If you had not guessed it I am finally going to dive deeper into my keyword analysis, and keyword research in this post.  People ask me all the time, “How do you find the best keywords to go after?”, “How do you go about YOUR keyword analysis/research?” 

Step One:

Plain and simple, you do not need to try to go after the #1 keyword that everyone else is going after.  Lets explore that. You need to be familiar with the tools, and websites you use to find keywords that people are actually searching for.  

• First site: http://inventory.overture.com (called the keyword selector tool)  This will give us the number of searches for phrases on the search engine Yahoo!.  So with this tool we can get a good idea as to what people are searching for.  A reminder that Google gets about 62% of search traffic, so figure in that number on top of Yahoo! for the searches Google gets.  Another great keyword suggestion tool that comes from Aaron Wall of SEO BOOK (Information taken from SEOBOOK.com)

• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool - tool shows top keyword phrases from Overture. Also

  • links to other keyword research tools, including:
    • Overture View Bid
    • CompareYourClicks Bid Viewer
    • Google Suggest (popular Google search phrases)
    • Google AdWords Keyword Sandbox
    • NicheBot (which pulls data from WordTracker)
  • the tool also links at various vertical databases, blog searches, and tagging systems to show you the top results from other information sources.

Step Two:

The next site you will need is Google.  You need to find out how many sites you are going up against.  So lets say you have a keyword like “mattress” that brings back 250k plus relsults on the keyword selector tool, how many sites will come up on Google when you search for that keyword?  It happens to be over 32 million results.  This number is not the number of the people selling mattresses so its not a good number for us base our decision on.  32 million is a huge number though, we do not need to try and get ranked for such a general word when there are hundreds of words that are more targeted that people are looking for.  

Examples:  (these are just a few of the additional results given to us)

So find a keyword that is more targeted to the specific product/service you are offering.  Or you can narrow it down Geographically.  Better words to go after (based on the number of sites on Google) would be words like:  Latex memory foam mattress, memory foam mattress, mattress toppers.  You can add in the location to any of those such as Phoeonix Memory Foam Mattress (if you are located in the AZ area).  Instead of getting results like 32 million you will get results in the 10’s of thousands when you are more specific.  I don’t need to be a brain surgeon to figure out which word would be easier to get ranked for … one that has 32 million site results or one that has 25,000. 

In conclusion …

So this is why I say “You don’t need the top searched keyword”  All you need to do is find the really targeted keywords that people are still looking for and make sure you are going up against thousands, not millions when you are first starting out with a new site.  I only go after smaller words on my Rocky Mountain Mattress website and I get an average of 600 unique visitors a day for very specific phrases that bring me higher conversion. You can always work up to bigger words once you are established, but be realisitic.  

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