The
Benefits of Using an Illogical
"Anything goes approach" to your keyword
research
By
John Alexander
Before we
discuss the benefits of using an "anything goes approach to
research" as it applies to keyword research or behavioral
research for the process of optimization, let's take a minute to
talk about logic or the reverse (for lack of a better term term)
anti-logic.
Logical
thinking versus illogical thinking:
In our everyday
life as mature adults, we find value in approaching things with a
logical thinking process. We choose to formulate ideas and
thoughts that "make the most sense" and contribute to
what we are trying to achieve. For most things in life, the more
logical planning you do, the better results you will obtain.
For most aspects of living our lives, using a logical approach
delivers much better results than taking an illogical approach.
Performing certain tasks in a methodical, step by step approach
only makes sense, especially in cases where you are taking
specific actions to reproduce a certain result over and over
again.
However, the
process we refer to as keyword research is one place where we can
benefit by taking more of an anything goes approach for research.
If logic rules in your research (which for most of us it naturally
does,) then you often discover the same keyword phrases that any
other logical person might be guessing at or researching.
But true research, is not limited to guessing at things but is
better thought of in terms of:
"a process of exploring existing data for the hottest and
freshest trends in search behavior."
Good research
technique allows the researcher to discover many different trends
that the casual guesser will never even notice.
Every time I
write another article describing examples of high KEI (Keword
Effectiveness Index) type phrases, it does not take long before
people jump on the examples and naturally start using them. So by
the time you read these examples the data may have changed, but
the reason I share these tips is to help you research your data
more effectively using a tool like Wordtracker.
Don't just limit yourself to the examples, but dig in and try
exploring data for your own industry specific phrases.
Taking one of
the oldest examples like "baby names" you might think
after this time that people have worn it out. The original article
I wrote talked about how soon to be parents love to use the
Internet to research baby names. Therefore, by offering such a
resource in a baby clothes or baby furniture Web site you could
attract "soon to be parents" to the Web site based on
what a specific audience wants to find. They may want to research
what they will call their child but end up realizing that there
are other things for sale that they need here too.
The examples I
gave years ago are getting fairly competitive, so let's give you
some new examples:
"Baby boy
names" has about 419,000 competing pages on Google at the
time of this article.
"unique baby names" has about 131,000 competing pages on
Google at the time of this article.
"uncommon baby names" has at least 40,000 competing
pages on Google.....
And people begin
to panic and say, oh well, so much for this strategy....all the
baby name keywords have been used up. But let's not jump to
conclusions so fast.
How about some of these searches:
"Traditional
English Baby Names has only 8 competing pages and a KEI of 55.0
"modern baby names" has only 755 competing pages and a
KEI of 205.0
"Old south baby names" has only 60 competing pages and a
KEI of 336.1
"Southern Female Names" has only 136 competing pages and
a KEI of 339.0
"Colonial baby names" has only 2 competing pages and a
KEI of 480.5
It took me less than 2 minutes to find these phrases, based on one
simple action. But once you are on to it, you will expand your
keyword research ability by several thousand times.
When performing
comprehensive research inside the members area of Wordtracker,
people tend to go with keywords that make sense logically. This is
only natural since for most of us, we want to guess at terminology
that makes the best sense. People often tend to only want to enter
into Wordtracker, the most logically descriptive terms instead of
taking a little broader "anything goes" approach to
their research.
TIP: To find the terms above in just a few minutes, I did not
research the keyword phrase "baby names." I narrowed it
down to the single word "name" and allowed
Wordtracker to instantly show me how that word is being used in
multiple phrases.
When you attempt
to research a specific phrase that is lodged in the front of your
mind, you are limiting the results you will see to those that
using that exact two word combination together. In the meantime,
there could be hundreds of searches being done that you will never
ever see or find, because you are logically guessing at a specific
phrase that you ***think*** may be important. By using a single
word, you are going to get a much wider cross section of keywords
and understand exactly how they are being used by the searcher
within the last 90 days.
Many people take
the approach of checking all of the keywords that make the most
logical sense, rather than using a root word that is not illogical
or not the most obvious. Let's go through a few more quick
examples to show you how to do research that will open up all
kinds of new windows for discovery.
Suppose you are an affiliate marketer who has Web site around the
topic of lighting. Maybe you are trying to find interesting
keywords based on low compete counts for words like lamp,
lighting, light bulbs etc.
Of these primary keywords that first come to mind, what would be
an interesting single root word to go exploring Wordtracker data
with?
None of these suggestions would be wrong to check out, but let's
use this as an example to find a product that we could sell from
our informational affiliate site.
Would you use a word like light or lighting or lamp
or light bulbs?
The first few words jump off the page at you because they are
logical and make sense, right. Let's go exploring with the single
term "bulb." It is still logical to a degree, but it is
not the first thing you probably thought of.
Rather than
listing all of the words I found.....such as:
"Inground pool light bulb"
"Fluoresent light bulb containers"
"Sunwave light bulb"
"Fibre optic light bulb replacement"
Let me say that it was not until about 260 words in the list that
the competing counts were above 20.
In other words, there are literally over 200 keyword phrase
combinations I found in about 3 minutes.
TIP: Have
you thought about exploring single terms that are on Wordtracker's
top 1000 busiest words within the last 90 days?
TIP: Have
you thought about purchasing a report from Wordtracker of the top
20,000 busiest keywords and use that list to quickly sort through
the hottest busy data within the last 90 days.
Try and take the
broadest anything goes approach to research and test ordinary
everyday terms. The boring little terms that most people assume
have no value. Don't be in a rush to try and research multiple
terms, but start with a single word. Most of want to think of a
solution and then explore data to find a keyword that relates to
that solution.
TIP: Try it backwards. Stop
thinking of the solution first, but explore the data to find a
need. Once you find a need of your searching audience, then dig
into a solution at that point.
Example of exploring an everyday boring word:
I hope this is enough to get you thinking more open
mindedly about the process of keyword research. There is a wealth
of data that can be instantly tapped into and made use of.