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.

Online Marketing For The Solo SEO

Being in the SEO industry, I have developed habits of using certain SEO tools, certain market research tools and certain keyword research tools. All of which I can say I am very happy with. I cannot remember the last time an online marketing tool actually made me step back and take notice.

Throughout my daily trawl of the goldmine of online marketing advice offered over at Marketing Pilgrim I noticed a review of a little service offered Michael Jensen. This service, SoloSEO, absolutely blew me away. Don’t let the simple interface fool you, this tool has absolutely EVERYTHING needed to manage an organic search engine optimisation campaign.

The first thing I noticed was the simple “Step By Step” guidance approach. This tool takes you through the the very basic SEO campaign management steps one by one explaining why each is important and providing checkmarks along the way to make sure you have not overlooked a particular task.

The feature that impresses me most about the SEO Project Management Tool is the Keyword Finder tool. I really like the DigitalPoint tool but it leaves a lot out when it comes to Wordtracker results. The SoloSEO tool has a really cool feature that lines up results from Wordtracker (Complete results), Overture AND Google Adwords Management. Viewing them side by side allows for tremendously simple analysis.

A couple of issues I would like to see addresses are the keyword duplicates . First of all, when adding the keywords to your “keeper List” the tool does not tell you that you have already added it from another source. Second of all, I would love to see the duplicates for upper and lower case words eliminated. It would also be wonderful to dee the daily or monthly search volume next to them. I would also like to be able to edit keywords inline in the keyword list.

The next feature I really liked was the Link Search Tool. This allows you to find links that your competitors have and links accepting submissions for your niche. And it gives a LOT of options and methods to search for links.

Among the plethora of other tools, there is one more that really shines. The reporting feature. Although a little slow for larger reporting queries, the results are displayed in wonderfully simple way that you can export and download. Wonderful for printing off and showing results.

After testing this tool for well over two weeks, I can safely say that I will be ditching many of my tools in favor of SoloSEO. The simple approach, unique tools and very modest approach makes this a tool really worth considering. Weather you use it for a single Search Engine Optimisation campaign, or use it to manage many in-house projects, I am sure you will find SoloSEO has a lot to offer.