How To Do Keyword Research

Once you have a topic (see previous section for more on this), you can quickly run it through the following steps to judge its profitability and create a focused list of keywords.

For this walkthrough, we will continue with our earlier topic home theater systems. Specifically, we will be doing keyword research to do three things for this topic:

Use the keyword databases to find out if it is popular

Research the PPC engines and find out what the top bid prices are

Go back to the keyword databases and create a focused list of keywords

Step 1 Popularity Check

Just as we did in the previous chapter, head to the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo Search Marketing (Overture).

As it's shown below, enter your main keyword in the box and click on 'Go'. This will give you a list of keywords with search estimates.

Copy the top 6-10 keywords in a text file; we will need them for the next step.

Alternatively, you could use the same keyword list you made earlier.

Trick #1

I don't typically go to the Yahoo search term suggestion tool shown above. I simply use a software product called Keyword Elite. Here's what I would do in this case...

Step 1: Open Keyword Elite and select project #1, "Create keyword list".

Step 2: Enter the main keyword: home theater system

Step 3: Select Overture.com from the list, and select 200 results, then click "ok"

See screenshot below:

Keyword Elite will process and give you a nice list of 200 related keywords, plus, you'll be able to do a bunch of editing to the keywords to give you an even larger list. See the screenshot below for some of the cool things you can do.

You can save the keywords to a text file instead of manually copying and pasting them from the Yahoo search term suggestion tool, which is a big time saver.

Also, what I like to do is in "step 3" above, I'd select 5,000 keywords to be returned and then select the "ask.com" option and Keyword Elite would bring back a list of 5,000 related keywords, within a few minutes! It's really cool...

Check out this video clip showing how this project type works. (Note: The video was created using an older version of Keyword Elite so you'll notice there are a few less features in the video than in my screenshot above, but it'll give you a good idea how it works.)

Click here to watch video"

Step 2 Bid Price Check

Most people will tell you to go to the Yahoo Bid Tool and see their numbers to get an idea of what the top bids are. It's a good idea, but why not go to Google instead and use the tools THEY have provided to us inside the Google AdWords account? This way we get to see numbers for Google AdWords (where we will be bidding), and not some other PPC engine.

You've already signed up for a Google AdWords account in the last chapter, it's time to put it to use.

Login to your Google AdWords account (https://adwords.google.com/select)

Within your account, go to Tools > Traffic Estimator (or just visit the link below) to launch Google AdWords' traffic and bid cost estimation tool.

(https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox)

Enter your keywords as above in the first box (don't worry about broad, phrase, exact and negative matches for now we will cover these in chapter 6). These keywords will be the ones you copied off into a text file in the previous step.

Next select the maximum cost-per-click that you're willing to pay, as well as your daily budget. Since we want to get the maximum number of clicks to our website, we will enter an unreachable budget amount of $500. In that case Google will keep displaying our ad, because our budget will never be reached in 1 day... given the keyword(s) we've selected.

Language and location targeting will be set to your default account values, so you can leave them as they are.

Enter countries that you want to target Here, I've selected US and Canada. When you're done, click on 'Continue' and you'll be taken to the next page with the Traffic Estimator's results.

This screen above is very helpful because it will give you a good estimate as to how much the top Adwords bidders are paying "per click" for each of the keywords you entered. Also, you'll be able to see roughly how many clicks you can expect to get "per day" if you were in a certain ad position in Google. And finally, you'll be able to see roughly how much you could expect to pay "per day" for each of the keywords.

These are some VERY helpful numbers.

At first glance, this seems a very expensive niche to get in. With most of the keyword phrases costing over $2.00aclick to be in one of the top 3 Adwords positions.

Now $2.00 a click is a high amount at a 1% conversion rate (1 out of 100 people clicking through your ad convert into customers), that means that you will need to spend $200 per sale!

But... when you think about the niche, you'll realize that most home theater systems go for thousands of dollars even a pair of high-end speakers can set you back $500. Add to that the fact that you can improve conversion rates by following simple tips (chapter 5) and suddenly this niche looks very, very interesting.

You'll also notice that most clicks go to a few keywords these are the ones you will be

shaping your ad groups around. Adwords is all a numbers game. No your metrics (how much a customer is worth to you) and you'll be a step ahead of the competition.

Now that we know that this niche can deliver, let's look at how we can create focused keyword lists around this topic.

Step 3 Creating Keyword Lists for Sub-Topics

Once you've put together this list, go back to the Keyword Selector tool and enter the into the search box - that is, enter 'wireless home theater system' in the search box this time, and press the arrow to generate a new keyword list.

What are we doing here?

The best strategy to choose keywords here is to start off with your parent term, pick up the top terms from its list, and then 'drill down' to find more keywords for second keyword those terms.

For example, with home theater system as our parent term, we see in the screenshot above that we have lots of targeted keywords for that term. You also see that terms like home theater sound system, wireless home theater and home theater system design are 'different' from the parent keyword and are subtopics that could be used to create more focused keyword lists. Not only that, they are also getting quite a number of searches themselves, so it's worth targeting that traffic specifically (as opposed to running general ads).

So for each term that is a "subtopic" (you have to use your judgment here) and has a lot of searches, you should run it again through the Keyword Selector tool and create a list for that term as well.

For each subtopic, create separate lists. By the way, you can keep these lists in simple text files - no need for fancy spreadsheets or anything like that - you don't that yet.

At the end of this process you will probably have around 100-200 strong keywords on 4-5 subtopics (and 1 parent topic). That's a good number to start with.

Using Keyword Elite to gather the Adwords bid data really quickly...

In "Trick #1" I showed you how we could use Keyword Elite to build us a big keyword list quickly. Well, after we do that, it's very easy to grab everything we need to know about each of those keywords (i.e. Adwords bid data that I taught you about above.)

Here's how I'd personally do it...

Step 1: Select all of the keywords that we generated from "Trick #1" above.

Step 2: Right-Click on your mouse and select "send keywords to project 2"

Step 3: Our keywords are now sent to project 2, "Analyze pay per click listings". Select Google, KEI, Top bids, Title Results, Broad match, phrase match, and exact match, and click "ok"

Keyword Elite will then show us everything I spoke about above, plus a TON of other figures that are extremely important in determining which keywords to use for our marketing.

You can see that the Google bid data is listed below.

You can sort the columns however you want. I use this analysis feature all the time. It really helps with finding profitable niche markets. I'll show you some very cool things I do to find profitable markets in some later chapters.

Check out this video clip showing how this project type works. (Note: The video was created using an older version of Keyword Elite, so you'll notice there are a few less features in the video than in my screenshot above, but it'll give you a good idea how it works.)

Congratulations now you're ready to write ads and get the ball rolling.

If this is your first time doing keyword research, don't worry it gets easier with practice, and there are tons of tips and shortcuts you can use (that we will see in chapters 7 and beyond) to drastically cut down your time in this.

In the next chapter, we will see how you can use these lists to write ads that attract clicks.