Keyword Tools - Why Pay When You Can Use Google

I own all the keyword tools on the market and I’m also signed up with Nichebot but time and again the only keyword tools I use for my research are the Google tools and best of all, they are all free!

When I’m writing a post for this blog and most of my other sites I write the article first before doing any research. I write the draft on the topic I had in mind, come up with some keywords that suit the draft and then research them using Google’s keyword tools. Once I decide which phrase is the one I can compete for, I go through the article again and just tweak it a bit to get my phrase in where ever appropriate.

OK, lets walk through the keyword research for this article. I’ve done my draft and from experience I have a good idea of which keyword phrases I can seo the article for. Obviously you are only going to see the finished optimized post so you will just have to take my word for it that it’s written but as yet not optimized.

So looking at the article the obvious keyword phrases are “keyword research” and “keyword tool” although experience tells me they may be too competitive, they are good starting points. There are also several tools on the market that are free such as Adwords Digger that I could target with a little tweeking if I can’t find anything else suitable.

I log into my Adwords account (if you haven’t got one, its a free sign up) and go to keyword tools. I enter the first phrase, select “all countries and territories” and hit the “get keyword ideas” button.

Next I sort the results by number of monthly searches by clicking on “Avg Search Volume.”

My first results show “keyword research” has 74 000 searches per month which is high volume but then there is a big drop to second place with just 14 000 searches a month for the term “keyword marketing research.”

This is quite a difference and suggests the first will be too competitive while the second in the list isn’t worth going after unless number 1 in the search results is a probability.

Opening up the Google search engine we first want to know how many people who know what they are doing are targeting “keyword research.”

We do this by entering in the search…….. allintitle:”keyword research” (making sure to use quotes).

This tells us exactly how many pages are using that term in the title tags and if they have it in the title, chances are they know what they are doing and are targeting the phrase. Keyword tools do not give you this kind of info, they just tell you how many searches, how many results. The result for our search is 63 300 which is way too much competition.

My rule of thumb when choosing a keyphrase to go for is as follows:

Less than 15 000 - possible but must be worth the effort ie. lots of searches per month. Check out competition first by visiting the top 10 results and checking page rank, quality etc. If you are up against a page full of wikipedia type sites forget it and move on.

Less than 10 000 - Deffo worth going for and a top 10 should be achievable. Check out top results to see if a break into top 3 is on.

Less than 5000 - Struck gold, less than 5000 pages competing on today’s web for a decent amount of traffic is getting rarer and rarer.

So 63k is way to much competition for a share of 74k searchers so I move on to my next phrase and enter it in the Google tool.

“Keyword Tool” averages 135 000 searches a month which means there will be a lot of competition but second place looks promising: “keyword tools” with 40 500. Back to the Google search engine and search them both with the allintitle:”keyword” again.

“keyword tool” returns 19 600 which isn’t bad for 135 000 searches a month and it could be tempting to have a go except that Google themselves rank 1, 2, 3 and 4th for the term so you can forget getting that high in the results.

“keyword tools” on the other hand returns just 4470 pages competing. It’s going to be hard to optimize for “keyword tools” but less than 5k competing for 40k searches can’t be ignored.

A quick check of the competition sees Google at number 1 spot but anything under that is certainly possible with some fine tuning and promoting.

Now I have the term I want to target I put the draft article into Content Composer and optimize it for the term keyword tools and you are now reading the finished article.

I won’t do any other promoting until this post appears in the results. We’ll then see how high we can climb just using the new Article Marketing Automation from PLRPro.

Check the comments below for updates and also any questions welcomed, just use the comments.