First, you need to find a good keyword tool to determine who searched for what and how often. Then you will need a good search engine like google.com. As far as the search engine keyword tool, you could use a simple free tool like Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool. If you are looking to get into greater detailed research and have much of the work done for you, you could try out WordTracker's 7-day free trial. This is a matter of taste because you can do all that you need with the free tool. Wordtracker might be classified as a superior tool because of the things it does for you and more. Check it out by clicking this link for the 7-day free trial. All you have to do is cancel it before the 7 days, and you won’t be charged anything. If you do cancel, you can always come back to the free Google tool.
Okay, let me explain what you can do with the free tool if you have the time and patience. I am also putting together a video for anyone wanting to see how I do my keyword phrases. Click here if you would rather watch the video, scroll to the bottom of this page. Well, I would recommend you create a spreadsheet in excel or Google documents with the following columns: “keyword”; “demand”; “demand-to-supply ratio”; “supply site info”; “content ideas”. Now with these columns you are going to be inputting what you find in the steps.
After you have determined who your target market is, you are going to want to begin with the search engine keyword they might use to find your website. Let’s use the example “food” which is a very broad search term. Getting a good ranking on a search engine for this term is probably going to take a very long time. Right now there are over 824 million websites found with the search word “food”. You are going to want to narrow that down a bit. If you are using WordTracker, a lot of the things I’m going to tell you will be done for you. The 7-day trial will tell you if it’s your preferred tool. For my example, I am going to use Google’s free tool. If you have it open, do a search for “food”. What you will see next is a list of keywords related to food. There is going to be a shaded blue area right next to it showing how much advertiser competition there is for the various phrases. In the next column, you will see approximately how many searches were performed for the phrases in the previous month on Google.com.
If you find a phrase that has no data, that could mean that there are not many keyword searches being done so I would stay away from those as potential phrases to use in your ad campaigns. We are looking for keyword phrases that can be used on web pages and in ad campaigns that are relevant and have a higher ratio of demand to supply. You will decide what ratio is good for you based on your eagerness to compete. You also will look at other things like what shows up in Google for the phrases and decide if you want to provide content for that market search or not. Many times there are good search engine keyword phrases that are underserved by good quality content in favor of junk sites. It’s funny when you go and do a keyword search for something like “food recipes” (as an example) and find only sites that don’t fit what a searcher may have been looking for. That’s where you will come in with high quality content to be found. These can also be used with services like Yahoo! Sponsored Search where advertisers get $25 free to open an account.
Here are the steps to use with the tool:
1. search for your base market search engine keyword
2. copy each keyword phrase into the spreadsheet under "keyword"
3. enter the number under "approx. search volume" under "demand" -- this is the number of searches performed using the keyword phrase last month
4. go to google.com and enter the phrase in quotations like this "food recipes" and enter the number of pages found
5. enter a formula in the "demand to supply ratio" column as these steps:
a)enter the "=" symbol
b)click the value in the column to the left with the number for demand
c)enter the "/" symbol
d)click the value in the column to the left with the number for supply
e)click the "enter" button
6. now repeat these steps until you feel you have exhausted the potential search engine keyword phrases
At this point, you will have quite a high number of potential keyword phrases to choose from. Now, you will go through this list to look for keyword phrases that offer potential for a low-competition field to get traffic to your site in the early stages. From this point, you want to narrow your list down to the search engine keyword choices that have a good ratio from the calculations above. On these calculations, you can change the percentage to give you two numbers to the right like "5.67%" versus "6%", if you choose. After you have narrowed your list, you want to take the remaining keywords and search again in google.com with quotes around the keyword phrase. This is going to be time consuming...in case you were wondering. Check out WordTracker's 7-day free trial when you get a moment to see how it compares. Okay, what you will do now is to look at the top 10-20 websites to determine if you see a need not being met. For example, you might see a keyword phrase that has a top 10 that is completely unrelated to the search phrase. This might be an opportunity for you.
While you are doing all this preliminary work, you will find topics of interest to your market. You want to put those in the column labeled "content ideas". The other column "supply site info" will be used to keep track of what you find in the top 10-20 results when you do the quoted keyword search. You will use this information while determining if you can fill a need for content to your target market. Now, there's no time like the present to get started finding those keywords to build traffic to your web pages. Get to it. See you soon.
