Partner Article

The ins and outs of keyword research

What makes good keyword research?

Now, if you go on most forums and ask what makes a good keyword, you will probably get a 100 different answers from very passionate guys.

“Search volume”

“It’s all about the cost per click” “It’s all about the competition level”

All of these are right, but they are also wrong. I say this because a good keyword is not made up of any one factor. It is a combination of all of them.

The basic signs of a good keyword:

The type of search volume.

Now, you have Broad and Exact match keywords; Broad is exactly what it sounds like, it is a estimation of everything that falls under that keyword search, so for example; If you typed in “dog training” it would also include all of the similar searches for instance; “types of dog training”, “best dog training”, “dog training techniques” etc. Broad searches are great for letting you know the overall traffic volume of the keyword if you ranked for all of the relative words too.

The better traffic, in my eyes, comes from Exact Match.

Exact Match is exactly what it is. It is the exact search volume of the keyword you’ve mentioned (roughly). I find this to be far more reliable then the broad search volume as we usually are targeting that keyword specifically so it makes sense to check the search volume.

So how many searches means the keyword is good?

To be honest, there isn’t really a determining factor. I have some keywords that have 100 exact match search volume but make clients’ fortunes where as I have some that have say 1000-3000 and barely make a penny.

This is where the other factors come into play.

CPC (Cost Per Click)

Some guy’s look at the cost per click levels and take this into judgement. This basically represents how much people are roughly paying for the traffic in AdWords. Basically, if people are paying a fortune for the traffic then it’s probably a sign that there is money to be made on the keyword.

Level of Competition

This is a little bit of an advanced technique and usually you have to have some form of experience in SEO to identify, but this is basically inspecting the websites that are ranking or trying to rank for the keywords and seeing what type of SEO they are doing.

We will go into the advanced aspects of keyword research in later articles and how to find some real corkers. ’Till the next time.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Karl Hudson .