Step 1. Start with a common word or phrase that is appropriate to your business
Start simple. Your starting point does not need to be clever or
creative. All you need is a common word or short phrase relevant to your
business - Wordtracker will help you find cleverer keywords later.
Suppose you sell chocolate online. A good starting point for your business would be the word chocolate
Using Wordtracker's Keywords tool, you can find thousands of keywords that all contain the word chocolate.
It couldn’t be easier to start your keyword research - just click the ‘Quick research’ tab and get going!
You can just enter a single seed keyword (as we said, if you’re researching chocolate, use chocolate).
In a few seconds you’ll see up to 10,000 keywords (depending on your
subscription level) containing the word ‘chocolate’ appear in your list,
sorted in order of popularity, or Search Volume. There are several
things you can do with this list, but let’s start by talking about the
numbers you’ll see.
Search Volume
This is the number of times each keyword has been searched in the
Wordtracker database (Wordtracker’s data comes from a major search
engine advertising network which passes us, on average, 3.5 billion
worldwide searches per month. They deliver traffic from hundreds of
niche web properties, search engines and portals. The data is from the
last calendar month. These are real searches made by real people).
If you’re new to keyword research, look for relatively high volumes. A
high number (against other keywords in the same list) means that lots
of people are searching using that keyword.
These figures are not meant to be used as an exact number of
searches, or a prediction. It’s best to think of this figure (and all
the other numbers you see in the tools) as a relative value. Don't worry
too much about the numbers themselves. Instead, consider the
relationship between the keywords: it’s easier and more helpful to see
that chocolate is searched more times than healthy chocolate than it is to try to work out exactly how many people will search for each term in the next day or week.
Competition
The competition number gives us an idea of how many web pages already
exist that have been optimized for each keyword. A high number is bad,
as it means lots of websites will be competing with you.
The competition figures are on a scale from 0-100. A figure of 100
means lots of competition, so it will be difficult to rank on the first
page of Google’s results for that keyword.
If you’re new to keyword research, just remember: high competition figures are bad.
IAAT
IAAT stands for 'In Anchor And Title'. This figure tells us how many
pages have been directly optimized for each keyword by having the
keyword both in the title tag and also in anchor text in a link from an
external domain (somebody else's website). It's a good measure of how
much direct competition exists for a keyword, and can help inform your
choices. The Competition figure above is based on IAAT.
KEI - Keyword Effectiveness Index
KEI is one of the quickest ways to find keywords with good potential -
that is, those keywords which are likely to help your site attract more
traffic. It looks like this:
It's a scaled metric, so you'll never see a KEI of more than 100.
That doesn't mean that we can go back to the old method of thinking that
a KEI of X or Y is good, or that a KEI of Z is bad - it's still
important to look at the numbers as relative values inside a niche -
what might be a good KEI for one niche may prove not to be so useful
inside another niche - so do look at the relationships between the
figures in this column rather than just relying on pure numbers.
So how do we use KEI? Simple! There are two ways that we can find
helpful figures - we're looking for a high KEI as these are the keywords
that show potential. The first thing to do is to sort the column by KEI
just by clicking the column header. We can see the highest ones at the
top of the list instantly, so look for the keywords that are relevant to
your business.
The second way you can narrow down your list according to KEI (if
you're familiar with the market you're targeting and have a rough idea
around search behaviour in that niche) is to use the filters on the
right to exclude keywords with a KEI below a certain figure - you'll
probably get more of a feel of what to exclude the more you work with a
niche.
How do we find keywords with potential?
Often, you'll find thousands of relevant keywords. You can't
necessarily target all of them, but you can use the filters (at the top
of the Keyword results table) to narrow down your keyword list:
You can include or exclude keywords that contain certain words (so if you’re looking at a list for chocolate, you can show (or hide) all the keywords that also contain truffles.
It’s easy to filter out keywords with high competition (high
competition is bad) or low search volume (bad again, a low search volume
means the keyword gets little search traffic).
If you’re new to keyword research, use the filters to look for
keywords that are popular (high search volume) and have little
competition (low competition figure). You can filter by KEI as well as
IAAT, or just by keywords containing (or not containing) certain words.
Content ideas
Struggling for content ideas? Then you’re not alone. Lots of people find it difficult to know what to write about.
The Wordtracker Keywords tool
can give you great ideas for creating content. Your site visitors are
likely to have a ton of questions about all sorts of things. They want
answers and many of them will go to a search engine to find them. When
they do so, they often enter their entire question in the search box and
hope to find a quick answer. By providing the answers to their
questions, you’ll create interesting copy and pick up a lot of relevant
traffic for your website.
You can tap into these questions in your market - just choose the the Keyword Questions filter and hit 'Apply'...
...and the Keywords tool will generate content ideas by showing you the questions people are asking in your industry.
Now go through the results and pick out the questions that are
important to your business and use them to create content. Once you’ve
got your list of relevant questions, you can either create a blog post
for each question or group the questions and answer several in one piece
of content.
In doing so, use the question as the main title in your content and decide on a secondary keyword that you might also use.
So if, I decide to write an article on ‘how to make chocolate’, I
might decide that my secondary keyword is ‘chocolate recipes’ - so I
would make sure that my article also mentioned ‘chocolate recipes’.
With the keyword questions tool, you don’t have to worry too much
about what the numbers mean. All you really need to know is that people
are asking those questions online – and then provide the answer for
them, but don’t just stop at ‘chocolate’ - try using the Keyword
Questions filter on your other lists, and you’ll soon have a host of
great content ideas.
Multiple filters
It’s not easy to identify the best keywords for your site when you’re choosing from lists of thousands.
You can use multiple filters to refine your lists, like this:
Of course, you might want to get a second opinion on your
niche. We’ve made this easy for you to do. Just choose the SEMrush
option next to the seed word box:
You’ll see your original seed keyword in the box on the left. Just
click ‘Search’ and you can see all of SEMrush's suggestions and Search
Volume estimates. Don't expect to see the same results as you saw in the
Wordtracker numbers. Each list is likely to report its own distinct
keywords, and there are likely to be great suggestions in each.
Any filters you set up are also remembered.
Exporting Keywords:
This is a simple task - just hit the 'Export' button, and you'll be
able to download a csv file of all the keywords on the page (or just
some that you've selected) so you can share or manipulate the data as
you please.
So to recap quickly ...
We’ve shown how you can:
- Build a keyword niche on the ‘Quick research’ page using either Wordtracker or Google data.
- Filter each list to find terms with high volume and low competition
- Export your data so you can share it with colleagues or clients.
If you're new to keyword research, it's worth taking some time to
familiarize yourself with the tool before moving on. If you've
questions, please let us know at the bottom of this page.
If you’ve got to grips with the tool, we'll move on to the next stage
of working with keywords. We’re going to look at how to use the
Keywords tool to manage our keywords in an organized way.
Wordtracker’s Keyword research tool works in Projects and lists. Here's how to set those up:
Step 2. Setting up a Project - organize your work
Google loves clear, logical site structure and the Keywords tool can
help you create one. You should start by setting up a project for the
website you're working on.
This couldn’t be easier - just make a relevant search, and then hit
the 'save' button. You'll see a window open here, and you're ready to
save all of the keywords in the list that are selected (all the keywords
are selected when they're shown to you by default).
- Give your project a name
- Add a list name
- that's it!
Your Project can hold all the work you do for a single website. The
work is broken down into lists. Starting a Project is really
straightforward - you can do it with a single keyword (you’ll be amazed
how quickly this can grow).
Adding Keywords
You can add keywords to an existing project or list just by selecting them in the window when you've pressed the 'save' button.
You know more about your business than anyone else, so it’s likely
you can think of relevant keywords that you’d like to investigate. You
can easily paste in your own keywords (up to 500) to the tool - just
paste them into the seed word box, and choose 'Exact Keyword Only' in
the search options - we'll give you data for every one of those keywords
that's in our database.
Another incredibly quick way to build up groups of keywords that are
relevant to your work is to use the 'search and save' function. You'll
see this when you click on the little triangle next to each keyword:
Click 'Search for this keyword, and a fresh search on that keyword
(with your previous settings) will be run on the page. Select 'Search
and save for this keyword', then the search will be run and saved (once
you've chosen a Project and list to save to) and you can carry on
building your lists up - each list could contain keywords to optimize
one or more pages.
Reviewing your Project:
Head to the 'Projects' link at the top of the page, and you'll see
the last three projects you worked on, and a link to an 'all Projects'
page:
Head to the Project you want to work with, and it'll appear on the
page (I've just added a very few lists here to give you an idea, but
there are no limits to the amount of lists you can save in a project).
Google loves well organized websites, and so will your users. If your site architecture and internal linking make sense, it will be easier for search engines to find and index your pages and, more importantly, for your visitors to navigate through your site.
As we mentioned, the Keyword research tool helps you create a clear
site structure with the minimum of effort. Let's say you've a category
page on your site that's dedicated to selling dark chocolate. You'd like
to add more pages and are looking for relevant long tail keywords you can target.
When you find a keyword you want to work with (dark chocolate),
you can create new lists really easily. The screenshot below is from a
list based on 'dark chocolate'. Again, you can use 'Search & Save'
to build up further lists based on the keywords in that list.
Now all you have to do is rush off and optimize your web pages for
those phrases, right? Wrong! That is what most people will do and as a
result, they will miss out on some very powerful keywords that are not
immediately obvious. There’s more work to do - let’s take a look ...
Step 3. Find words that are related to your original keyword
Successful sites will attract traffic from many thousands - often
millions - of keywords. So, it's a good idea to broaden your research
and look for keywords you might not immediately think of.
Let's take our chocolate example. Our task is not to find keywords that contain the word chocolate. In fact, it's just the opposite - we want to find relevant keywords that don’t contain the word chocolate.
The reason for this is to extend your thinking about how you optimize
your pages, and the content you create. After all, if you're only
targeting chocolate you're missing the opportunities presented by truffles, hot fudge, and candy.
The Related Keywords tool can help you find hundreds of keywords that
you’ve not thought about that could bring more traffic and business to
your site. It will help you unearth whole niches you would otherwise
miss.
Head to the Related keywords tool (just on the left of the page) , and enter a
word relevant to what you're researching. Wordtracker searches websites
that score well on search engines for the search 'chocolate' and
extracts the phrases that those sites use. You'll find relevant keywords
such as dark chocolate candy, dark baking chocolate, candy gifts, and so on.
You’ll find lots of keywords that you might not have considered
before - lots of terms that your potential site visitors are using in
their searches.
Read through the list of related keywords and pick the ones that you
feel are relevant to your business - either products or services that
you provide, or relevant topics that you can produce helpful good
quality content around. Again, you can use the 'Search' or 'Search &
save' to build lists from the Related tool results.
Your input and insight are required: Wordtracker is not a machine
that churns out a list of keywords that will automatically bring you
traffic and success. If that was so, everybody would get the same
results. Rather, Wordtracker is a tool that allows you to find your best keywords.
Keyword research doesn't stop
The average person will do their keyword research on a single basic
term and stop. And, the average person will do their keyword research
once - perhaps when they are building their website - and then forget
about it.
But that is the way to get average results. Effective keyword research is an ongoing process and to get outstanding results you must work at it regularly.
If you want to be a successful keyword researcher:
1. Regularly check your keyword counts using Wordtracker's Keywords tool. Counts can go up and down over time, and keywords can become more (or less) popular.
2. Continue to add keywords to your Projects. The more money-making keywords there are on your site, the more profitable your online business is likely to be.
3. Monitor how well their keywords do. Performance will always come from a mixture of the following types of keywords:
- Keywords that bring good traffic and good conversions (these are the words people use when they are in buying mode.)
- Keywords that bring good traffic but poor conversions (these are the words people use when they are in research mode.)
- Keywords that bring low traffic but great conversions (these are the words that represent buying behavior in niche markets.)
Next we'll look at how you can pick the most competitive keywords
from your research and how you can use those keywords in your website
copy (the text that appears on your web pages).
