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 alist of keywords with search estimates.

Copythetop 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 KeywordElite. Here’s what I would do in this case…

Step 1: Open KeywordElite andselect 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 textfile 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 the video clip at Keyword Elite Site it 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.)

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 Â engine.

You’ve already signed up for a Google AdWords account? If not sig up HERE

 
Login to your GoogleAdWordsaccount https://adwords.google.com/select ). (

Within your account, go to Tools > Traffic Estimator (or just visit the link below) to launch GoogleAdWords’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 .

Whenyou’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 muchyoucouldexpectto 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 $2.00 a click 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!