How to Perform Keyword Research Day #2: Keyword Discovery

Today you’ll learn how to perform keyword research while I review Trellian “Keyword Discovery” tool. There are many free and paid ways to do “keyword research” online, and Trellian’s service is one of the major paid services available.

This is the third installment in the new series How to Build Income Online.

I won’t go on and on as much as I did yesterday about why Keyword Research is so important – but it’s worth stating again…

There are 3 main reasons to do “Keyword Research”:

• Which keywords are best to use?
• How much traffic do they get?
• How much competition do I have?

There was a comment left on the initial post in this series this morning basically saying – “will you get traffic just by posting everyday, I didn’t get much at first, but now that I do keyword research it’s increased dramatically…”. Of course! The first post was just to get people used to the fact that you have to post all the time and build income “post by post”. Through each and every post in this series you should get better and more experienced on how to expertly craft those posts into search magnets that draw traffic to your site. That’s the goal because traffic = $$, but merely posting is the beginning.

So, we’re on Keyword Research Day #2 and I’m going to show you how to use the Keyword Discovery tool. There are two version to this tool – one is free and one is paid. You need to register for a free account to use the free one (no credit card required here).

Click the banner above to get a Free Trial account at Keyword Discovery for keyword research so you can follow along (*again – no credit card required).

Keyword Discovery has some unique options for keyword research. In addition they claim to have 36 billion unique search terms where WordTracker has 300 million. They also have keyword data in other languages, like Spanish, Dutch, and Polish. Their paid service is more per month than WordTracker, but has more features – like a keyword density tool so you can harvest the keywords competitors use on their web sites. Let’s get started…

Starting a search for keywords is easy. The first thing you notice are the numerous options that are available. You can search the “global premium database” for keywords, but you can also search various countries and markets. Also note that the bottom you can search eBay, news and shopping databases – and not pictured, the last two are specifically Google or Yahoo data. You can also choose thesaurus, including plurals, phrase match, historical, and more right off the bat. Keyword Discovery seems to have all the options baked into one easy to use interface, whereas with WordTracker yesterday – you can see they have theirs spread over various screens and tools. There are also options here to the right for “spell” (misspelling search), “related”, and “fuzzy”. I’m going to do a search for “hard drive” just like yesterday.

The numbers seem be higher and I seem to have some clearer options with Keyword Discovery vs. WordTracker. I have keywords I expected like laptop hard drive and external hard drive (second on the list today), but I also got unexpected results like “dell c 600 hard drive” and “500gb external hard drive”. I want to dig deeper in these results if I can.

In the images above I clicked on the chart icon to the right of “dell c 600 hard drive” – and look at the results. It shows that the dell c 600 hard drive phrase has really only been searched for in the last month. Is it a trend that will continue? Who knows, but I’m more interested in keywords that always get traffic. I want to dig deeper on the keyword “external hard drive”.

The graphic above is the results I get after clicking on the chart “trends” icon beside the “external hard drive” result. It looks like searches for this are increasing, which they should be as external hard drives are getting bigger, and cheaper every month.

Now, I clicked on the “market share” button at the bottom and now I see how the search traffic is split for “external hard drive” across google and Yahoo! Looks like the traffic from Ask and MSN for that keyword phrase are almost non-existant. One more thing I can do is actually click on the term “external hard drive” to get related keyword phrases that include that phrase:

This is great, because I can see if related terms get as much traffic and if I should consider them as well. It also gives me hundreds of ideas for future posts and articles. So far we’ve just looked at raw traffic information (a bit more in depth that with WordTracker). At the bottom of the keyword search results are additional options.

These icons are options, the trash can is “delete from project”, the chart is “analyze results”, the next one is “export results”, the binoculars are “search and replace”, and the last icon is “search DNS”. I’m going to “analyze results”.

Now we get some competitive analysis information like we did yesterday in WordTracker. In this chart we get KEI information (see yesterday’s lesson for explanation), but it doesn’t appear for all results. It appears the ones you see KEI for are ones somebody else recently ran, and now it’s cached. If you want KEI for certains ones you have to check the box to the left and click the “analyze” button at the bottom of the page.

I clicked all the missing results and clicked “analyze” to load them all in the graphic above. Now I have the data I need. The only thing you don’t see on this screen is an extra column that was too big for me to include to the right “predicted daily”. I think out of this list if I was going to start up a brand new site based on this info my keywords would be “external hard drive”. I know the KEI is very low and there’s a lot of competition, but there are so many options for categories, sub-pages, articles, and posts. In the column you can’t see “external hard drive” gets 480 searches per day – that sounds pretty good to me. Especially since most people searching for that term are definitely shopping.

Now I’m going to do some other types of searches using the keyword phrase I picked “external hard drive”. Next I do a spelling search on this keyword phrase:

It looks like at least 3 variations of that phrase are getting some sigificant searches every month. If I use those in posts and artices I should attract additional traffic.

Next I do a “related” results check for “external hard drive”, and while not the most significant – I do get a list of related terms that might be good in my site.

Now, I’m going to do something that I’ve only seen (so far) in the Keyword Discovery tool. I’m going to take the phrase “external hard drive” and use the “search DNS” option. What what this does:

This search takes your keyword phrase, in this case “external hard drive”, and lookes for domain name options and tells you if they’re available or not. It tells you if they are available, registered, or for sale. I think that’s an awesome time saver!

There are several competitors tools within Keyword Discovery. The first is the “X-Ref” tool. Basically it does a keyword search like the first one we did, and then if you give it one URL it will figure out how many keywords in your results match keywords on that page. It can only do this for one web page at a time. So – I would have to do a google search for “external hard drive”, and then punch in one of the top URL’s to cross reference. The first results I got was for the PCMag Reviews and Price Comparison page for “hard drives”. That didn’t seem to work for some reason – so I did it for the second result at “newegg.com”.

This is a very telling graph, because I did it on the #2 results for “external hard drive” – and they have 28 matches for the phrase “external hard drive”, and only 1 for “external hard drive case”. They don’t have any other keywords – and you can’t see it here but they only have “external hard drive” appearing once in keyword and once in meta description. None of the other phrases rank at all.

This tells me (like I said), I have a pretty good chance at ranking for some of those other keyword phrases on specific posts and pages with different terms that include our main keyword phrase.

The last competitor search I’m going to do is the “keyword density” search. I used “www.newegg.com” since they are top competition for all hard drive related searches. This graph shows us the top 10 keywords they rank use on their homepage and where they appear (title, keywords, description, link, and heading). If I did some more google searches I could find where they rank for these phrases – but this is good info as it shows how they get their rankings and where they place their keywords. Once I get my site up I can compare my URL with theirs to see how I’m doing.

The only other thing I should show you is the “industry keywords” tool in Keyword Discovery. Let’s say I start with “computers”, and on the next screen click “hardware”, then “storage”, and then “hard drives”.

In this tool I can drill down through industry categories to get as close to my keyword phrase as I can (in this case “hard drive”). What I get is a list of “industry terms” for hard drives that I otherwise may not know – AND I get their search traffic. In this graph I see that Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital are the top 3 industry terms (and manufacturers), and combined get more than 9,100 searchs per month. That’s more than our main keyword phrase “external hard drive”. With this information – if we use those 3 terms throughout our new site we can get 75% per more traffic per month.

As you can see in today’s post, keyword research isn’t easy – but the data you retrieve may last a very long time. With just a small amount of data you can amass hundreds of keywords giving your fertilizer for posts and articles, keywords, descriptions, titles, products, and more. There are, as I said, many competitors online vying for your money to sell you online keyword research tools. WordTracker and Trellian’s Keyword Discovery are the largest I know of. If you come across “Wordze” – that’s just Wordtracker in disguise, it’s the same data with a different front end. There are several niche tools for keyword research but none I’ve found as broad as these two.

If you’re going to start a site, blog, niche store, or build an online business keyword research will give you the data you need to be more informed about traffic and the competition – and in the end be more profitable. You can’t build a business on little or no research. Tomorrow I’ll cover free keyword research tools – and you can weigh how they work versus paying a monthly fee for a service like WordTracker or Keyword Discovery.