Keyword Research and Tracking Tips?

[Nick_Sayers]

Keyword research is elusive thing. Sort of like Bigfoot. Well… not really.

Rand actually does an excellent job explaining how to get started in his Moz Academy lesson on Keyword Research. Check that link out!

I want to get the same type of conversation started on Q&A. I'll let everyone know how I’ve learned to do KW research. Please let me know how you do it!!!!!

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a list of keywords you feel like your brand should target. I would start with what you offer, your brand, and how you want people to find you.

1. Brand – Obviously you want to rank for your brand. First thing you want to do is see how people are searching for you brand. Use Ubersuggest for this. This tool will give a huge list of ways Google is suggesting results to people. Take that list and look at one’s that relate to your service, product, or content and save them in a spreadsheet. This will let you start tackling longer tail keywords before you focus in on your exact brand.
2. What do you offer? – Think to yourself; how would I find my own service? Let’s say you sell air conditioners. You should check out Wordtracker to get a sense of how many people are searching for “air conditioners.” Then look at the other suggestions Wordtracker gives. These suggestions are usually terms that you want to invest some research into, because people are actually searching for them. A lot of people don’t focus their efforts… They end up using a wide net, which is fine, it’s just hard to measure success and build good quality content around too many terms.

Alright! Let’s say you have list ready to go. It’s time to do some competitive research. I’d start with the Keyword Difficulty tool section of Moz Analytics. If you’re new to keyword research you want to try a longer-tail keyword. Something like “air conditioners on sale” instead of just “air conditioners.”

When you put a term in the Keyword Difficulty tool you’ll see the top ten people ranking for this term. These are based on Domain Authority and Page Authority. This is great way to size up the competition based on how strong their link profile is!

Don’t stop there. If you see some lower authority scores in the top ten, then I’d consider it low hanging fruit. Run a full report now.

There’s going to be a lot of information here, but I’d like to focus your attention to the On-page stuff. Check that data out. Look to see how well pages in the top ten are optimized(do they have A, B, C, D, or F grades?). If they’re mostly floating around the B and C grade range; try to optimize an existing page you want to rank for the term or create some new content.

When you have a page built drop it in our standalone On-page optimization tool to get a guide on how should use your keyword. You can also use Moz Analytics’ On-page tool to track these grades in combination with your rankings data. Just keep tracking it here!

How do you go about KW research and tracking? Let me know if you have any feedback on this process and please detail your own if you have time. I’d love to here what ya’ got.

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[garfield_disliker]

Most people have their general process down pat, so I thought I would just add a couple things I do with keyword research that I'm not sure if other people do, or if they consider them to be an integral part of their process:

• I take large groups of keywords, upload them to adwords, and get regional search volumes using the keyword planner (E.g., Seattle or Texas or whatever is the relevant area for a client.) I then export search traffic by region from Google Analytics and compare the volume a website is getting from search compared to what the Google Keyword Planner reports the volume is... and find opportunities from there. Pic below.

• If I know there are opportunities for a client and I'm looking for pages to optimize or create or whatever, I use Screaming Frog's custom filters to gather a list of all the pages on a site that already contain a particular term. Then export, and you have your list right there.

• I also look for universal results stuffed with image boxes, local packs, videos, news results, as much as I look at rankings. Those results often provide the best opportunity for capturing the greatest share of searches.

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