A nice long list of keywords is the first step to conducting effective market research as well as being an invaluable tool for use in one’s ongoing online business marketing efforts.

Continuing in this series of articles about comprehensive keyword research, you now have a list of hundreds, if not thousands of valuable keywords to design an effective internet marketing campaign.

Here are some additional free tools, if you would like to do more keyword discovery. As you are designing or developing a website, you should constantly consider what your existing and future website visitors are looking for, what you are offering to these potential site visitors and how many other competing sites offer something the same or something similar.

Once your site has been online for a while, you’ll begin to get an idea of what your site visitors are looking for and whether or not they are finding it when they visit your site.

Your initial keyword research and ongoing checks, using the strategies presented here, will enable your online business website to be more competitive as you provide content geared specifically to these searchers.

Now, use the long list of keywords and do use some software tools on the web to check the search volume and competition of you main and ore “highly-targeted” keywords.

Well, check to see if there have been many searches for the main key phrase we are targeting. In this example, you can use the keyword “bowling” and find out how much daily search volume history there is and how much search volume is estimated.

I found a tool that is a Word Tracker and Google Trends mashup. This means it analyzes and compares the data from both. I have found it very useful. In addition, by using a free trial account at: http://www.wordtracker.com in combination with Google’s Keyword Tools (Create a free account at Google, if you haven’t already).

Google also offers a useful tool in the same area called Traffic Estimator. It is designed for Paid Internet Advertising, but is great for getting an idea of search volume for a particular phrase.

Focusing on GTrends, the Google/Wordtracker thing, you’ll first go to: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends. This is sponsored by “The 30-Day Challenge, which you really should sign up for, by the way, since it is FREE.

GTrends will give you a list of up too 100 related keywords, based on your “seed” keyword, as will the free trial of Wordtracker. Use Google as well, since Google has been good at tracking and predicting search volume.

The estimate of daily search volume with this tool has shown to be a good indicator of predicted search volume

The 100 keywords that you’ll see when you select the “Hit me” button will are hyper-linked into a deeper list, so you can drill down into those niche keywords.

Next to the hyper-linked key phrase, you’ll find a little graph. Click on that. There’s some good info here on that particular key phrase.

The search volume is shown as “Actual Visitors From #1 in Google/day”.

If we use the key phrase “bowling”, then select the graph next to the key phrase “bowling balls”, down the list a little bit, the this number looks pretty good at 27778 visitors per day from number one in Google. This is a pretty good number if your site ends up at the number one search position in Google for the key phrase, but it goes down exponentially depending on the search position of your site for the keyword, hence the less findable your website is by the search engines.

Unfortunately, however the number of competing websites is rather high for the key phrase “bowling balls” at 2,010,000. But, don’t necessarily be discouraged by the competition on this one term. The keyword phrase “bowling balls” would be likely to be competitive. It’s not the key phrase were after quite yet. but the search volume you can estimate from this, while not precise, is encouraging.

It’s worth noting that the “bowling” and related key phrases are searched, even adjusting for unrelated terms, 25,000 time a day. You can save this list.

Going through each of the 100 terms and even drilling deeper into each, you will find some search terms that have more than 100 searches per day and less than 30,000 competing web pages. This is a good niche keyphrase to focus on right up front. Make note of it. It’s gotta have some search volume, though. That’s very important.

Let’s look at one of these briefly. After going through several on the list, I found “history of bowling”. This is a great example.

Here’s the breakdown for the key phrase “history of bowling”

Google Competition
22,300 (< 30,000 recommended)
22300 pages for “history of bowling” under 30,000 pages recommended

Actual Visitors From #1 in Google/day
110 (> 100 recommended)
110 searches for “history of bowling” over 100 searches per day recommended

this would be the first or next article on my website about bowling – “The History of Bowling”.

As you progress through this tool, you’ll be able to add additional keywords to your long list. Keep any that meet our criteria from the above example save them at the top of your documents. you’ll refer to these “highly-targeted: keyword lists often as our project progresses along.

I’d recommended focusing your content around these niche keyphrases. At least in the beginning to drive some traffic to your site.

There may be some key phrases you come across as you complete this part of the process that are a little too competitive. These may also be gems, up to a certain point. It really depends on how hard you want to work at getting and keeping your site in the search results pages.

I’d recommend using a sort of grading system of your own, something like an A-F grade or a 1-5 rating for all of the keywords that look promising. Using a grading or rating system, a lower grade or rating results from higher competition in relation to estimated daily search volume. And, you would give the keyword phrase a higher grade or rating if the estimated search volume is higher relative to the competing web pages.

For our purposes at this stage, we’ll say that any key phrases with more than 100 searches per day estimated and less than 30,000 competing web pages, would be an “A” or 1. Taking an average of your grades or rating, you can rank how competitive your niche or online business is.

For now, he work you’ve done here to find some good, niche keyword phrases will make you more effective at creating or purchasing high-quality and highly-targeted content that will get your website found.

In the next article in this series of articles about keyword research, well explore further estimating the search volume and competition in your niche or business. It is the equivalent of thorough market research.

Updating...

Detailed keyword research is an essential first step for any online business.

Comprehensive keyword research reports are invaluable tools for conducting effective market research, analysis of the competition, managing a profitable paid internet advertising campaign and creating content for a website.

Good keyword research is also very important as you are building traffic to the website with link building.  These, and other search optimization and search marketing activities ,are really only effective after extensive keyword research has been completed.

Once the critical first step of keyword research reporting has been completed you can use this report in several different ways.

There are many situations where you may wish to do a quick check on a keyphrase or you may want to add new keywords that you discover from investigating which search terms your website is found by.

In this way, you will constantly want to be updating these lists with more highly targeted keywords and more. Keywords, search volume, and, most importantly, competition does change over time.

Let’s get started by creating a comprehensive list of keywords for our target market niche or business.

First, search Google using a few words relating to your chosen product or niche. At the bottom of each page of results you’ll find a few suggested keywords.

Paste all these and the word or words you searched with into notepad. Once you have collected 10 or more keywords and key phrases, save the document.

You now have a good list of seed keywords for use in creating a more detailed keyword list. Now check out Freekeywords.wordtracker.  There’s no need to create an account.

Copy and paste or type in the first keyword or key phrase on your list. A list of up to 100 keywords will come up based on what you entered. Now, take this list and copy and paste to notepad.

Save this document, giving it a name related to the seed keyword you entered.

From this list of keywords, you can select the hyper linked key phrase and then you are shown a list of up to another 100 keyword phrase for that keyword phrase.

Simply complete the above steps with each list, progressively “drilling down” to the more highly-targeted keywords.

Some of these may be clearly unrelated to your niche or product. Discard them. If there are any real general keywords that may apply in a number of other areas, then discard those, as well.

Once completed, this process should give hundreds, if not thousands of keywords to work with. With this list you can learn much more about your competition and determine the best strategy to market and grow your online business.

In the next article we will discussing using this list find out who’s searching for what and how many websites are competing for those potential visitors.