A lot of people and companies offer the service of doing keyword research for you. But what are you getting exactly?
The low-end types will use Yahoo Overture and tell you what keywords to use.
The next step up is people who use a combination of services and tools to compile more relevant data like Search Volume, KEI values, Number of Competing sites etc….
However, research is always done by humans and always subject to their interpretations of what words and phrases to use. The person doing the KW research for you is probably someone who has a different goal in mind than you do.
I ran into this issue recently from a reputable service provider with whom I am still working.
Here is what happened:
I hired someone to do some traffic generation for me, and was outsourcing/outtasking a new project to them.
Their service included:
Doing some “deep” KW research and returning with a list of keywords and phrases for some content. Creation of Squidoo lenses and adding periodic content to them, and social bookmarking some articles written and submitted by them for m
Here’s what the problem was:
There was a disconnect right from the get-go. They were interested in KEI values since these would help me get traffic right away. I was interested in achieving SERPs and rankings for specific terms.
KEI is a ratio/score of search results/search volume. KEI basically is an indicator of how many people are searching for something and how many competing sites there are for just that one keyword.
Article marketers, listen up! KEI is what you want to focus on. Articles writen with KEI in mind will get traffic right away
Site owners looking for rankings, listen up! SERPS, backlinks, indexed pages, keyword density is what you should be concerned with if you have a long term approach to the business.
The story continues, I get ticked off!
So, I’m going over MY truly deep KW research analysis sheet and comparing it to my new outsource team’s KW research.
Wow, almost nothing was the same… Did I get ripped off by someone who has hoping to take advantage of a newbie?
I know how to do the truly deep research, and was testing and double-checking my outsourcing team’s work. I was about to ask for a refund when something dawned on me.
All niche and keyword research is not the same.
My outsourcing team was focused in getting immediate traffic for me via articles based focus on KEI-laden keyword research. My focus was on long-term gains in the SERPs, but I’m OK with getting immediate traffic, too.
Anyways, the discovery was another hard-won battle in the trenches for me. I found out stuff that only the true experts know, and I found it out from a BUM. A Bum Marketer, that is. an article marketer/niche marketer.
Even though I “laid at his feet” and listened like a sponge, it was still quite overwhelming how much data there is to pore over before you start to get a clear picture of what Keywords you really want.
So, if you’re an article marketer, find relevant keywords with good KEI values for your articles
As an article marketer, your goal isn’t necessarily to gain rankings or get better SERPs. Your goal is immediate type-in traffic that finds your articles and sends people to your links eventually.
If you’re a website owner trying to figure out what you want your site to rank well for, there are many factors to consider.
1- How long are you willing to wait to unseat the entrenched top ranked sites?
2- How much time, effort, and money are you willing to spend to gain SERPs?
The answers to these 2 questions will help make the rest of the decisions easier. Now, when doing Keyword Research with a long-term SEO view, not the KEI/article marketer’s view, then you need to take into consideration the following factors.
Search volume- obviously a pretty important statistic. You want a few hundred searches a month, at least. But remember that ranking #1 for a KW that is extremely targeted is often better than 10X the traffic to a generic term that doesn’t conver the visito rinto a reader, buer, subscriber eetc…
Number of Competing sites- the number is almost always going to be 10, since you’re really only worried about the top 10 site sin the SERPs. these 10 sites represent page 1 of search engine sites, and everything else is unimportant, IMHO.
Number of indexed pages- This surprised me as being an important factor.
Who care how many pages a site has, right? Well, apparently the search engines do because it’s one of the reporting features that they look at when spidering sites and research tools usually return this as a sought after value, too. Looking back on things, I can see that it’s true. One of my review sites outranks other sites in the same niche because of the large number of indexexed pages it has, even thoug hit has less links pointing towards it.
Number of backlinks- Pretty important.
The more links that point back to your sites with the proper anchor text, the more “votes” that say your site is about XYX content. Generally speaking, the more links you have, the better, but links from related sites that point back to your site with anchor text…that’s much, much better.
So, in order to do some Deep Keyword research you need to know your goals ahead of time.
KEI and immediate traffic OR Long term SERPS?
Once you know this, its time to gather all this data together and make decisions…
If you read this far down, then you definitely want to get my free newsletter on How To Find Hot Niches For Niche Affiliate Marketing by going to http://nicheaffiliatemarketingsecrets.com
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Daniel McGonagle
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