Keyword research

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mistawright

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I know this is a topic that is discussed time and time again but I have not found any information that would help me understand how to conduct keyword research effectively.
I have found article after article that give tips on keyword research but they always leave me with more questions. Lets say I was researching keywords for "legos", how would you guys go about generating a targeted list of keywords for that topic? What tips do you guys suggest? What are the guidelines you suggest for doing proper keyword research?

Thanks in advance,
Alex
 


This is what I do:

I go into a keyword tool (Keyword Discovery for this example). I type in "legos" and these are top few search results.

legos 69025
star wars legos 24856
starwars legos 3160
harry potter legos 2785
star war legos 2235
legos star wars 2198
legos toys hobbies 1346
spongebob legos 1112
star wars legos toys hobbies 1062
legos lot 1025
pirate legos 709
batman legos 652
halo legos 415
space legos 399
sponge bob legos 387
duplo legos 369
legos starwars 357
clone legos 340
castle legos 302
knights kingdom legos 299
spiderman legos 284
vintage legos 276
belville legos 272
lots of legos 267
legos harry potter 249
legos star war 208
custom legos 203
thomas legos 200


I decide whether I am going for the broad term (legos) or a specific term (like Harry Potter legos). Once I do that, I choose 20 keywords. I go to Google and type each keyword as allintitle:legos then allinurl:legos

This gives me a general idea of the competition I'm looking at. It isn't a hard and fast rule, I've ranked top five for terms that logically are extremely competitive, but overall it gives me a general idea. Sometimes it's easier to go for five smaller traffic terms and know you're going to rank for them, than it is to go for a big traffic term that you may have trouble ranking for.

I tend to go for silos, which means that the main keyword I choose has 20 solid keyword phrases that get traffic, with the main keyword in it.

If I chose to go for Harry Potter Legos, my keywords would be:

harry potter legos 2785
legos harry potter 249
harry potter legos hogwarts express 105
harry potter lego legos tcg foil 87
harry potter lego legos tcg 54
harry potter and the order of the phoenix legos 39
harry potter legos toys hobbies 38
harry potter legos 4709 31
harry potter 5 legos 29
harry potter and the chamber of secrets legos 17
harry potter legos nib 17
harry potter castle set legos 4757 16
harry potter lego legos toys hobbies 15
harry potter legos sorcerers stone 14
harry potter legos 4708 13
harry potter lego legos tcg toys hobbies 13
harry potter hogwarts legos 12
harry potter legos hogwarts castle 12
harry potter castle legos 11
harry potter durmstrang ship legos 11
harry potter legos hogwarts


I'd remove the duplicates and I'd create a silo of 20 pages out of these terms after checking competitiveness.

Also, when checking for competitiveness...there may be a lot of pages for a term but if they are all small, new sites I go for it.
 
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Reactions: turbolapp
Sorry if I missed it, but are you asking about researching for PPC, or researching to rank organically?

As for the Google keyword tool. I personally love it. Don't take all of the info as facts, especially CPC and stuff like that, but it's still a very nice tool.
 
Yes I am talking about ppc

Yes I am talking about getting keywords together to drive traffic to my pages through ppc.

BlondeTM thank you for your reply which was very informative. I have another question for you. When you say you create a silo of 20 pages what exactly do you mean?
 
I would like to hear a little more about Organic...It seems PPC always gets the spot light and not enough good info about naturally moving up in the ranks with key worded content. Is it only about moderate keyword placement/density?
 
I go to Google and type each keyword as allintitle:legos then allinurl:legos
Click to expand...

yea i didn't completely get what silo's means either or the above quote...

i'm guessing basically you make a huge keyword list in google tools and see which ones get you top placement for, for the lowest cost, and use 20 of those? is there a limit how many keywords you can use in adwords?
 
Blonde's post, while very good, is talking more about how to rank organically in the SERP's.

The "silo's" are websites with pages designed to rank well for a specific term, in the example above she's wanting to rank for "Harry Potter Lego's", so she builds around 20 pages with related keywords that include the main keyword, such as " harry potter castle set legos".

I go to Google and type each keyword as allintitle:legos then allinurl:legos
Click to expand...

This lets her see how many competitors have the term "legos" or any other keywords in the page titles and URL's. You can see your competitors sites, find out how many backlinks they have and where, and a bunch of other useful info.

Adwords and PPC are a different ball game from ranking organically. The best way to find out what works well is to use common sense and available tools to find related keywords, and then just go to town and track everything to find out what's working. If a keyword is getting clicks but not converting enough to turn a profit, you cut it out. The only real way to be successful with PPC is to jump in and test everything yourself.
 
If a keyword is getting clicks but not converting enough to turn a profit, you cut it out.
Click to expand...

say you had 20 keywords running in adwords all for the same ad and landing page, the landing page points to an affliate offer page where they have to enter an email address to convert... how or where would you track which of the keywords is not converting?

do you have to set up mulitple landing pages and ads to track conversions to a particular keyword in your list? not sure if this question makes sense or not.
 
I just received a couple of PM's with basically the same question, so I'll just post it here.

How do you track keywords to find out if they're converting or not?
Click to expand...
Use sub ID's on your affiliate links. How you do this varies on different networks, so ask your AM.

For example, if I'm selling legos. I'd have several adgroups, and each adgroup would point to a different landing page, the affiliate link on that page would have a corresponding Sub ID. So...

Adgroup 1: Harry Potter Lego's. I'd be bidding on 5-25 (varies by campaign) keywords related to Harry Potter Lego's. I'd point all of my traffic to landing page 1, which has the Sub ID HP, for "harry potter", in the affiliate link.

Adgroup 2: Star Wars Legos. This time it's 5-25 keywords relating to Star Wars Lego's. I send all of the traffic to landing page 2, with the sub ID SW, for "Star Wars".

I run the campaign for a day, and then I open up adwords and my offer reports from my network.

I can look on adwords, and see that I spent $5 on traffic from my "Harry Potter" adgroup, and $10 on my "Star Wars" adgroups.

Then I look at my reports from the network. I can see that my sub ID "HP" earned $12, and my "SW" adgroup only made $3.

So, in this example, I'd cut the "Star Wars" adgroup, it was losing money. More likely I'd just look closer at the adgroup, figure out where most of the money was spent, and then cut it down into even more adgroups to track it closer. Sometimes 1-2 keywords can ruin an otherwise profitable adgroup.

That's a basic example of how to track keywords and see which ones are profitable.
 
scottspfd82 said:
Blonde's post, while very good, is talking more about how to rank organically in the SERP's.

The "silo's" are websites with pages designed to rank well for a specific term, in the example above she's wanting to rank for "Harry Potter Lego's", so she builds around 20 pages with related keywords that include the main keyword, such as " harry potter castle set legos".



This lets her see how many competitors have the term "legos" or any other keywords in the page titles and URL's. You can see your competitors sites, find out how many backlinks they have and where, and a bunch of other useful info.

Adwords and PPC are a different ball game from ranking organically. The best way to find out what works well is to use common sense and available tools to find related keywords, and then just go to town and track everything to find out what's working. If a keyword is getting clicks but not converting enough to turn a profit, you cut it out. The only real way to be successful with PPC is to jump in and test everything yourself.
Click to expand...

I'm sorry, I thought the original post was about organic traffic, I feel like a dork! :anon.sml: I do very little PPC, when I have I've used the Google tool like scottspfd82 said.

Traffic comes in two forms. Either you pay for it, or you work for it. Neither is better than the other, each is a trade-off.

Organic traffic, to me, is more valuable because I put a lot of time into content and SEO but I get a long term investment. With PPC, if you don't keep buying it, your traffic is instantly cut off. I create pages every day, on different sites. I research keywords every day, and I diversify.

If I rank well in legos, I create either another site or another area within an existing site that is a different topic. That way, if legos become passe or they get recalled or if I get sandboxed or whatever...I have other traffic sources.

I call them silos because my business partner and I call them that. :) We look at it like a funnel that the traffic is pushed into.

turbolapp, let me know what you want to know. I can outline it in more detail.
 
turbolapp said:
I would like to hear a little more about Organic...It seems PPC always gets the spot light and not enough good info about naturally moving up in the ranks with key worded content. Is it only about moderate keyword placement/density?
Click to expand...


It's something that actually drives me insane.

I'm ranking in the top three for a term that is one of the highest searched terms on the internet. I can't get on the first page for a term that has a smidgen of that traffic.

There are so many factors, and every single day I learn more and more. And, to complicate things even more...what works in one silo may not work in another.

On my one domain, which is 7 years old, I can rank for a lot but have been crushed by newer sites. The aged domain does help. But other sites may have an advantage if they have better backlinks and are tight niche sites.


I have a pretty strong formula, and I tweak it almost every day. I read bluehatseo and try to apply as many of those practices as I can, but I don't automate so it is something I modify for my own abilities.
 
scottspfd82 said:
Sorry if I missed it, but are you asking about researching for PPC, or researching to rank organically?

As for the Google keyword tool. I personally love it. Don't take all of the info as facts, especially CPC and stuff like that, but it's still a very nice tool.
Click to expand...

Hey thanks for the feed back. Both you and Blonde have given me some clarity on this subject. Right now I'm focusing my attention on organic traffic at the moment. I'm pretty happy with it so far I was wondering if there's a way to automate the kw research.


+rep
 
keywords cpa offers

I'm going to be running cpa offers from copeac and azoolge so that is why I wanted to know about keyword research as far as a means of generating traffic. But when it comes to promoting cpa offers would it make sense to promote them organically? If I was to promote offers using organic methods how long would it take for me to drive traffic to those offers using organic methods.

Thanks for the responses guys and thanks for the clarification BlondeTM.
 
mistawright said:
I'm going to be running cpa offers from copeac and azoolge so that is why I wanted to know about keyword research as far as a means of generating traffic. But when it comes to promoting cpa offers would it make sense to promote them organically? If I was to promote offers using organic methods how long would it take for me to drive traffic to those offers using organic methods.

Thanks for the responses guys and thanks for the clarification BlondeTM.
Click to expand...

depends, days to months.
 
cpa and organic methods

I'm guessing that if one is supposed to promote cpa offers through organic methods it will be done through methods such as blogging and advertising on sites like u.s. free ads. Am I correct? And if that is the case would it also make sense to use adwords to drive traffic to those areas as well?
 
mistawright said:
I'm guessing that if one is supposed to promote cpa offers through organic methods it will be done through methods such as blogging and advertising on sites like u.s. free ads. Am I correct? And if that is the case would it also make sense to use adwords to drive traffic to those areas as well?
Click to expand...

bingo!
 
Nichebot

illkitty: I see you have a link to nichebot in your sig. How do you feel about nichebot. I currently subscribe to them but don't believe I am using the tool properly. Is this what you use mainly to generate keywords?
 
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