This information is something any website owner or search engine marketer running a Google Adwords campaign needs to know.

There are some calculations needed to filter this information yourself, before you will have the information you need. I’ve created a sample Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for you to use in figuring this information.

Please feel free to download the free sample to use in figuring this data.

Follow the breadcrumb I’ve laid out below and do some math to get a better detailed idea of your actual conversions from paid versus organic visitors. It’s buried deep in the Google Analytics stats.

Here’s the breadcrumb or path to follow in finding out what conversions were from Google Adwords pay per click website visitors and what conversions are from visitors who found your website via the Google’s organic search results

Download the Conversions - Organic - Vs - PPC Sample Worksheet

Once again the data you need to fill in the worksheet can be found by following this breadcrumb:

Google Analytics - Traffic Sources - Campaigns - Goal conversions Tab (Select Medium Under Segment)

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.

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.

Know your competition!

This means that in just an instant, you can look at any webpage and determine whether or not it’s worth pursuing a link based on the number of links on the page. Using SEOdigger, you can easily see the quantity and which phrases any domain is ranking for on it Google and MSN. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work for Yahoo, but maybe it will soon.

When you’re only talking about a dozen or so links, it’s easy enough to count manually, but when you start getting up into the higher numbers, it can be a futile exercise to try and count the number of links.

You may be thinking that if you’re having trouble counting them it’s probably not worth pursuing, however if it’s a higher PR page, then even a page with 100 or more links can have some good value. If you use Firefox (and you should) then you really need to be using this free SEO extension.

There are a number of informational sites, you can choose from, but I just ran across a great site for first glance information. The information is coming from the US Census data, which is getting old, but it is still pretty decent.

The site is called zip skinny, and here are your detailed instructions…

Type in a zipcode - Nice!

Not to mention the fact that there seem to be new tools available every month, and various reporting services “update” their procedures, so it’s getting hard to know the who, what, when and how of services and tools that are reporting links.

Use Yahoo for this, and you supposedly get all of the links Yahoo knows about excluding those from your own domain -
linkdomain:www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com

You may also search without the www and see different numbers
linkdomain:domain.com -site:domain.com

The fact that www and non www numbers are different is not something to fret over, but it is something to decide for yourself, then use a consistent standard, and stick with it.

To avoid driving yourself crazy, decide to track only one of them month-to-month, (like www) and focus any link building efforts on www. versions as well

Then there’s Yahoo Site Explorer, which in most cases will support higher numbers, and give it a more in-depth analysis. This is my preferred method.

“Exploring” a URL there gives several different results. First, there are two options at the top, “Pages” and “Inlinks”

“Pages” lists the index pages in the search engine from your domain, but Inlinks is where it can get confusing.

For Inlinks you have three options to show links:
1. From All Pages (which is supposed to include those from your own domain)
2. Except from this Domain (this is supposed to exclude all links originating from your domain name)
3. Except From this Subdomain (used only if you are working with a subdomain on your site)

Then you have two more options for each of your previous choices:
1. to “Entire Site”
2. to “Only this URL” (For checking the inlink counts of specific pages)

Occasionally, when reviewing the options, and they don’t appear to change, and you have to re-select your choices. It’s always worked a bit buggy like this for me, even on different computers.

Another problem you may notice is that you can never quite duplicate, or even come very close to the same amount of inlinks shown at http://search.yahoo.com/search with the command linkdomain:www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com

Why? What is the difference between linkdomain:www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com at Yahoo, and “Show Inlinks Except from this Domain” to “Entire Site” at Yahoo site Explorer?

The count is always substantially different. Is this because it’s using different databases? Different data centers? That makes no sense because they are eternally and completely unmatched.

Most experts seem to agree that using Site Explorer is a more accurate representation, but I want to know why… What’s the difference? What’s your opinion?

Will it go up? Will go down? That’s up to you, and it depends on your feedback, and the volume of orders we receive.

A couple of updates:
We are considering offering the keyword research report free if both of the competitive analysis reports are ordered. that will likely be in place today.

If you are an SEO, and would like to provide tips on keyword research, backlink analysis, or competitive reporting information of any kind, please send us an e-mail to sales (at)  competitionreporting.com, and we can create a guest author account for you, allowing you to establish a profile including outbound links to your own site.