Tools For Choosing Keywords:

There are many different keyword tools out there that offer up this type of information. Some are free while  others charge for their services.  Some keyword tool creators charge a monthly subscription fee while others charge a flat fee to purchase the software.

Here are a  few different tools for choosing keywords for SEO purposes.  There are others out there but these are some of the more popular ones:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool - This is the most well known and widely used keyword tool out there and the good news is – it’s FREE! This is the main tool we use daily to find new and relevant keywords to use for customers as well as our own content.  Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to learn more.

Market Samurai - This is the 2nd keyword tool we use daily to find new keywords.  It currently costs around $100 but it is a 1-time fee and WELL worth it.  Once you purchase the software, you own it for life and all software updates are free.  It offers much more information than other tools and it is easy to use.  Visit www.marketsamurai.com to learn more.

Wordtracker Free Suggestion Keyword Tool - This is another free keyword tool to help you with choosing relevant keywords for SEO.  After you type in a root keyword that you are interested in, it will display the top 100 searches that people are looking  for.  It tells you how many times per day that people search for these specific keywords.  Go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com to learn more.

Wordtracker – Wordtracker also has a paid version of their keyword suggestion tool.  It offers up a lot more information but is not necessarily needed for optimizing a small business website.  It currently costs  $329 to purchase the software or $59 monthly if you only want to use the software temporarily.

Keyword Spy - This is another keyword tool to help with choosing the right keywords. There is a paid and free version of this software.  This tool also allows you to spy on your competitors and see what keywords they are using as well as what ads they are specifically using to drive more business to their websites.

How to Start Choosing Keywords:

There are various ways to go about choosing keywords for SEO but I’m going to cover my technique using the Adwords tool.  Your goal is to find keywords that have enough people searching for them with little competition.  The less competition you have for a specific keyword, the higher your chances are for ranking well for the keyword.

Since most of the 1-2 word keyword phrases have lots of competition already, it’s good to search for long-tail keywords as well.  These are 3+ word combination.  For example, if you run a plumbing business in Chicago, you may want to start searching for words such as:

• “Chicago IL plumber”
• “plumber in Chicago”
• “Chicago plumbing business”

Head over to Adwords and type in your root keywords which in the above example would be “chicago plumber”.  After you type this into the Adwords, you will get a ton of keyword suggestions – many of which will be too general and not applicable to a local business.  As you look through the keywords, click the “Add” link  to the right of the words that apply to your business.

I usually look for keywords that have at least 3000 searches a month.  With a local business however, you may need to be choosing keywords that have closer to 300-500 searches a month since you are dealing with a smaller geographic location.  When you get your keywords laser targeted (in this case by adding in the specific location), you know that the traffic you are getting to your website is looking for the services you offer.

Keep adding in new keywords and see what the tool returns to you.  You can do repeated searches and just keep adding new words to grow your list.  Rearrange the wording (i.e. “chicago plumber” and “plumber in “chicago”) to see if Google gives you any new suggestions.  As you “Add” the keywords to your list, on the right hand side of the screen you will see your keywords list grow.

When you are finished adding words, click the link that says “.csv (for excel)” which is below your list.  This will export you list to Excel. Add the following columns into your Excel spreadsheet: “Keyword”, “Search Vol”, “Exact”, and “allintitle”.  Put your keywords under the keyword column and add in the search volume from Google Adwords under the Search Vol column.

Your next job is to look at the competition for these keywords. After choosing your keywords, go to Google to see what the competition looks like.  I usually search for words that have less than 30,000 competing pages and less than 3000 pages that have the keyword in their HTML title tag.  Here’s how to look  for this information:

Find Total Competing Pages For Your Keyword

Add quotations around your keywords and separately add the keywords into a Google search. This is called an exact match.  In the image below, the total number of competing pages is 32,500.  This means that there are 32,500 pages indexed in Google that have this exact string of keywords.

Record this number in your Excel spreadsheet and repeat this step for all of your keywords.

Next you want to find the total number of pages that have this exact keyword string in their title.  If the keyword is in a web page’ title, this means that the website is trying to rank for this keyword.

Find Total Competing Pages For Your Keyword in Title

You then need to type in allintitle:”keyword” into a Google search (or other search engine) to see # pages with your keyword in title.

As you can see there are 922 pages that have this exact keyword in title. Not bad for a 2 word keywords combination!

Here’s what your excel spreadsheet should look like:

When choosing keywords, in this example, I would try and rank for the keyword “Chicago plumber”.  This may be tough depending on who is currently dominating the front page of Google  but there are other SEO tactics you can do to try and rank higher.  We will go into these in the near future.  On a side note, a keyword tool such as Market Samurai will do all of these steps for you, all you need to do is add in your root keyword.