Finding the Best Keyword Phrases For Your Marketing Campaign
An important part of your marketing campaign is choosing the best
keyword phrases for your website. A natural place for people to
start usually is seeing what their competitors are targeting on
their site. This is a good place to start to build a preliminary
list that you use to start your research, but it doesn't end here.
The reason is that your competitors may not be targeting the best
keyword phrases on their site, so it is necessary to do the research
and make sure you have the best keywords.
There are a number of tools out there, the ones that we'll be
covering are Wordtracker, Overture Keyword Selector Tool, and
testing PPC campaigns such as Google Adwords.
The Overture Keyword Selector Tool
This is a great way to find out what people are searching for, but
there is one very important thing to remember with Overtures tool.
It clumps singular, plurals and misspellings together. For example,
if I search for playing cards, playing card, or
card playing, I will get the same search number of 29,656
returned. Using the Overture Keyword Selector Tool for organic
search results, you need to take the keywords you find and further
investigate. Using the 3 phrases above, we would want to find out
which phrases are getting searched for more. This is where
Wordtracker comes in handy.
Wordtracker
Wordtracker also incorporates the overture database, so you can
start with Wordtracker if you have an account with them, there are
also some free versions with limited data, but still useful
available such as
DigitalPoints tool. Wordtracker is helpful that it
differentiates between singular, plurals and different spellings and
so on so we can get a better idea of what people are searching for.
The drawback with Wordtracker is that as you will notice, the search
numbers are not as high as they would be as Overtures would be.
Wordtracker gets its data from the Meta search engines. Wordtrackers
results are from the past 60 days from approximately 338 million
searches, and overtures numbers are for the past month.
Comparing the Data
By now you will have a list of keywords from both sources and its
good to compare the data/numbers in a table. I find using excel and
also incorporate the competiting number of websites for the exact
phrases a great help as well. The more sites that are competiting
for a certain keyword phrase, you can get somewhat of an idea of how
hard it will be to achieve rankings.
Using PPC Campaigns to Test Your Findings
For this article, we'll use Google Adwords. You can use all the
keyword phrases (or which ones you want) and test them out in Google
to see what keyword phrases actually are getting searched for more.
The great thing is that over a period of time, you can see the
searches, and you can also see what is working best for your site
with the click thrus from your ads. Writing proper ads leads into a
different topic that we will touch on later, but for now, you are
able to see what people are searching for, and you can include this
into your findings along with the data you have already found.
Conclusion
With an approach such as this (or something on a similar level) you
will be better equipped to make a better educated decision on
choosing the best keyword phrases for your site. Also, if something
ends up not working, it is as simple as changing the keywords on
your content/copy and waiting for the results in the search engines.
These are a few sites that you can use to further your investigation
Gerard Manning
Search Engine Placement Specialist
Search Engine Marketing Agency :: Manning
Search Marketing
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