Finding the right keywords using an online keyword research tool

July 15, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 15 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Attracting Visitors, Sitesell and Site Build It 

For the last several months, I’ve been researching information to help me build a new website that will be found in the search engine results.

Choosing keywords is more of an art than a science, despite what some people say about it. It’s not enough to write pages on a site using topics related to the most searched keywords or the most used keywords.

If it were that simple, then we’d all buy a list of the top 1000 keywords and write pages around them.

If you’re new to keyword research, you may have used one of the online keyword research tools that provides a list of phrases that people have searched for lately. With some of them, you enter a word or phrase, and a few seconds later you get a list of related phrases that contain the words you entered along with other words.

For example, this morning I was doing some research on what people were really using when trying to find a place to eat. I’m promoting a local family-style restaurant, but could not find good keywords to attract visitors. So, I did some vertical research on words like eating, eat, food, restaurant, dining, and a few others. Over a couple of hours, I looked at a couple of thousand long tail keyword phrases that contained one or more of those words. None of them had the numbers I was looking for, however.

Later, I did a lateral search for keywords related to restaurants. This produced several hundred keywords that were found on the top-ranked pages about restaurants in Google, but which did not contain the word, “restaurant.”

After that, I researched the word, “dining,” but most of the good-ranking phrases were related to furniture, not restaurants.

So, that’s the challenge. I need to find what real people are searching for when they want to find a good place to eat. I’ll keep working on it.

Finding the right keywords

Earlier, I mentioned that lots of people look for the most searched keywords and use them when writing their pages.

That’s an important consideration, but it overlooks something equally, or possibly more, important — how many other people are doing the same thing. In other words, what’s your competition?

About a decade ago, Ken Evoy wrote an ebook called Make Your Site Sell!, where he talked a lot about being found by the search engines. He was the first author I found who talked about both supply and demand when it came to keyword research.

By writing about topics in the top searched keywords, we are doing part of it right. We’re writing about things that have a high demand — people searching for them on the search engines.

But, what about all the other people who are doing the same thing? How many other pages are there that are competing with you for those search engine results?

I don’t know about you, but I want to find just the right combination of words that have a high demand and a low supply. Then I’ll invest the time and effort to write about them.

If you have a choice of two phrases with approximately equal demand, but one has ten times the number of competitors as the other, which one would you choose to write about?

I’d choose the one with the least number of competitors — most of the time. Now and then, I write about something that I know I probably won’t rank highly for, just because I want to write about it.

I do basic keyword research, but don’t get bogged down in all the SEO (search engine optimization) discussions and postulating. I don’t have time or energy to waste trying to guess the exact keyword density Google wants. Page rank discussions leave me bored to tears.

What I want is a tool that helps me find the right keywords and then get on with my life.

This morning, I got a very pleasant surprise.

Sitesell introduced version 3 of their Brainstorm It! tool

Now, if you’ve been reading along lately, you know that I’m building a new site for promoting local brick-and-mortar businesses and the site is powered by Site Build It!, the main product offered by Sitesell.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been using the beta version of Brainstorm It! 3, but the actual current version was 2.2.

This morning, without thinking, before my first cup of coffee, I logged into Site Central and clicked the Brainstorming link.

I was pleasantly surprised to see version 3 load in my browser. As late as last evening, I had to go to the beta address to use version 3, but this morning, it’s the standard version.

I logged into the Sitesell members-only forums and found the announcement by Ken Evoy that the new version had been successfully deployed overnight.

Not only does version 3 produce better results, it’s much, much faster than version 2, even on the slow dial-up connection I have.

Everything is working as expected. All the hundreds of top-ranking keyword phrases I had in my Master Keyword List (MKL) were there. The changeover was painless and I didn’t have to do anything at all.

So, how much is the price of Site Build It! going up because of this new tool? Not one penny. We continue to get more and more functionality with SBI at the same price. You gotta love that.

Currently I have about 600 keywords in my MKL that have a relatively high demand and low supply. Over time, I’ll keep on researching, comparing, and pruning this list to make sure that I’ll spend my time well, writing about topics that Google may rank highly.

Although it isn’t perfect, and I have to use my own intelligence and intuition when comparing which long tail keyword phrases to use, the new version three of Brainstorm It! is already a very nice tool in my Internet marketing arsenal.

Of course, it comes at no extra charge with a Site Build It! subscription.

It almost makes keyword research fun.

Act on your dream!

JD

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