Advanced Keyword Research – Keyword Elite

Keyword research is very important if you want to receive substantial search engine traffic, keyword research is good but advanced keyword research is even better. In this article I will take you through my process of advanced keyword research, this process helps to find keywords and keyphrases which not only have substantial searches per month but also have low competitors and high paying advertisements (AdSense).

Picking a Topic

The broad topic you choose should reflect your interests, what you know a lot about and what you wont get bored writing about. The broad topic I chose for this website is marketing with emphasis on internet marketing, your topic could be anything ranging from search engine optimization to global warming.

Generating a Keyword List

If you want to receive traffic from search engines you must write about what people are searching for. The AdWords Keyword Tool tells you exactly this; simply enter your broad term then the tool returns up to 150 related terms and also 50 partially related terms. For this website I enter the term ‘Marketing’ then click ‘Get More Keywords’. Now we want the keywords in a plain text format but rather than copying and pasting into notepad the tool gives us the option to save at text. Scroll down to ‘Download all keywords: text’ and click the link that says ‘text’ to save the keywords to a text file. Save both the related terms and the partially related terms. Keep this file handy as we will be using it in the next step.

Analyzing the Keywords

Keyword Elite is a useful tool for speeding up the analysis process and I recommend it to people who have a high online income but the software isn’t the silver bullet of SEO, as I said it just speeds up the keyword analysis process. I have written two sections about analyzing the keywords, one using Keyword Elite and one using free methods to give an alternative to paying $176 for Keyword Elite.

By analyzing the keywords we collected we will find out; the amount of competitors, the amount of searches per month, the ratio of competitors to searches and the AdWords CPC (cost per click).

Keyword Elite Keyword Analysis

In Keyword Elite we will be using project number 2, ‘Analyze pay per click listings’ for our keyword research. Select project number 2 and click ‘…’ next to ‘Enter keywords you would like to analyze’. In this window copy and paste your keywords from the text file we created earlier into the text box. Now change your settings to be like mine and click OK.

The program will now take 5 minutes or more, depending on your internet connection, to analyze all of the keywords you selected. Click on ‘Report view’ at the top right of the window and wait for the progress bar to reach 100%. First I will explain the most important column names –

• Keyword – The keyword collected from the AdWords keyword tool.
• Results – A Google search of intitle:”keyword keyword” which finds out how many competitors are optimizing a page for the keyword.
• Searches – The amount of searches per month which is scraped from the free search frequency tools such as KeywordDiscovery and Overture.
• R/S Ratio – The ratio of results to searches, the lower the better.
• Adwords CPC – If you are displaying contextual advertisements like Google AdSense, the higher the AdWords CPC the higher the money you will receive from advertisements on the page.

For these results to be useful the keywords should be ordered by the R/S Ratio column, click the column name to order by that column. If it is ordered largest to smallest click the column name again to order smallest to largest since we are interested in the smallest R/S Ratio results.

Now that you have the R/S Ratio of all of your keywords you should note the keywords with 0 to 5 R/S Ratio and think about which you would like to write about. Some of the results returned by the program are rubbish because of inaccuracies in the Results or Searches data but usually this method of keyword research is a very useful method of finding topics to write about which will bring search engine traffic.

The terms which interest me from the keyword analysis are ‘sample marketing plan’, ‘marketing plan template’, ‘marketing agency’, ‘marketing campaigns’, ‘insurance marketing’ and so on. The terms I am interested in have a good R/S Ratio and are topics I can actually write about.

Manual Keyword Analysis

To analyze the keywords we collected earlier we will use just two free tools: Google Search and Keyword Discovery (or Overture). It will take approximately 1 minute to analyze each keyword so think about how much time you have to spend on keyword analysis, if you have 30 minutes select your favorite 30 keywords from the list we created earlier, make sure to choose keywords you can write about.

Now that we know which keyword we will analyze we can get started. First we will search for the keyword in Keyword Discovery to find out how many people search for the term each month. My first keyword is ‘internet marketing’, Keyword Discovery says that the term gets 19926 searched per month, if I divide that by 30 if equates to 664 searched per day. If you were to reach top 5 rankings for the term you might expect to receive 500 visitors per day for the term. Repeat this step for your other 29 keywords and record the results in notepad.

Now we will find out how competitive each term is, to do this we will use the intitle: filter in a Google search. To find out the amount of websites competing for the term ‘internet marketing’ I will search Google for intitle:”internet marketing”. At the top right corner of the Google results it says ‘Results 1 – 10 of about 629,000’, 629,000 is a lot of websites to beat if you want to rank in the top 10 and even worse is that Wikipedia is in the first position, this term would be very hard to rank for and for only 500 visitors per day it might not be worth it. Repeat this step for your other 29 keywords and record the results in notepad.

Now we will find out which of the terms has the best competitor to searches ratio by giving each a C/S Ratio value. To find out the C/S Ratio value for each term you simply divide the amount of competitors by the amount of searches. For ‘internet marketing’ the C/S Ratio value is 630,000 divided by 20,000, the C/S Ratio value is 31.5. I am looking for keywords with C/S Ratio values of between 0 and 10 so ‘internet marketing’ having 31.5 is not a very good keyword to target. Following is a few more keywords I analyzed.

As you can see, of the 5 words analyzed ‘Sample Marketing Plan’ is the best and I will actually be creating a page targeting that search term soon. To find the best words will take either more time or an application like Keyword Elite listed above.

Create Some Content

Now that the (advanced) keyword research is done you have some topics to write about. Go out there and write some amazing content about the topic, build some backlinks to it and you should have some nice search engine traffic flowing in no time.