How to Find Keywords – Part 2

how to find keywords

In this post I want to share with you how to find Keywords which are relevant to your content and which will help you to get more traffic to your site.

In Part 1 of this post I explained why Keywords are so important and why you are potentially wasting your time if you are publishing without doing your keyword research.  You can find Part 1 here.

Four Golden Rules of Keyword Research

  1. Relevance
  2. Traffic
  3. Competition
  4. Commerciality

Long Tail Keywords

What we are looking to find are the long tail keywords which are transactional.

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A long tail keyword is a phrase which is less frequently searched for. It is normally three or more words long and it benefits from less competition than the main keywords but it may still be really relevant to your topic. Because people are searching for this phrase, it can drive traffic to your site but you have a better chance of ranking on page one of Google for this due to the lower competition.
Firstly we need to identify transactional long tail keywords based around our main keyword.

Transactional keywords are those where there is an search intent to make a purchase or a transaction. This means we know that our audience is ready to buy rather than just trying to find something or discover some information.

(By the way, the keyword I am targeting for this article is “How To Find Keywords”)

Using Google Search to Identify Long Tail Keywords

The easiest way to check for some long tail keywords is simply to open Google.  When you put your main keyword into the search box, Google offers you some drop down options which are – yes you are way ahead of me – long tail keywords.  You can make a note of these.

Then when you have selected a keyword (or phrase to search for), click search and then go to the bottom of the page.  Google will offer you a list of ten or so further phrases which are effectively related long tail keywords.  How cool and simple is that.

Google Keyword Finder

Google make it even easier and give you data to work with too. Google Keyword Finder is a great tool

Google keyword finder is like a widow into the whole amazing world of Google advertising and they are sharing detailed information about millions of keywords with you for free.

This free tool enables you to search for long tail keywords and Google provides you with information about traffic and competition for you to evaluate the best keywords for your topic.

Keyword.io

Keyword.io is an online tool which will enable you to discover and download (one click to excel or csv) a long list of long tail keywords.  It is as simple as going to the site, typing in your main keyword into the search box and hitting search.

Then across to the right hand side at the top is a download option which will enable you to download this list to an excel spreadsheet or a csv file.

This will provide you with a list of a couple of hundred long tail keywords which you can read through and then identify from these a list of long tail keywords which are transactional – just look for the sense of intent to buy or take action

You can then check them out in Google Keyword finder or Market Samurai, to identify which are the best keywords for you to use.

Market Samurai

I also use Market Samurai  which is a great tool but is paid.  I want to explain some of the key steps in Market Samurai as these will also help you to understand the difference between good and not so good long tail keywords.  You can go back to Google Keyword finder and use the same concepts its just not quite so “done for you” as it is with this paid tool – which is why I think it was worth buying in the first place.

If you have Market Samurai, you can follow this guide.  If you have not yet invested, don’t worry, just follow along so that you can see what Market Samurai does and how it can help you identify great long tail keywords. We are going to define what we mean by “great” below.

Time after all is money.

Traffic

We want to find keywords which will drive a baseline level of traffic to our site.

Once we have identified our Long Tail Keywords, we need to work out which are worth targeting. This is a partly to do with the amount of traffic related to them.

There is a big difference between the number of searches and the number of people who click through. This is SEO Traffic. We don’t just want searches, we want traffic.

In Market Samurai you should set a traffic filter of 30 = keywords which can deliver at least 30 visits a day to the number one listed site in Google for this term. This eliminates keywords with little or no traffic.

Market Competition

Some keywords have strong competition, other keywords have lower competition.

The amount of competition = how many people actively competing for a particular keyword phrase

TA Comp = Title and Anchor Text competition

We are looking for keywords which have low competition so that we have more chance to rank on the first page of Google.

Strength of Competition

Click on Key icon in Market Samurai to create new Tab and then use SEO Competition module and click on the Generate Results button.  This will populate the table of results and colour code them so that you can identify strong, average and weak results for the first 10 results in Google for this keyword.

The more green squares the weaker the competition

The definition of competition is a measure of how Google ranks the sites compared to your own in terms of Page Rank, Backlinks and other metrics. If your site is relatively weak compared to those showing up on the first page of Google you may not be able to out rank them and therefore appear not be able tp appear on page one yourself.

How to Assess Commerciality

Google calculates the value of a keyword, based around how much people are prepared to pay to show up on the first page of Google with a paid placement for that keyword.  They tell you this and therefore you can gauge how valuable a keyword is.  The value is directly related to the value that the keyword can generate for the people placing the ad.

We need to measure of the potential profitability of a keyword phrase

In Market Samurai we need to look at Average Adwords Cost Per Click – AWAPC
This is an indication of the commercial value of the keyword.
Make sure at this point that you set to “no filters” in Market Samurai for now so that we can see all the keywords.
Then Click on AWAPC column to rank them and to understand value of the different keywords.

Value per visitor 

If we combine the amount of traffic with the cost we can identify the value per visitor.

SEO Value or SEOV is obtained by multiplying SEO Traffic x Adwords Cost Per Click
Within Market Samurai, we recommend that use a filter of $30 – will filter out any phrases which will generate less than $900 per month

This filter therefore ensures that you only look at commercially viable keywords

Golden Rules

To recap then, these are the four Golden Rules 

  1. Relevance
  2. Traffic
  3. Competition
  4. Commerciality

The Golden Rules preset filter automatically filters out a large number of keywords leaving you with the best ones to look at, so you can go from your Keyword research straight to keyword analysis and then screen out for both unsuitable (non transactional and non-relevant) keywords and those that do not meet the criteria of the Four Golden Rules.

Summary

If you are regularly posting to a blog, your posts should have purpose.

The post should deliver useful information or at least entertain your audience and also be useful for you in helping you to build your reputation, traffic, engagement and ultimately your business.

But your posts are useless if no one reads them and if they do not tie into long tail keywords, the search engines will not present them to potential new readers in organic search. Therefore you must ensure that you follow the steps outlined here to help your content appear in Google and other search engines.

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