Keyword Research: How to Know Which Terms to Choose

[patrickprecisione]

So I'm doing some keyword research for a friend. I've compiled my master list of possible terms, along with competition, search volume and current ranking for each term.

Now here's the tough part. Choosing which keywords are best to pursue. I've narrowed it down to a few factors that will help me make the decision:

1. Search volume
2. Competition
3. Ranking: The way I see it, if the website is already ranking at 10-20 for this term it's worth pursuing. If they're further down than that, it might not be worth it.
4. Relevancy: What type of search results show up for this keyword? Does it seem like the potential customers are using this term?

My question is- What other considerations should I be taking in to account? What factors are most important when it comes to deciding a keyword is worth pursuing?

[KristineS]

What's your goal? Is it just to get seen? Is it to bring traffic and thus sales to the website? Ranking well is nice, but it's also about what you want that ranking to do for you. If you're hoping to drive sales, than you want to pick keywords that would seem to be sales oriented, or what people would search for if they wanted to make a purchase. If you're just looking to be seen, any keyword might do. Sometimes this is a very fine distinction, but I think it's worth considering.

[vangogh]

One thing to consider is how well the keyword converts. Like Kristine asked what's your goal. I'm guessing it's ultimately to sell something so which keywords actually lead to sales. You would need to be getting some traffic for the keyword already to test and at least in Google, it's getting harder to know which keywords are sending us traffic, but ultimately it's conversions that matter.

Don't overthink it though. It's much harder now to identify which keywords are sending traffic to a site. Harder, though not entirely impossible to get some of the information you want. Look more to which pages of your site and pulling search traffic and think what those pages are about and what words are on the pages. Think of it one level of abstraction higher than the keyword if that makes sense.

[patrickprecisione]

One thing to consider is how well the keyword converts. Like Kristine asked what's your goal. I'm guessing it's ultimately to sell something so which keywords actually lead to sales. You would need to be getting some traffic for the keyword already to test and at least in Google, it's getting harder to know which keywords are sending us traffic, but ultimately it's conversions that matter.

Don't overthink it though. It's much harder now to identify which keywords are sending traffic to a site. Harder, though not entirely impossible to get some of the information you want. Look more to which pages of your site and pulling search traffic and think what those pages are about and what words are on the pages. Think of it one level of abstraction higher than the keyword if that makes sense.

Thanks, Van Gogh. But let's say I'm picking keywords for a brand new website, so I don't have conversion data. What would you say is the best way to choose keywords? Which factors out of the ones I outlined (or even ones I didn't mention) would you say are most important?

[Harold Mansfield]

So I'm doing some keyword research for a friend. I've compiled my master list of possible terms, along with competition, search volume and current ranking for each term.

Now here's the tough part. Choosing which keywords are best to pursue. I've narrowed it down to a few factors that will help me make the decision:

1. Search volume
2. Competition
3. Ranking: The way I see it, if the website is already ranking at 10-20 for this term it's worth pursuing. If they're further down than that, it might not be worth it.
4. Relevancy: What type of search results show up for this keyword? Does it seem like the potential customers are using this term?

My question is- What other considerations should I be taking in to account? What factors are most important when it comes to deciding a keyword is worth pursuing?

The most important consideration is what you are selling. What is the content on the page about?

If you are just looking for subject matter to build a site on...like say to build an Adsense site( which is a waste of time) then you are going about it the correct way. But if you have a specific product or service to sell then that would be your keyword. Trying to match the most popular general terms just to try and attract traffic, yet is only vaguely related to the content on the page, will not work for you.

It is more beneficial to attract the people looking for exactly what you have to offer, than trying to attract everyone and hoping to make a sale from window shoppers.

[patrickprecisione]

What's your goal? Is it just to get seen? Is it to bring traffic and thus sales to the website? Ranking well is nice, but it's also about what you want that ranking to do for you. If you're hoping to drive sales, than you want to pick keywords that would seem to be sales oriented, or what people would search for if they wanted to make a purchase. If you're just looking to be seen, any keyword might do. Sometimes this is a very fine distinction, but I think it's worth considering.

So Kristine. It sounds like what you're saying is the most important factor in choosing keywords is user intent. Would you agree with that?

[vangogh]

What would you say is the best way to choose keywords

I used to like the free Google AdWords Tool. Unfortunately it no longer exists as it did. If you have an AdWords account (you can sign up without actually using AdWords) you can see the latest version of the tool. Here's a post from Moz.com with some additional tools you can use to collect keyword information (http://moz.com/blog/keyword-volume-tools). The difficulty is that Google isn't giving out the information they used to so the data you're looking for is going away.

That's why I'm suggesting not getting too locked in on keyword research. Think about the page you want to attract traffic to. What's it about. Is it selling a product? If so what words and phrases would real people use to search for the product. Similarly if it's information about a topic, what words would real people be searching for to find the information. Ideally we'd be able to find those numbers, but we are losing that data so I'd shift the focus more to getting to know what you can about potential customers and visitors. Go to Twitter or Facebook and search for the topic or product how you would search. See what other words and phrases people use and start building a list.

When writing content for the page, use a mix of words and phrases instead of trying too hard to focus on one or two specific phrases. Keyword data has never been perfectly reliable and now that Google isn't revealing it, it's only going to get less reliable. Switch your focus to the content on the page and making it the best it can be. Figure out how to get real people to share it, which probably means social sites more than search engines. The search engines will follow.

[Freelancier]

The most important consideration is what you are selling.

I'd flip that and say that the most important consideration is what your target audience will search for when they're looking for what you're offering.

It took me about 8 months to figure out that -- for the most part -- my best potential customers searched for my consulting services using three phrases. All the other phrases were secondary to three main ones. A tool wasn't going to tell me that... it showed me hundreds of possible phrases, but didn't give me any clues about the ones that my best potential clients were going to use to find me. So I had to waste a bit of money and monitor the search phrases every few days to see what phrases were getting my ads clicked, and then correlating that with phone calls I was getting.

[Harold Mansfield]

It took me about 8 months to figure out that -- for the most part -- my best potential customers searched for my consulting services using three phrases. All the other phrases were secondary to three main ones. A tool wasn't going to tell me that... it showed me hundreds of possible phrases, but didn't give me any clues about the ones that my best potential clients were going to use to find me. So I had to waste a bit of money and monitor the search phrases every few days to see what phrases were getting my ads clicked, and then correlating that with phone calls I was getting.

That's kind of what I meant. The tools only tell you what people searched for last month. If you are one of only a few service providers, or are selling a new product or service, the tool won't help you.

[billbenson]

I used adwords when I first started my site, both to sell and to see what people were searching for. Just because your adwords ad is targeted at X doesn't mean G won't show your ad for 'Y'. In a month or so you can get a pretty good list of positive and negative keywords that way.

[OlMan]

The easiest way to find good keywords is to find one with a lot of search, low competition, AND a lot of adsence ads running. This means that people think the keyword is so competitive that they do not target it (they don't understand keyword research either) and run paid ads instead.

These keywords have traffic but no one realizes it or capitalizes on it. A quality site will rule this keyword.

[johnkaster]

My question is- What other considerations should I be taking in to account? What factors are most important when it comes to deciding a keyword is worth pursuing?
Patrick, it is not just you check above factors, you will have to use Google’s adwords and check for all dates users statistics. This will help you get exact search query that users are typing. Also while doing this process, select phrase in match type. Do remember that you have to think very hard, I mean in all possible combinations. Why I m saying hard is because it is never easy to bring all combinations of the way users type, but trying out constantly will, for sure, on longer run, give you some of the best keywords to rank on.

[singhabhishek251]

I too have used and has been using Google Adwords for my business ads and because of some unknown reasons I do not trust some other tools. I have seen many people using other tools, but I think that Google must be knowing best about the keywords being searched on this daily and no other tool can provide more accurate info than Google about searches being conducted on this.

[CoolHandCol]

I believe that keyword research is the backbone of any SEO campaign. You can write wonderful content but if it doesn't contain the right keywords (actual and semantic) then it will not rank. You must pick your keywords first and then write content around them.

[Harold Mansfield]

I disagree. Write the content you want to write and find a way to included relevant keywords. Content written with no other consideration that trying to target popular keywords is sucky content. Everything you write is not going to fall within a popular keyword. Especially if you are a leader and not a follower. Leaders set the trends. Besides, SEO isn't the only way to have good content found anymore.

If you write 10 articles, sure throw 3, or 4 in there that are keyword candy. But if that's what all of your articles are no one is going to come back to read your stuff.