Key Phrase Research part one - transcribed
Key Phrase Research, part one
Hi, this is Sage Lewis from SageRock.com. One of the most important parts of web marketing is key phrase research. If you get your phrases wrong all of your work will be for naught. It’s both going to be too competitive and you won’t rank well. Or you will miss the mark all together, you might be number one for a phrase and you just don’t show up. There are numerous key phrase research tools on the market today, but there is one that is free. It is at Overture, which is Yahoo search marketing; you can get to this tool at inventory.overture.com. You are going to come to a page that looks like this: keyword selector tool. You enter in a word or two; this tool will show you the top variations of that phrase that have been recorded in the last month. This is a great way to see what variations of your potential key phrases people are searching for. I’ve looked at Cleveland real estate; these are the results that I got. You can see the count, the search was done in July of 2006, and there are 19612 people who searched for Cleveland real estate, 7227 searched for Cleveland OH real estate, 4766 searched for Cleveland TN real estate. That right there is interesting because, a lot of times when you are in your own market, you don’t think there might be variations or someone searching for someone who seems like you, but isn’t. Cleveland real estate is a good example because there are numerous Clevelands throughout the country. When we are crafting our phrases to optimize for we want to pay attention to that. A visitor will probably type in “Cleveland real estate”, realize they are in the wrong state and go back to refine their search. Now we want to start developing a spreadsheet. If you used a tool like Wordtracker, which is a great key phrase research tool, this process would be a little bit more automated, but it certainly isn’t out of the realm of possibility. All you do is highlight the phrases you are interested in as well as the count numbers. Then you right click and hit copy. Now, you might think that you will just be able to paste that into excel, but, believe it or not, you can’t. Excel jumbles it all up. What I do is go into notepad and paste the phrases. From here I copy and paste them once again into excel. Now you can see the search numbers are in the C cell, and our phrases are in the D cell. We can go back and forth, doing this for a lot of different phrases. We might also want to look at Cleveland realtor to see what variations of that there are. Here we can see that the numbers are a lot less than Cleveland real estate, but clearly people are still searching for it, so we will take these and paste them into the spreadsheet as well. Now you can see we are developing a nice little list of key phrases. This tells you half of the story; this tells you how often a phrase is searched in comparison to another phrase. There are some things to keep in mind here, these numbers are strictly from Overture.com, this is not across the internet. The value here is in comparison to other phrases. Now we want to know how likely we will come up for these phrases, we want to see how competitive they are. Now we will go to Google and search these phrases and find out exactly how many competing web sites there are for each of the phrases. I am just going to start pasting these phrases into Google. I am going to put the phrases in quotations, this is not how most people search, but this will tell me how many pages have this exact phrase on the page. If I don’t have the quotations I’m going to have a much larger number because it will show me every page that has these words anywhere on the page. What I want to show you is, results 1-100, you might have your browser set to 1-10, of about 408,000, This is the number we are interested in. So, we are going to copy this number and then paste it into this cell, E. Then we are going to do this will all of these phrases.