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Category: Keyword Research

Learn about keyword research best practices and how to improve your keyword strategy.


  • My two all time favorite tools (free to a certain degree) are Ubersuggest and SpyFu. Ubersuggest gives you a lot of keyword variations and suggestions while SpyFU can be used to look at how your site compares to your competitors. I also would suggest letting Google SERPs give you an idea, try using long tail keywords related to your site and see what others are targeting. Hope this helps! Kyle

    | kchandler
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  • Hi Brandon, I guess the part I dont understand is why you need to create a new campaign for the /widgets/ part specifically, the overall campaign for example.com will cover all sub folders and sub pages. So you can just set up the main campaign, create as many keywords as you like and label them for easy filtering into logical buckets (widgets, purple, brand, whatever suits). Then all pages in example.com will be tracked for these keywords and whichever page is highest ranked for each keyword will be shown in the main ranking page. If you have any other pages ranking for the same term but lower, they will be visible in the ranking history page. Hope I am not missing something obvious!

    | LynnPatchett
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  • Hi Emma, I feel your frustration. Unfortunately, we don't know all the ways in which Google's algorythm works, although we have a pretty good idea of many pieces of the puzzle. Even the highest correlated metric we know of, PageAuthority, only has a correlation of about 0.35 (1.00 being a perfect correlation). Pretty good for SEO, but in the real world it's not the best correlation. So the factors in the keyword difficulty tool are known ranking influences, but it's impossible to incorporate all 200+ ranking signals (some known, some unknown) into a single tool. Instead, the best way to use the tool is to use it to try to find out exactly why a page ranks above another. Is it over-optimized? What is it about those social signals that help? Are the links from relevant sources? Has the site been penalized? Yeah, it's conflicting and confusing. In truth, the first 80% of all SEO is pretty standard: Create good content, make sure it's accessible by Search Engines, Follow best SEO practices, market it smartly, get links, repeat. Do this well and you'll win most of your battles. The remaining 20% gets hard, and if we think about it too much, we sometimes waste our time. Regardless, the best strategy, in my opinion, is not to go after 1 keyword, but 100s at a time using a long-tail strategy. I wrote about it in more detail here: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank   If you're just starting out, or even experienced, it's the best way to go.

    | Cyrus-Shepard
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  • Here is an article by Mark Traphagen: Google+ Profile PageRank: The Real AuthorRank? - SMX Advanced 2013 in which he mentions G+ pages in the SERPs. The Google+ Fitness and Nutrition community was apparently ranking on the first page for "fitness and nutrition", though this week they are on page two. Perhaps we will be seeing more of this.

    | Linda-Vassily
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  • Hi Garry, A focus on two or three main keywords on your page is perfectly appropriate, even for longer tail keywords. It may be recommended to use longer tailed keywords for pages on your site appropriate for such keywords. As well, it is recommended to put the keyword(s) as close to the beginning of each tag as possible. Keywords can be combined to create longer tail keywords, but only if they are relevant to each other; try to put two unrelated phrases together will look like spam. If your business is located in a certain area, using long tail keywords with location can help your results; with other keywords, your site can still rank for longer tail keyword due to natural relevancy. With a focus of more than three keywords, your tags will be bulky and read unnaturally.

    | SEO5Team
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  • Trying to find "non-branded keyword phrases revealing searcher’s intent with high volume and CPC?" is a bit like looking for the holy grail. Some things to remember. 1. CPC is just one measure of the competitiveness of a keyword. It's related to the value others place on this keyword and how much they are prepared to spend to try and capture traffic by advertising. It doesn't necessarily reflect the value of this traffic to your business. And if they keyword is competitive, how confident are you that you can rank for this keyword? 2. As a general rule, the more generic the keyword, the higher the search volume, but the lower the commercial intent. (If I search for "dogs" you can't tell what I'm after, if I search for "puppy training bristol" then you know exactly what I'm looking for and where. So, if I run a puppy training service, which traffic is worth more to me? Millions of hits for "dogs" or <10 visits a month of high intent traffic around a keyword that actually relates to my business? (I don't train puppies by the way!) 3. Remember the long-tail. If you have a content rich website you will find that while your branded/head terms have higher volume, you should be getting lots of visits from low volume search terms. For one of my highest traffic sites, my strongest keyword provides less than 15% of total search traffic. Most of my search traffic comes from keywords with almost no volume. Keywords that I have never considered! http://moz.com/blog/how-big-is-your-long-tail-whiteboard-friday Don't get overly obsessed by high traffic volumes. You run the risk of crowding out the people that really matter. You need to look at the value of the traffic to you vs the competition/effort you'll need to spend creating great targeted content. 4. Remember your goals! Unless you're making an income from on-page ads then your goal is unlikely to be "get more traffic". For a business, your trying to get more sales leads, more higher margin leads. You don't always need high volumes of traffic to achieve these business goals. How much revenue does the site need to deliver? 5. Be realistic. If you're running a very small niche business, you're unlikely to attract high volumes of visitors. What you need to focus on is making sure that you get in front of the right people. The people that will help your meet those goals! Some thoughts that might help: Define your (true) goals at the start and keep them in mind as you work through the process. Before you start your keyword research, try to identify who your customers really are. The better you can understand your target audience the easier it will be to write content for them. Don't assume that you know who they are or what they really think. Can you talk / interview your past customers? If you can, try to capture their thoughts/words using a voice recorder. It's important to understand the words that they use when talking about your products/services and their needs/motivations. Look at any testimonials, customer feedback or comments. You don't need to limit this to your own site, take a look at your competitors or any forums/social places that your customers congregate. Don't be afraid to engage your target audience - just do so in a friendly authentic manner. Write content that speaks to this audience. What matters to them. What are they most concerned about and what are their concerns etc. Write broadly around specific topic topics that matter to you and your audience. Look at the keywords that people are using to find your site (even the low volume ones). Look for common themes/topics. Can you create better content around these topics (you can look at your bounce rates to see if the landing pages around these topics are doing their job), again, you need to consider intent. People may have got the answer they're looking for and left. Instead of optimising for keywords, think about optimising around topics. Do you have site search on your website? I find that this can provide a great insight into what your visitors expect to find on your site. You should definitely review this regularly and use it to inform you content strategy. Use segmentation in your analytics to understand what different types of search traffic actually means to you. Focus on what matters.

    | DougRoberts
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  • Hi Thomas, As you are running a design/SEO business, then Google does not consider your business model as truly local to anywhere and will only show organic results for queries like 'web design nyc'. So, everyone competing for phrases like this must do so organically. Your efforts will likely need to include on-going content development, link building and, perhaps, an additional outreach via Social Media, video marketing, etc. Content development will most certainly stand at the core of your strategy, so finding something of interest and value to write about that will be relevant to your desired NJ audience is the task at hand. For web design firms, a natural choice would be beautiful writeups of projects you've completed for NJ businesses. You might also begin doing features of NJ-based businesses with awesome websites, or websites that could be improved, or websites that help the people of NJ is some special way. You can display some of your expertise by critiquing what works. Basically, you're going to have to brainstorm some great ideas that would make for excellent content and then keep brainstorming and writing so that you can begin to build authority around search terms that relate to New Jersey. But, again, the end goal here will be organic rankings rather than local ones, simply because Google stopped displaying web design and SEO firms for common local queries some years ago. Your creativity is your best asset towards achievement of your goals. Lots of work ahead! Good luck!

    | MiriamEllis
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  • Thank you all for your answers I got the direction and information that can help you Thanks again SEOwise

    | iivgi
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  • I do put 9 popular product in my home page. The thing is that I don't know how to promote this page.

    | Rephael
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  • Hi I just answered a question like this the other day http://moz.com/community/q/naming-a-brand-domain Hope this helps, Thomas

    | BlueprintMarketing
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  • Aha, ok yeah that makes more sense now. I'm sure we can include text on ''edited''. Although, ''edited'' is only 2 clicks away from ''edited''. If we were to link to ''edited'' from ''edited'', would it still be a good idea to link to ''edited'' from our homepage? That would pass on the most 'juice'... Or would the site structure look a bit funny then? Thanks for all your help, much appreciated

    | jennie.evans
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  • Hi Tom Thanks for your repsonse. Interesting you mention the data is pulled form Bing as I noticed a small disclaimer underneath the results box: Search Volume data is collected from the Search-based Keyword Tool via the Google AdWords API Totally agree, would rather have upto date data than a 12 month overall average with estomations etc. I also agree on the Fresh Web index as this also gives some great insights as well as the Google Trends facility too. Cheers

    | PIXUS
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  • Hi Dustin, By adding additional characters to your keywords, this can have the effect of “splitting the vote” with crawlers. If the initial keyword has a strong ranking, then adding additional text to complement it likely will not affect the main keyword ranking. Crawlers are fairly adept at finding keywords within other keywords, but for more precise effect, it may prove beneficial to use both the main keyword and the additional keyword as separate entities (e.g. “Lawn Mowers | Cheap Lawn Mowers”) to cover the most amount of ground. Use this tactic only with proper meta tags, and do not repeat phrases more than once to avoid keyword stuffing.

    | SEO5Team
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  • My client really wants to build out a second site. It's to get them both to rank, one for spot one and one lower for most keywords. But we really need to know when to target the same keywords and when to target different keywords. It's ecommerce

    | BobGW
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  • Matt Cutts has stated before that a dash - in a URL is interpreted similar to a space while an underscore _ is interpreted as a connector. http://youtu.be/AQcSFsQyct8 In your case, if Co-matic and Comatic are synonymous then I would choose whatever the actual Brand name is. Odds are Google will understand 1) that the brand is Co-matic and 2) that "Comatic" is "Co-matic" when looking for machinery. Also, "Comatic" has the dictionary definition "of, pertaining to, or blurred as a result of a coma" which I don't think would be advantageous to have associated with your site.

    | MikeRoberts
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  • Real experience: We had travel guides with 1 page about travel itineraries on each destination covered. (e.g. Rome Itineraries) That page was doing good but we decided to create other 3 pages to target longer keywords: 1 day Rome Itineraries, 3 days Rome Itineraries, 5 days Rome Itineraries (not exactly that keywords but somethign like that). New pages have been linked from the "old" well performing one. We replaced the content of the old page  (it was  about 1 day, 3 days, 5 days itineraries) to avoid any internal duplicate content issue and created new fresh  content for the new pages. Results: Traffic increase in 2/3 months.Moreover we observed decreased bounce rates since we were finally serving all the user with an exact intent (e.g. "5 days itinerary in Rome") with good and focused content. IMHO,  having lot of pages targeting a lot of keywords it's good but you have to pay attention on content differentiation. Different keywords, different pages, different GOOD content.

    | j.royal
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  • Well. Thanks . Now i understand confirm my self with this part. Thank you very much.

    | Webworld_Norway
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  • Hi Nicholas, Thanks for writing in and sorry for the confusion. We no longer provide Google AdWords information because they have restricted our access to their API, so now we show Bing search volume data. You shouldn't be seeing any reference to Google AdWords on the page any longer so either that is an older screenshot or you will need to clear your cache and cookies to update the page and show the Bing search volume data. When I log into your account, I do see the Keyword Research tool is correctly showing that the search volume does come from Bing but, unfortunately, Bing does not support data for South Africa. I'm afraid for this location, you would need to access the Google AdWords tool directly here: https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool as Bing cannot provide data for you locale. I apologize for the inconvenience this causes. Please let me know if you have any other questions. Chiaryn

    | ChiarynMiranda
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