Case Study Part II – Keywords

Today I’d like to continue discussing my case study of a blog that I am reviving. In Part I, I discussed how I was getting content for the blog. Today I will discuss keyword research.

There are two main aspects to a good keyword: (1) the price you can get per AdSense click, and (2) how competitive the keyword is. If the keywords are too competitive, it will be hard to rank for them in the search engines, so it will be hard to get traffic to those posts.

Tools for Keyword Research

There are several good tools for keyword research. First I will list some of the available tools; then I will tell you what I use.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool – It used to be that you could use this tool outside of AdWords. But today when I was trying it, it kept telling me that I needed to sign in to my AdWords account. So you might need to sign up for an AdWords account to use this tool.

You enter one or more keywords, and it will come up with a lot of suggestions for additional keywords. The nice thing about this tool is that you can also find out what advertisers are paying for clicks on the keywords, which will help you to see whether you will get good money per click in AdSense. Remember that you will not get the entire amount listed here. Google takes their share, so you only get a portion of it.

Seobook Keyword Tool – You enter your keywords, and this tool will give you a list of suggested related keywords and will give you a lot of information about each one. While you get a lot of great information here, and it is free, I don’t like the fact that you have to do a lot of clicking around to get everything, and there is no good way to get a list of your results.

Wordtracker – I don’t use this one, but I am mentioning it because a lot of people swear by it. You do have to get a paid membership to get the full benefits. You can pay by the week, the month, or the year. You can also get a free trial, but I believe the free trial is limited in what you can do.

Keyword Elite – This is the one that I use. It is a paid product, but you only have to pay once, and you can use it forever, instead of paying every month. You can watch the videos on the sales page to see what it can do.

It can generate lists of keywords that you can export into an excel file or into your AdWords account. It gives you information from other tools, such as Google cost per click and Wordtracker information.

You can get some of this information from other tools, but Keyword Elite gathers it all into one place, and I like being able to save it into a excel file for later use.

The only drawback to this tool is that it is slow. It runs for quite a while. You used to be able to just leave your computer and let it run, but now you have to stay nearby to enter “captcha” characters every once in a while. I believe this is for Wordtracker. Keyword Elite used to use the Overture/Yahoo keyword tool, but that is no longer available. Still, for me, it is worth it. I would rather have to enter a few “captchas” than pay huge monthly fees, and I only have to do it once. After that, I just refer to my excel files.

Using the Keyword Data

Anyway, no matter how you gather the keyword data, you then use it to create new posts on your blog.

You don’t need to worry about “keyword density” (the percentage of time you use your keyword on the page). The search engines are more sophisticated and will not be fooled by artificial keyword density. Just write your article naturally and be sure to use the keywords where they are appropriate.

Do a separate post for each keyword that you want to use (unless they are closely related). For example, you can write about dog, dogs, and canines in the same post, but do separate posts for Jack Russell terriers and poodles. This part is just common sense.

The real use of the keyword tools is to let you know of keywords that you may not have thought of, and to let you know which ones would be most profitable to focus on.

For example, doing keyword research for my dog blog, I found the keyword Cesar Millan. I had no idea who he was. I found out that he is a very popular dog trainer with his own show on the National Geographic Channel. Dog lovers love Cesar Millan. Now that I know who he is, I love him too. (Both because he has such great ideas about dog training and because writing about him brings me great traffic. )

Application To My Case Study

So for my case study blog, I ran Keyword Elite and got a huge list of keywords. I then sorted them by KEI (a Wordtracker gauge of keyword effectiveness – measured by number of searches versus number of results found for those keywords). Keywords with a high KEI are good ones to use because they have a lot of people searching for them but are not super competitive.

I looked through the high KEI keywords and found some with high Google cost per click. I am going to take these and write some posts about them on my blog. Hopefully this will bring me lots of traffic for those keywords, and when the traffic gets to my blog, their AdSense clicks will be worth a lot to me.

I will let you know what happens, and tell you what else I am doing with this blog, in future parts of this case study.

- Pat Doyle