Chapter 2: Getting Traffic to Your Website
Section 2: Keyword Research
Keyword research is a vital first step in generating traffic, whether it is via paid methods or free methods. Quite simply, if people are going to find you via the search engines (whether in free, "natural" results or by paid sponsor results), they are going to find you by using certain keyword phrases. When you set things up by using the information in Section 2, these phrases are literally a pathway to you! You have the "information super-highway" leading right up to your doorstep!
There are some really cool tools that allow you to do some pretty intensive keyword researching. Many of these are free, but some are paid as well. I’ll discuss each of these in turn.
First off, in my opinion the best tool to start with is Wordtracker. It is free to use and you don’t need to set up an account or even give your e-mail. You just type a starting keyphrase in the box and out spits the estimated daily, world-wide number of times that phrase is searched for, as well as many different combinations and more specific extensions of your main phrase.
What you really want to do here is to "drill down" to find specific keyword phrases that are a subset of your main phrase. The power in these "long tail" keyword phrases is that these are "buying" words. If you think about it, this makes sense. When someone is searching for something in very general terms they are likely looking for basic knowledge about the subject. As they learn more, their questions will get more and more specific when they search.
Those more targeted keywords are called "long tail" words, since there are less of those types of searches done. However, because there are less searches there, there is also less competition on those keywords! For example, it is easier to target and be ranked highly for 20 keywords that are searched 50 times per month each, for a total of 1,000 monthly searches than it is to rank high for one more popular (but also more general) term that is searched 1,000 times per month.
A nice side-effect of appearing near the top of the search results for lesser searched keywords is that you’ll naturally start getting better results for more popular words as well. And, when you are targeting more specific phrases with less competition in paid search results, you’ll notice higher sales rates as well compared to your competitors!
The way to approach all of this then is to think of 10 or so main, general searches that fit your audience. Enter those phrases (one, two, or three-word phrases) into Wordtracker and find out how many times the searches are estimated to be made daily, and find out what the lesser searched for phrases are. Then, select a couple phrases from each main keyword such that you have 20 or so phrases that are searched 5 to 10 times per day. Out of your original 10 keywords, each of those should be searched 50 to 200 times per day or so.
(NOTE: when doing your searches, I would turn off the adult filter. It seems to do too much filtering and provides very different results in some cases.)
Now, organize your group of 10 phrases by total count in descending order, and do the same for the 20 more specific phrases. Your initial campaign is going to consist of having 10 to 20 sub-pages that are each optimized for one or two keywords specific keywords and it’s general phrase counter-part, and a home page that is optimized for the most popular phrase (and it’s corresponding best specific phrase). We will discuss what all of this means in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) section, but for right now having that list is a great start.
If you want to go even deeper into the long tail words, wordtracker does have a paid service such that you can generate even more of those. You can get this for one month at $60, or for a full year at about $27 per month by clicking to this link at WordTracker. Actually, you can get a free 7 day trial here. More importantly though, this tool allows you to do "lateral" research, to get related synonyms, get the search counts for those, and drill down from there.
There are other keyword search tools like the one at digitalpoint and overture (now yahoo!), but I don’t like those because they are either down frequently, or don’t seem to return good results. For "vertical" research (general to more and more specific terms) wordtracker is the best.
For "lateral" research, google has a good free tool built into its adwords program. (Lateral research would return related keyword phrases that don’t contain any of the same actual words, for example a search on "basketball" might return "Michael Jordan". Wordtracker is not going to come up with that, but google will.) We are going to learn more about that in the next section, for right now just know that it will become available once you set up a google adwords account soon. (Cost there is a one-time $5, and google adwords is an ABSOLUTE must-have.)
Now, when we have these keyword phrases nailed down, it would be good to know what our competition is doing. If we know what they are doing, we just need to do a little better and we’ll be right where they are. For this information at the click of a button, I would recommend keyword elite. This software lets you know what your competitors are doing both in the "natural" results and paid results, as well as helps you to generate lists of keywords. You can buy this software, and I consider this a must have, for $176 here. (Note the $76 discount below though.)
(Note that the maker of this software also has another must have tool for SEO that is indispensible in analyzing competition and improving your natural search engine results. When you buy that product for $167, you can get keyword elite for just $100 at the same time. This is a great buy and really a necessity if you are serious about getting traffic for the least expense possible. I will discuss that much more in the SEO section, but you can get both programs here in the meantime.)
On the videos to the right, I show what each of the above programs can do, as well as a quick sample of what the wordtracker free and paid tools do as well.
Now that we have our list of keywords to target and know how to generate hundreds of keywords for pay per click campaigns (PPC), let’s look in depth at how to manage a PPC campaign in google , to generate nearly instant traffic to our website!
