Ideas for Keyword Research

Hi Guys and Ladies this is my first post in the forum. I have learnt so much here and just wanted to share something that someone might find useful.

If your are like me, keyword research is one of the most daunting tasks that I struggle with, inspite of the many keyword research tools out there. The truth is before you actually begin to use the keyword tool you need to first of all identify your market.

Let me give you an example, a friend of mine owns a balloons decoration company and here am I working with him to setup his website, I decided to do some keyword research and felt to use the word balloons as the main keyword, the result was a very narrow set of keywords that did not capture all that he does.

So I backed up and thought how can we best capture the keywords for the website blueprint, it was then that I thought about this. The consumer or rather the customer. So I asked the question "why would a customer come to his store" as against "what does the customer want from him" . Strangely enough this pattern is repeated across so many markets.

Focusing on the what will leave a lot on the table (I mean keywords). Thinking of the why led me to come up with words like "Weddings", "Birthdays", "Anniversaries" and so on. Next Thing I do is go to google.com or which extension is local to you and then typed "weddings" into the search bar and hit return. The results I get are really irrelevant to me at this point, what I am after is how google sees the keyword "weddings" in relation to other words (i.e. keyword mapping). So I click on the "Web show options " button to reveal the options on the side bar to the left.

Just under the Standard View I select wonder wheel. When the wonder wheel loads it will display all the 2nd tier keywords that reinforce the main keyword. In the case of the word "Weddings" the following were displayed:

Wedding Invitations
Wedding magazines
Bridesmaid Dresses
Wedding Venues
etc

By showing these keyword phrases around the wheel google is telling us these are the keyword phrases they expect to find on a website that wants to rank for the keyword "weddings" in this case. You can use these phrases as your category or menu titles.

Before now it was always difficult to put together a properly themed website based around what google was thinking, now you can.

Next would be to perform indepth research on each of the category keyphrases.

So before you go to any of the keyword tool of your choice, start with the wheel and go from there. Google has told us what they expect to see, why do it otherwise.

In addition to this you can go to YouTube and you will find that the same set of keyword suggestion you get from google search is the same you get for video search and so always find a way to rank well on video as well.

Hope you find it useful.

As for the keyword tool of choice, for me its Market Samurai.

Texenergy