Keyword Research The Hard Way
Over the past couple of weeks I have been spending a lot of time learning how to build BANS sites. There are three challenges to building BANS sites, keyword research, building links, and getting indexed. In this post I want to focus on what I have learned about keyword research. I’ve learned there are basically two was to do keyword research the hard way and the easy way. I will be going over both ways of doing keyword research. But, in this post I am only going to cover the hard way to do keyword research.
Whether you do keyword research the hard way or the easy way the quality of the results is still dependent on your understanding of the niche you are targeting and your ability to choose keywords the right way.
As we all know the goal with keyword research is to find keywords or keyword phrases that search users might use to find our web site, blog or whatever. Because no one person thinks like another and our individual experiences influence how complete tasks being able to develop a list of targeted keywords is a key factor in online success.
Keyword Research Building The List
Building a list of say a few hundred keywords and keyword phrases by sitting down and just writing up a list would be nearly impossible. I don’t know of anyone that builds a keyword list that way. If you cannot afford to subscribe to services like Keyword Discovery or WordTracker then you are pretty dependent on free services such as the free WordTracker keyword tool, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, or the keyword tool from SEO book. you can get varying degrees of information from these tools. But, none of them are the holy grail of keyword research.
Of the three mentioned tools the best is the one from SEO Book. Primarily the keyword research tool from SEO Book stands out because it aggregates information from most of the better free tools that are available. But, because they are free tools you will always question the accuracy of the data. Moreover, at times each tool will give you a different set of words or phrases. So, which tool is more accurate?
At this point you are only trying to build a list of keyword to start your research from. These tools really only help you build a list of key words. Yes each tool gives you a bit of different information about the keyword or phrase. However, they do not do any processing on the keywords and phrases they return to you. That is left up to you to accomplish.
Keyword Research Processing The List
To begin processing these keywords and phrases and to start determining how competitive each keyword is and extracting the long tail phrases from the rest you have to export the data to a spread sheet like Excel. Once you have the data situated in a usable format in the spreadsheet you will need to manually search each term in Google to determine the number of competing pages.
Can you imagine how long this would take to do with a keyword lit containing several hundred keywords and keyword phrases. Once you have determined the number of competing pages you can then use a the basic formula of (searches /(searches*page results) to determine the KEI for each entry. This is not really very time consuming using the copy paste function. Now you have to determine which base keywords you are going to use from your list.
Because you now have the KEI to help guide you it should not take long to determine which keyword phrases you can be competitive for. But, KEI does not give you the whole picture. You need more information to make a well informed decision. Sometimes KEI makes a niche look more competitive than it really is. The vice versa is true as well. Sometimes KEI makes a keyword phrase look less competitive than it really is as well.
Free Tools For Keyword Research And SEO Analysis
You can use free tools like SEO Quake and SEO For FireFox to look at the competitive nature of the pages ranking for the keyword phrases you are targeting. These tools are good for limited use. Here again these tools are free. Although they will help you in your keyword research they will not give you the information you need to be competitive in a timely manner.
But if you are building BANS store you have only just begun the process. You now have your site and main menu keywords. You will now need to start the process over for each keyword to drill down to the long tail keyword phrases to build your second level menu. These are the keyword phrases that you should be more competitive for. But imagine if you had 10 or 15 menu items for a particular niche that you were building a BANS site for. Just the keyword research process, alone, would take several days. Much less the time it will take to do the competitive analysis necessary to make a well informed decision.
Now that you have looked at the traffic, KEI, and the relative competitiveness of the keyword phrases you would like to target you might think you are ready to move on, but you are not.
You now need to look at the back links that your competitors have been able to build. Without knowing the PR of the linking page and the anchor text used you have no idea what you will need to accomplish to move up in the ranks. Just like with anything else SEO related there are free tools to help you. Just do a google search for backlink analysis and you will find a lot of them. But, remember these tools are mostly free for a reason. They are limited in what they can do for you.
Keyword Research The Hard Way Conclusion
Keyword research is not just building a list of potentially useable keywords, keyword phrases and long tail phrases. It is also competitive analysis of the web sites ranking for those keyword phrases. You have to have the right tools for the job.
Using free tools to manually build and process a list of keywords to find the best long tail keyword phrases is doing keyword research the hard way. Time is money, so if you think you are saving money by using free research tools you are only fooling yourself. When I first started building BANS sites I got bogged down in keyword research and frustrated by the length of time it was taking. So, instead of taking the time to find the true long tail keyword phrases of their niches I rushed the process and used keywords that I thought I could be competitive for. Bad move on my part now I am stuck with 5 nearly completed BANS sites that will never be very competitive.
There is an easier way. Next Time.
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The is definitely the hard way to do keyword research. Paid tools really speed things up.
Tools like wordtracker make this all important task sooooooo much quicker, but getting the basics down in tutes like this is still helpful, particularly for new marketers. Once they understand the premise on which keyword research tools operate on, it makes it more effective IMO.
Keyword research is always hard to do. Even with good software keyword research can be a very time consuming process. You have to have a strategy guiding you in your keyword research. You really need to know what you are looking for. If you take “I’ll know what i am looking for when I see it,” approach then you will loose more often than you will win.
Keyword research is a never ending process. Just because you create the first list does not mean you then forget about updating your keyword list.
You are absolutely correct. keyword research is very hard to do correctly. But, having the right keyword research tools really speeds up the process and enables you to look at more keywords than you would normally have the stamina to look at. more often than not you will have to use many different tools at a time to get the different angles on the keywords you are researching. For instance one tool may give you excellent information on competing pages and keyword density but horrible link data. It really requires several tools. i have not found one tool that can trruly do complete keyword research. In some ways I am glad i have not foiund such a tool. I think that there are many people that are too dependent on the tools they use for keyword research and never look at the niche they want to target in a true hands on way. To get the most out of kewyword research you really have to use both an automated and manual approach.
It is not so much that keyword research is hard to do correctly, as it is time consuming to do and learn. The more you do keyword research the better feel you will get or it. You will get a good understanding of wht you are trying to do and what you are capable of doing.