The Benefits of Using
an Illogical "Anything
goes approach"
to your keyword research
By John Alexander
Before we discuss the benefits of using
an "anything goes approach to research" as it
applies to keyword research or behavioral research for the
process of optimization, let's take a minute to talk about
logic or the reverse (for lack of a better term term) anti-logic.
Logical thinking versus
illogical
thinking:
In our
everyday life as mature adults, we find value in approaching things with a logical thinking process.
We choose to formulate ideas and thoughts that "make the
most sense" and contribute to what we are trying to
achieve. For most things in life, the more logical planning
you do, the better results you will obtain.
For most aspects of living our lives, using a logical approach
delivers much better results than taking an illogical
approach. Performing certain tasks in a methodical, step by
step approach only makes sense, especially in cases where you
are taking specific actions to reproduce a certain result over
and over again.
However, the process
we refer to as keyword research is one place where we can benefit
by taking more of an anything goes approach for research. If
logic rules in your research (which for most of us it
naturally does,) then you often discover the same
keyword phrases that any other logical person might be
guessing at or researching.
But true research, is not limited to guessing at
things but is better thought of in terms of:
"a process of exploring
existing data for the hottest and freshest trends in search
behavior."
Good research technique allows the
researcher to discover many different trends that the casual
guesser will never even notice.
Every time I
write another article describing examples of high KEI (Keword
Effectiveness Index) type phrases, it does not
take long before people jump on the examples and naturally start
using them. So by the time you read these examples the data
may have changed, but the reason I share these tips is to help you
research your data more effectively using a tool like Wordtracker.com.
Don't just limit yourself to the examples, but dig in and try
exploring data for your own industry specific phrases.
Taking one
of the oldest examples like "baby names" you might
think after this time that people have worn it out. The
original article I wrote talked about how soon to be parents
love to use the Internet to research baby names. Therefore, by
offering such a resource in a baby clothes or baby furniture
Web site you could attract "soon to be parents" to
the Web site based on what a specific audience wants to find.
They may want to research what they will call their child but
end up realizing that there are other things for sale that
they need here too.
The examples
I gave years ago are getting fairly competitive, so let's give
you some new examples:
"Baby
boy names" has about 419,000 competing pages on Google at
the time of this article.
"unique baby names" has about 131,000 competing
pages on Google at the time of this article.
"uncommon baby names" has at least 40,000 competing
pages on Google.....
And people
begin to panic and say, oh well, so much for this
strategy....all the baby name keywords have been used up. But
let's not jump to conclusions so fast.
How about some of these searches:
"Traditional
English Baby Names has only 8 competing pages and a KEI of
55.0
"modern baby names" has only 755 competing pages and
a KEI of 205.0
"Old south baby names" has only 60 competing pages
and a KEI of 336.1
"Southern Female Names" has only 136 competing pages
and a KEI of 339.0
"Colonial baby names" has only 2 competing pages and
a KEI of 480.5
It took me less than 2 minutes to find these phrases, based on
one simple action. But once you are on to it, you will expand
your keyword research ability by several thousand times.
When
performing comprehensive research inside the members area of Wordtracker.com,
people tend to go with keywords that make sense logically.
This is only natural since for most of us, we want to guess at
terminology that makes the best sense. People often tend to only want to enter
into Wordtracker, the most logically
descriptive terms instead of taking a
little broader "anything goes" approach to their
research.
TIP: To find the terms above in just a few minutes, I
did not research the keyword phrase "baby
names." I narrowed it down to the single word "name"
and allowed Wordtracker to instantly show me how that word is
being used in multiple phrases.
When you
attempt to research a specific phrase that is lodged in the
front of your mind, you are limiting the results you will see
to those that using that exact two word combination together.
In the meantime, there could be hundreds of searches being
done that you will never ever see or find, because you are
logically guessing at a specific phrase that you ***think***
may be important. By using a single word, you are going to get
a much wider cross section of keywords and understand exactly
how they are being used by the searcher within the last 90
days.
Many people
take the approach of checking all of the keywords that make
the most logical sense, rather than using a root word that is
not illogical or not the most obvious. Let's go through a few
more quick examples to show you how to do research that will
open up all kinds of new windows for discovery.
Suppose you are an affiliate marketer who has Web site around
the topic of lighting. Maybe you are trying to find
interesting keywords based on low compete counts for words
like lamp, lighting, light bulbs etc.
Of these primary keywords that first come to mind, what would
be an interesting single root word to go exploring Wordtracker
data with?
None of these suggestions would be wrong to check out, but
let's use this as an example to find a product that we could
sell from our informational affiliate site.
Would you use a word like light or lighting or lamp
or light bulbs?
The first few words jump off the page at you because they are
logical and make sense, right. Let's go exploring with the
single term "bulb." It is still logical to a degree,
but it is not the first thing you probably thought of.
Rather than
listing all of the words I found.....such as:
"Inground pool light bulb"
"Fluoresent light bulb containers"
"Sunwave light bulb"
"Fibre optic light bulb replacement"
Let me say that it was not until about 260 words in the list
that the competing counts were above 20.
In other words, there are literally over 200 keyword phrase
combinations I found in about 3 minutes.
TIP:
Have you thought about exploring single terms that are on
Wordtracker's top 1000 busiest words within the last 90 days?
TIP:
Have you thought about purchasing a report from Wordtracker of
the top 20,000 busiest keywords and use that list to quickly
sort through the hottest busy data within the last 90
days.
Try and take
the broadest anything goes approach to research and test
ordinary everyday terms. The boring little terms that most
people assume have no value. Don't be in a rush to try and
research multiple terms, but start with a single word. Most of
want to think of a solution and then explore data to find a
keyword that relates to that solution.
TIP: Try it backwards.
Stop thinking of the solution first, but explore the data to
find a need. Once you find a need of your searching audience,
then dig into a solution at that point.
Example of exploring an everyday boring word:
The word I
am just grabbing to demonstrate this anything goes approach is
the word out of my last sentence. I am thinking about the word
"everyday." I think I'll just shorten it to the word
"day." How boring is that? Do you think we'll
discover anything even remotely useful with a word like
"day?" Let's try it out:
Father's Day E-cards
KEI 432.6
30 day free trial Websites
KEI 784.0
History of Patriot's
Day KEI 1700.0
Daylight Savings Time Map KEI 1762.0
labor day
travel
KEI 1859.0
So we see some very interesting
search terms that carry nice potential for a variety of
applications. In just a few seconds we've learned about
several words and exactly how they are being formed to create
exact search phrases that could be helpful in any number of
scenarios.
I hope this is enough to get you thinking more open
mindedly about the process of keyword research. There is a
wealth of data that can be instantly tapped into and made use
of. Check
Out Wordtracker's Free Keyword Tool Now .
For more
Wordtracker articles, please see this page.
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you like a Free SEO Tip of the Day?
About John Alexander
John Alexander is Director of Training at Search
Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his SEO
Training Associates at Search
Engine Academy. John is author of an
e-book called Wordtracker
Magic and has
taught SEO skills to people from 87 different countries world
wide.
John's articles can be read in publications like REALTOR
Magazine, Search
Engine Guide, WEBpro
News and many others.
