Keyword Opportunities

Those keywords out there that people are typing in represent an opportunity. As you work through the overall process of SEO, you should develop this keyword mindset.

For example, let’s say you work for a company that makes drone kits. Then imagine that John Doe is interested in building a drone. What kinds of keywords might he type into Google when he’s doing research?

Don’t worry if you don’t know anything about drones (I don’t). Just remember that keywords can be pretty generic, but you can also get very specific and detailed, whether it is a brand name or a specific type of product or item that a company offers. The reason this is important is because sometimes developing keyword research can involve getting more specific, in order to uncover keywords for products where there isn’t as much competition.

Search Volume and Competition

Another concept to learn about is search volume. When you’re thinking about search volume, you’re simply saying, “how much demand is there for these keywords?”. This is a good question to ask, because even if you think of keywords that relate well to your products, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s demand for the keywords. In other words, just because it’s a good keyword, doesn’t mean that people are actually searching for it as much as you’d like. Part of the process of keyword research is checking to see how much search volume there is for particular keywords, which we’ll look at.

The other thing to remember, as you learn about keywords, is that there’s competition. This applies whether you are writing ads (using Google AdWords—see Introduction to Search Engine Marketing and AdWords) or you’re doing search engine optimization.

When you are running ads, the competition is a bidding environment, where you decide how much you are willing to pay for a click on an ad. There is competition around particular keywords. For example, if two drone manufacturers want an ad to appear about their company on Google when you type in “racing drone,” there will be competition for that keyword phrase.

There’s a similar concept at play for SEO, and there is competition for keywords there as well. If you think about search results and the web sites that come up, you can see how everyone would probably like to appear on the first page of search results. That’s the best place to be.

For example, at the time of this writing, if you type in “sunflower seeds”, you’ll see in the fine print at the top that there are about 6.5 million search results on Google, from web sites around the world!

And at the bottom of the first page, you can navigate to more pages of results.

In theory, you could page through 6.5 million pages of search results, but you’re probably not going to do that, and the point is that the higher and earlier you appear in the search results, the better. In general, the initial goal is to appear somewhere on the first page, or within the first 100 results, and then to work on increasing your rank from there.

SEO is the process of maintaining your rank and ideally increasing it. It is fair to say that aside from thinking about technical things like using meta descriptions (see Chapter 9) and doing keyword research, that developing content and adding it, to strengthen and reinforce keywords, makes sense. Even if you didn’t get super specific about how many keywords were in a particular article you added, for example, you might still benefit from being aware of keywords, and either writing material or working with writers at your company (or freelancers) to develop written material that is related to keywords. For example, if you are a drone manufacturer that offers drone kits, you could write an article on “The Top 10 Considerations for Drone Kits” and write it naturally, where the phrase and keywords appear in the article.

The easiest way to think about gaining experience with keywords is to think about it as a mindset—as you are working on content or working with people who develop content, it can become a conversation to think about keywords and how they will boost marketing objectives. There may already naturally be content that will be added to a site, but an SEO person will instigate that through blog posts, articles, etc.

Trying the AdWords Keyword Planner

To try the AdWords Keyword Planner, log in to AdWords and select Keyword Planner from the Tools menu:

Before you start using it, I recommend exploring some of the articles that appear on the screen:

To try it, click on “Get search volume data and trends”:

The search volume window has a variety of options. In general, I suggest going with the defaults as you learn the program.

Try entering a keyword:

Then click the Get Search Volume button:

You should see something like this:

There’s a lot of interesting information, but the main purpose is to get a general idea of how much search volume there is. In the earlier search window, the “targeting” was to “all locations,” meaning the entire world, so narrowing that down when you do a search is a good idea unless your web site is targeting the entire world.

You can also see the relative amount of competition, which is important to be aware of for SEM and SEO purposes.

At the top, you can enter new words or modify an existing search (to change the targeting):

With that, you have entered the sophisticated world of keyword research using a core tool, the AdWords Keyword Planner! Congratulations!

Now for a bit of fun.

Activity: Research Keywords

Pretend you own a T-shirt business and are looking to generate ads on Google and work on search engine optimization.

Think of five keywords to start with and use AdWords Keyword Planner to research them. Then, either think of five more keywords or use Wordtracker. Type one of the first five keywords and see what Wordtracker suggests. Register for the free trial if you have to.

You can also just start typing in keywords in Google and see what “auto-suggest” comes up with: