What Makes a Keyword a Great Keyword?

[James Seward]

Hey Warriors,

Hope you are all well

So really: What Makes a Keyword a Great Keyword? What are you standards when doing keyword research (and what tools you use for that)?

I mean on google keyword tool what are the important numbers and then how you define that the keyword is a good keyword? I am looking to do a list of 50 or so keywords to write articles but I a not sure which criteria to follow when doing my research.

Any help on the subject is greatly appreciated

Thanks
James

[Tsnyder]

For me the definition of a great keyword is simple... are lots
of people searching it... and is there low to moderate competition?

Tsnyder

[Kevin Koop]

Ah, James...

If only your question was an "easy" one!

Since you mentioned that you are planning on using these keywords to write articles around, I will give my advice relative to article marketing.

(I do keyword research differently depending on what I am trying to achieve... ie organic search engine rankings, ppc traffic to bring buyers, etc.)

If you are going to be writing articles to promote a product, then you want keyword phrases that have "decent" search volume (a subjective term you'll have to decide upon) and "reasonable" competition (unfortunately, another subjective term).

It makes no sense to write an article around a keyword phrase that gets 10 searches a month so you want to know what kind of search volume is out there before you begin writing.

As you'd also like to get your article to rank on the first page of a search engine, it is important to check the competitiveness for the term as well.

You can do this by simply Googling the phrase, surrounded in quotes, to see how many people are targeting this exact phrase.

So, if your article is about Dog Obedience Training you put "dog obedience training" into the search area and search.

Look at the results to the upper right to see how many pages are indexed for that exact phrase. If it's in the millions, it will usually take a good deal of time and additional work to get your article to rank.

If it's 300,000 or less (not a strict value) then you may be able to rank for the term pretty quickly.

As far as tools go, my favorite is the "Micro Niche Finder" which is found here: Micro Niche Finder. (not an aff link ;- )

It is available as a one-time payment as opposed to a monthly fee and it is both efficient and powerful.

It also allows you to check the "OCI" of any particular keyword phrase (Online Commercial Intent) so you will know if the term is likely to draw buyers or looky-loos.

Of course, you can still check the OCI (manually) for free at:
Detecting Online Commercial Intention: Audience Intelligence: adCenter Labs

[aboutalhah]

A great keyword is a buy keyword (that means that people WILL buy).

If there is a lot of competition, just pay for it.

Franck

[Mustafa Khundmiri]

A great keyword is one which has less competition, has a high number of searches, is a buy keyword and is targeted towards your product.

[Viggie]

I am going to agree with Kevin on this one. When writing an article for a particular keyword you should be trying to get that article to rank for the keyword.

The two free tools i use most is googles keyword tool as well as the adlabs commercial intention. I try and find a strong balance. A keyword with 3000+ searches a month, I use a quarter million as competition. Once I have a list of the words that fit both those requirements. I go to the adlabs commercial intention tool and then rank them based on commercial intention and attack them in that order.

[linker101]

keyword is purely something that people type into search engines when they’re looking for info’s, or something to solve a problem or rather buy something.
A keyword only becomes a great keyword when you learn how to do something good with it!

[SEOJJ]

I always try to think of clicks as potential buyers and how much each click could be worth.
Are the people searching for this keyword ready to take action and buy or register?
If not, then I will probably not make much money then there's no point in working with those keywords.

I also check out the competition. If there's too much I try to find another keyword.

Why target "Free poker" when I can target 10 smaller keywords and make more money with less work?

I know that people searching for this keyword will take action and signup for poker-sites that offer free poker-money for example.
But this keyword is too hard to rank for, instead I use keywords like:

"Download free poker software"
"Where to play free poker"
"How can I play poker online for free"
....
..

You get the idea. People searching for these keywords will also take action and register but the competition is far from "free poker".

[PabloVTB]

A great keyword for me it's a converting keyword. I mean, a lot of people try to focus only on high trafficked search terms, and that's allright, I mean, at least you can get high volumes of traffic that way, and is a good way to quickly generate leads and build up your list;

but, really, If you can focus on putting your site out there for the keywords that actually GENERATE buyers, I think that is much more important.

And normally, these are long tail keywords, so, although traffic volume won't be that high, it will actually be easier to rank well for these keywords.

[Jonny Mulroy]

A great keyword is definitely a 'Buying' keyword that has a reasonable amount of searches and is possible to rank for with some decent amount of SEO work and not too much competiton, otherwise you could be selling your soul to the devil if you was trying to rank for 'make money online' within a week!

[goingup]

The best tool i know of to determine what your competition REALLY is is called TrafficTravis. There is a paid version as well but i never needed it. This will give you the results for the top 20 for any keyword, # ofbacklinks that exist for each, if its an inner page or an article, if they used the keyword in the metatags and title or not and so forth. Also simply tells you on a scale of one to 5 how easy it is to rank for that keyword.