The keyword research you never knew about

Nine years in the industry and I think I’ve tried every research tool and method exist on the planet in efforts to find the resource that will do for the hectic time-consuming task called keyword research. It’s the foundation of every web-marketing campaign and cannot be overlooked. Each time I think about keyword research, it shocks me to the core remembering that a real comprehensive tool doesn’t exist, so at Dynamic Search, we developed our own system and I’m going to share it with you today. I’ll be using different tools and resource which most of them are available for little or no cost at all.

First thing first, before we pick under the hood and get our hand dirty, do you know the types of keywords exist? Do you know which type we are after? Here are a few facts you should know:

Over 75% of search queries on Google are of people seeking immediate information and not looking to buy! We are going to aim for the rest of the 25% where the money is.
Five stages of the buying funnel are awareness, interest, learn, shop, and BUY. We’ll be aiming for the money making keyword aka “buying keywords”.
73% of the clicks on the first SERP occur in position 1 to 5. We’ll be aiming to keywords that we have medium to high chances to fit there (sorry, we are not going to compete Amazon).

Phase 1:

Make a raw list keywords or key-phrases would someone use to search for your product/Service on the search engines. That list called also the seed list and it can be as long as you want, although time is of the essence and I suggest keeping it under 30 main phrases that best describe who you are and what you do. eCommerce, you have tons of work here, sorry no shortcuts or automation to replace the human spontaneous common sense thinking.

Phase 2:

“Suck” all the keywords out of your competitors but please don’t go after their Meta keywords! Ha, I had a website and the meta keyword read: “slices is golden”. Seriously, nobody cares about that anymore so don’t look for contributing information there. Okay, so you want to know how to find your real competition keywords? SEMrush offers the top first 5 keywords of any website for free (no subscription or login required). Find your top 10 competitors, run 10 tests, and, you have another 50 keywords added to your list. Who says that they are all good? Nobody, and we’ll probably end up throwing most of them.

Phase 3:

Google is the best resource for information and Google complete is my best resource to discover good opportunities using my methods. You simply need to enter your keyword in the search box and copy the suggestions. Of course, it will take you hours if not days so I found a solution for you. The rank checking tool “Rank Tracker” offers that feature and can check 500 keywords in about 30 seconds. It will return a long list to choose from and give you the option to save or export your list. This tool free to download and use but will not let you save projects. You might need to set a proxy to be able to use it in high quantities.

Phase 4:

You can use some other tools to finalize your list before we start testing. The list of tools you can use is long so I can give you top three of using: Keyword Discovery, SEMrush (again), and Google Ad-Word keyword tool. Here too, I will not leave you alone and tell you that Rank Tracker will take care of all of them for you. At that point, you should take out all the irrelevant keywords and lightly start screening the list.

Phase 5:

Now we are going to use a tool called “All in scraper” (Google to find it) to find out the competition level of each one of the phrases. The tool is very self-explanatory so I won’t explain too much about the functionality. The idea is to give each keyword a value that will help us later in the final screening process.

The output will be as above and you’ll do the following: 

(AITQ x AIAQ x AIUQ ) / 10,000,000

Doing this will give you one value to work with. That number is the difficulty level and you’ll need it later.

FYI:

AITQ = All in title (quotes)

AIAQ = All in anchor (quotes)

AIUQ = All in URL (quotes)

Phase 6:

Check all your keyword in Google AdWord keyword tool and find the search volume. Depends on the industry you’ll need to set your own threshold and decide what will be the minimum you’ll keep and all the rest you delete.

Phase 7:

Next two phases we will create two filed and combine all the information. Create a column in your excel sheet called CTS (Competition to search). CTS = the monthly search / Phrase results (for each keyword).

Phase 8:

Create another column called OLVL (opportunity level). OLVL = CTS if your monthly search is more than the minimum you defined and less than the maximum of the competition level you define. Otherwise, it will show zero, meaning not suggested promoting this keyword.

Here is the formula I use ” =IF(AND(J18<1000,C18>50),I18,0)”

See the complete excel file and how it should look like:

Using about 4 tools and excel sheet, I’ve shown you how to do a professional keyword research like the pros do. Hope it will help you with your web marketing venture. Enjoy.