Doing a Keyword Analysis

If keywords are important, how do you know which keywords to use?
1. Guess.
2. Take your guesses and run them through a keyword-analysis tool.
Do not stop at Step 1! If you guess, you’ll guess wrong!

Wordtracker is almost certainly the best keyword-analysis tool around (www.Wordtracker
.com). It’s the system used by most search-engine professionals because you can do more with
it, more quickly. We don’t have room to describe this tool, but it’s worth spending a few hours
and doing a really good analysis with this tool.

We’ll look at a free way for carrying out a keyword analysis, though ideally you should
use Wordtracker, which you can “rent” for around $8 a day (one day’s usually plenty). The
following’s a simple procedure that uses your brain power and Yahoo!’s Keyword Selector Tool.
1. Quickly write down all the obvious keywords, the ones you’ve already thought about. If
you’re selling golf equipment, an obvious choice might be golf equipment . . . and golf
clubs, golf balls, golf cart, and so on.
2. Now think from your customers’ point of view. Put yourself in their shoes . . . can you
think of terms they might use?
3. Ask employees, partners, family . . . what other terms can you come up with?
4. Go back over your list, and add plural versions of singular terms and singular versions of
plural terms.
5. Look for words that are likely to be frequently misspelled, and add them, too. (Some
words are misspelled as much as one third of the time they’re used, so these represent
a significant opportunity for reaching people.)
6. Go to the Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions web site (http://searchmarketing.yahoo
.com/) and find the Keyword Selector Tool. (Unfortunately, Yahoo! keeps moving things
around; sometimes it’s easy to find, other times it’s hidden away. Dig around and you
should eventually find it; look for the Advertiser Center or something similar.)
7. Type a keyword into the text box and press ENTER.

Google also provides a free keyword-analysis tool, though it’s also hidden away a little. Go
to adwords.google.com and begin setting up a Google AdWords campaign—quickly enter a
little fake data so you can move through the steps and you’ll find a Keyword Tool link in the
Choose Keywords step.

8. The tool returns a list of similar keywords and the number of times the keyword has been
used in a prior month on the Yahoo! PPC network (see Figure 22-3).
9. Look down the list for terms to add to your own list. Enter another term, including terms
you find in this list, into the text box at the top and try again.
This tool will give you ideas for keywords, and some notion of how often searchers use a
particular term. It won’t tell you how much the term will cost, though.