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Trellian – who own the excellent keyword tool Keyword Discovery – sent me a good promotional email today.
Now Keyword Discovery is a good tool, I’ve subscribed to it before.
But I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying. It didn’t matter that much, as Google’s keyword tool is comprehensive, accurate and free.
Life must be really hard for Keyword Discovery since Google unleashed the economics of free on the keyword research market.
There have been a lot of new options emerge for keyword research recently.
If you are are doing keyword research for yourself, check out these three tools from Google:
Discussing how and when you might use these tools is the topic of a longer article.
Following up on my last post on keywords, once you understand what keywords are most important for your business, then comes the question of how to make use of them.
Having a search engine friendly website is vital, because if you don’t, all your hard work won’t help if you can’t even get indexed. But assuming you have a search engine friendly website, and know your keywords, what do you do with that knowledge?
I’ve written a set of articles in our How To section that talk about on-page and off-page search engine optimization.
A detailed – and pretty technical – article from the Keyword Discovery manual is also useful: Implementing Keywords into a Website. If you are using one of our sites, make sure you read the How To articles first, as we have made it easy to access the tags mentioned in the KD article from your Dashboard – no programming required.
We use Wordtracker a lot because our clients can keep on using the free keyword discovery tool themselves even if they don’t have a full subscription. Keyword Discovery costs more, and doesn’t have a free version. As their free trial is heavily neutered, it isn’t easy to get a flavour for it.
As the great philosopher once said, if you can’t be free, at least you can be cheap.
For many years Overture was a very popular keyword research tool. But it wasn’t that accurate, and it stopped being updated regularly. Free, and very, very cheap.
But Overture is still used widely as a meaure of popularity.
Guys, we’ve moved on. Use old data and you miss out on important changes.
There are more accurate data available – even free. And a professional subscription to a keyword tool costs $30-60/mth.
Understanding keywords is much more important than is generally realised. And I think a habitual dependence on Overture can mean missing what is right in front of you. The world has moved on.
Understanding keywords, and knowing how to make use of keywords research, is a powerful differentiator for online business.
To help explain keyword research to business owners and those responsible for marketing strategy and planning, I’ve written an introductory article called Keywords Research: Sonar for Online Marketing.
The article introduces keyword research and explains how it can be used in an online business. The article aims to be concise (as simple as possible, and no more).
I’ve left a few concepts out. For example Keyword Effectiveness Index (or KEI) didn’t get a mention. KEI measures popularity of a keyword over competition, so a popular keyword with low competition has a high KEI.
It is left out because if you are running a business with competition, KEI just isn’t useful.
Brian Clark of CopyBlogger has recently launched his Teaching Sells educational programme (highly recommended if you are in any way involved in delivering education services online).
In the Teaching Sells course material, there is a quote that makes a very important point:
The idea behind entering into a high-demand market is not to avoid competition, but to successfully compete.
Rather than focus on where there is limited competition, I would rather work with strategies that allow you to compete successfully.
And that is the focus of the article, how to use keywords as a competitive tool.
Please read the keywords-as-sonar article. Let me know what you think and suggest any improvements – I do plan to add to it over time.
