The Death Of Keyword Research Options

[Thejspot]

Hi there guys,

Have you noticed that Ovature is dead.... RIP....

It's certainly not being maintained. Even on the odd occasion it does work the results are from May or something.

Alternative suggestions anyone?

[A.N.Onym]

freekeywords.wordtracker.com
google external keyword tool

[kichus]

Using tools are just to gather the popularity trends... no tool says you have to use THIS keyword. Finalizing keywords need deep analysis over those gathered data. Here are some tools which can give you insights about the global/limited trends of past search data... Hope this may help...

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
http://adlab.msn.com/ForecastV2/
http://adlab.msn.com/contextSim/Default.aspx
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
http://www.seosleuth.com/site/www.seochat.com
http://www.seodigger.com/
http://www.spyfu.com/
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

[Thejspot]

Thank you Kichus, that's a fantastic list.

I don't really use them to find the "right" words, I use them to watch trends on how people are searching more than anything. It seems that people are asking the search engines more questions now than they used to.

A search used to be a few words, now it seems to be full questions.

Anyway, thank you again.

[earlpearl]

that is very thorough, Kichus. thanks.

For pure volume I like wordze which is a paid service.

for competitiveness seodigger is great.

[DarrenC]

I seem to have a real problem with choosing the right keywords.

It's frustrating to find that the keyword term provides few or no visitors to your site.

It's okay having all these great tools, but I'd like to hear what process you go through when identifying which keyword term(s) to optimise on a page.

[kichus]

It's frustrating to find that the keyword term provides few or no visitors to your site.

True, in some cases.
I would suggest not to worry on a one-to-one rank check. Do it as a group of keywords and see the overall trend. Depending on individual keywords are not suggested instead analyze the grouped trend over time.

[DarrenC]

Kichus,

Hi, could you give me an example of what you mean by a 'grouped trend'

My business "sells" holidays to UK and European holidaymakers.

So, the problem we have is that it's holidays in different holidays, and down to different types of holiday.

[kulpreet_singh]

Add to that list your own analytics program (which should show the keywords that people are using to get to your site), and also Keyword Discovery, which I think is more accurate than WordTracker.

[kichus]

Sure Darren.

By Grouped trend, what I mean is, a bench of selected keywords.

Getting your /bluewidget-california.html page rank for [blue widget in california] and disappointed while seeing your page receives 0 traffic, is wrong, I would say. For such long tail keywords only if you are at #1 or #2 would drive you any traffic, and hope we all know that.

Instead you watch the steady rank and traffic trend for [blue widgets] and [widgets] as a whole - say you have pages on [blue widgets + place 1.. 100] and similar to [red widgets + place 1--100] - and see the upward trends. If you are seeing a steady trend and foreseeing a steady flow of traffic with the support of those long tail keywords, that's the right way to do it.

Don't be sad while seeing a drop in [blue widget + ...] keywords if you are seeing the others [red widgets, green widgets] are performing well. Since if you are selling holidays, you know better than me that your traffic is affected by several factors. The season, place and even unexpected calamities...

That's why I said, instead of worrying "Damn! my [blue widget] keywords sucks...!!!", check whether you missed to see the, 'hmmm.... I can see my [red widgets] are poping up and altogether for the [widget] I am in a better position now". Study each trends... you may find last year same month you faced the same drop in [blue widgets]. So being aware of the trends will keep you away from unwanted worries....

This post has been edited by kichus: Dec 24 2007, 07:34 AM

[Thejspot]

I seem to have a real problem with choosing the right keywords. It's okay having all these great tools, but I'd like to hear what process you go through when identifying which keyword term(s) to optimise on a page.

We'll since we're talking about SEO, we can fairly safely assume you're trying to attract people doing a commercial search (they're going to buy something hopefully). So work out what the primary business activities of the site are, and they're your keywords. Using Google Webmaster tools (which is free) will also tell you what Google thinks your site is about, it will list the keywords Google sees.

So, if your business "sells" holidays to UK and European holidaymakers...

You should look at keyword phrases like - "travel europe", "UK Holiday" etc. You probably want something a little more long tail than that though so your competition is a little less.

It's frustrating to find that the keyword term provides few or no visitors to your site.

Sure it is, but if the keywords describe what you're doing, you might havd to admit you don't have a big enough market. Not in your case I don't think.

[Robert_Paulson]

Hi DarrenC,

For the KW research I do for most of my sites, I have a bit of an advantage in that I work in that industry (which maybe you do as well for your site), so knowing the kinds of things that are trending more popular are just sort of known to me by virtue of being in the field. That's a nice starting point, but if you don't have that advantage, subscribing to magazines, watching television shows and browsing competing sites can give you a pretty firm grip on the general types of things people are looking for and a start at the keywords you should use to attract that audience.

As for the longtail phrases to actually make use of, I'd use those tools suggested in this thread by Kichus to find as many keyword combos as you can and make note of them, and use them on that single page or small cluster of pages (as appropriate). There's no real way to know which KW phrase is going to work out best, so monitor your traffic and adjust the content on the page accordingly.

Good luck!

[kestrel]

If you can afford the investment why not trial your keywords on PPC first?

There are several benefits to taking this approach:

- You can tell in (virtually) real-time whether a keyword is performing/going to perform
- When you commit your keywords to natural SEO you have the confidence that in 6 months time you won't have to rethink your strategy, and then spend another 6 months re implementing.
- With Adwords you can run a query report that will tell you exactly which keywords triggered your ads. That's not just the keywords you have in your keyword lists. The report also shows the other keywords the searcher used at that time.

The last tactic is invaluable for deep keyword research and uncovers all of those obscure long-tails you would never have thought of. *edit* PPC'ers can find many negative keywords with this tactic *edit*

I mentioned that this approach requires an initial investment. Arguably the cost is neglible if you consider the benefits of significantly increasing your chances of getting it right first time.

Also, make sure you track the conversion rates of keywords. There is no substitute for hard statistical evidence when it comes to deciding which keywords to commit to.

K

This post has been edited by kestrel: Dec 30 2007, 12:33 PM