and that’s really important.

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This was a guest article written by Jimmy Cox.
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