The more things change, the more they stay the same. While SEO tactics have evolved and diversified virtually year on year since the advent of the industry in the mid-90s, keyword research is still arguably the most important piece of any successful SEO project.
If your site doesn’t adequately target relevant phrases, it doesn’t matter how well structured it is, or how many backlinks it has. Basically, if your keyword strategy isn’t up to snuff, your SEO efforts are pretty much dead in the water.
An effective keyword strategy targets a selection of short and long-tail keywords chosen with user behaviour in mind. Often the most difficult part of this process is placing yourself in the users’ shoes and considering their journey from beginning to end.
Brand immersion will only take you so far, and the more resources you have to reference, the better. It’s easy to get lazy and simply use the same tools or techniques over and over again. While this might save you time in the short term, it will likely limit your results further down the line; at which point you’ll need to waste valuable hours revisiting and revising your strategy.
As such, I’m always on the hunt for new sources of inspiration. Every job I do, I start out with some initial market research and then seek out potential consumer touch points. Fighting the urge to just take keywords and plug them into a tool has forced me think outside the box and as a result I’ve uncovered some fantastic resources that have provided invaluable insight. Below are a few examples:
Amazon
Amazon provides customers with the facility to tag products with applicable keywords. Where films and books are concerned, these keywords often stretch beyond generic terms, and touch on subject matter and themes.
Obviously this technique can’t be used for all clients, but in the instances where it does lend itself to a specific product or service, it can be very powerful.
Q&A sites
Q&A sites are a great source of long-tail content. The likes of Yahoo! Answers allow you to browse by category, and as such you can quickly hone in on long-tail search phrases that could be relevant to your keyword and content strategy.
Social Media bookmarking sites
Bookmarking sites, such as Delicious and Amplify, cover an array of topics and themes. Within these categories, you’ll find literally millions of articles that users have submitted – each with relevant tags.
Like Amazon, referencing these sites won’t provide value in all cases, but taking note of the words users associate with various types of content can provide valuable insight.
Knowem.com is a good starting point as it provides a list of bookmarking sites, which you can find here.
Custom search strings
Recently I’ve been playing around with custom search strings for keyword research. One particularly useful string I’ve leveraged is: "powered by wordpress" inurl:tags intitle:your keyword.
This will get Google to return the tags pages of WordPress blogs that match your keyword. Similarly, "most used thread tags" intitle:keyword and "tags for this thread" intitle:keyword will help you unearth forum threads related to your niche and see what keywords users have tagged them with.
The above strings only work for vBulletin forums, but can be modified to help you harvest data from forums running on other software (e.g. Invision Power Board and phpBB), provided these platforms have similar functionality.
Wordtracker keyword questions
Enter a short-tail keyword – for example, ‘car hire’ – into Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions tool and it spits out related questions consumers are asking (based on Wordtracker’s keyword data).
This is an amazing source of both short and long-tail keyword ideas, and the tool has recently evolved to include modifiers that make it even more potent.
Adwords search query reports
This requires that you have access to pre-existing Adwords data, and as such often isn’t feasible. If you do have some campaigns set up though, I highly recommend you take a few hours to analyse the results.
In addition to providing further insight into keyword search volume, search query reports may help you uncover keyword ideas you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise; particularly those of the long-tail variety.
Leveraging search trends & upcoming events
Finally, here’s something a little different. This isn’t so much a keyword research technique as a content strategy built around search trends. I like to call it the pre-emptive keyword research strike (PKRS).
As you know, it’s much easier rank for a search phrase when you get the jump on your competitors. By keeping an eye on emerging trends, and being mindful of any upcoming events relevant to your niche, you can craft content and build links to it months before the SERPs become saturated with similar sites, pages or blog posts.
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GREAT post Tim. Search strings are resources I haven't been using yet. Any opinions on using questions as post titles? I watched a webenar the other day where Gina Gaudia-Graves went into some depth as to why she uses this.
Posted by peter on 2011/07/30