Finding Keyword Volume

Speaking keyword volumes

Once we know what keywords are, we then have to go through the process of finding them, and what tools we can use to locate these little gems. There are three main things we are going to try and establish when checking for good keywords. The first thing is the search volume; this is the amount of people that do searches for a word or phrase. Then we want to see the amount of advertisers that are competing for the phrases we’re after. The last thing we check is the amount of commercial intention a keyword might have. This is how many sales were generated historically from this keywords past performance.

 To stay within the scope of this article we will discuss how we find good search volume. We will also look at the amount of competition for chosen keyword phrases, and how it might be easer to find our keywords before we find our niches. If I start with a niche and want to find keywords, I look at words or phrases that best describe what I am selling.

For instance if my niche was in the toy industry and I sold toys, I would take the word toy and  put it into a free tool I use online called “WordTracker keywords free keyword suggestion tool”. This is a great tool, it is a stripped down version of the WordTracker keyword tool. You can find this free tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com.

We then proceed to put the word that best describes our product into the WordTracker tool and click the “hit me” button. If for example say we were selling toys. And we put the word toy into the textbox and hit the button we would end up with a list of words or phrases, with a column of numbers on the left hand side. The numbers on the left of the words are how many times these keywords or phrases get searched each day according to the WordTracker database. This number is actually a lot smaller then the search volume that Google has each day, this is because Google has a lot more search’s then the search engines that WordTracker  uses to gather there data. Now in our toy example above we see that we have some keywords with some good search volume. Here is a list of some of the results.

14459    toys r us

3597      toys

2982      adult toys

1235      toys r us application

1198      toy poodle

1161      toys for tots

1154      kb toys

1144      toy

 I personally like to take words that have at least 1000 searches daily, as this tells me that they will have a very good search volume with Google. As we can see most of these phrases have good search volume but a lot of them are completely unrelated to selling toys, for instance if I were not an affiliate with Toys “R” Us and selling there stuff, then the keyword phrase “toys r us” is no good to me. The other issue is if your were going to use this keyword phrase in a Google Adwords campaign you would run into trouble when trying to optimize your campaign, by using a keyword phrase in the title and ad description with the brand name of Toys R Us in it.

 There is a very slight chance the keyword “toys” might be a good choice, for the simple fact that there is very likely a lot of competition for this single word. But we still put it on our list and keep it to check and make sure. The next one is again of no use to us unless we are into the adult industry. Then we have the phrase “toys r us application” this again is unrelated to what we’re selling. The phrase is "toys for tots"; again people are looking for an organization not really toys. So what we end up with is only two words on the list that we might be able to use, but when I check them they both have very high competition.

 So it is back to the drawing board, and we now have to think of a word or phrase that is more specific to the products we are selling. We narrow our search to a particular type of toy, the reason for this is we will likely incur less competition and find more phrases. These very specific words stand to have a higher commercial intention, converting into sales with higher conversion rates.

 For example we might try the keyword phrase “lego building plans”, but in the search results for WordTracker it only has a search volume of 860 which is a bit lower then I would like to see, but when I check the competition for this term it is almost nonexistent. We can do this by doing a quick check with the Google search engine; to give a rough idea of the competition. By typing the keyword into the search text box; in this case it is “lego building plans”. But when we type in our phrase we do something special with it, we surround it with two quotes so it would look like this “lego building plans”, this tells Google we only want to see results of webpage’s with just the phrase “lego building plans” in it. Then we hit the search button now.

 When Google list out the results we see some number above on the right hand side of the screen, were it would say something like (Results 1 - 10 of about 1,480). Ideally I like to see a number less then 25,000, this means that the amount of competing websites for the keyword phrase “lego building plans” is nearly non existent. The results number is the number for the natural search results. These are the results we would be interested in if we were doing search engine optimization (SEO) for our WebPages.

 When we look at the column of results on the right hand side, this gives us an approximate amount of the people advertising on Google Adwords for this keyword phrase and is referred to as the paid results.  In this case there are only three or four advertisers. These are results that we might be interested in if were to make an Adwords campaign on Google. To be honest I didn’t just think of this phrase “lego building plans”, but found it through a lot of trial and error.

 When trying to find different phrases, I looked in Google search for terms like “popular toys” or “hot toys” and got ideas from the results to try in WordTracker. By looking at the results in WordTracker for each term, I tried to look for the longer keyword phrases (longtail) variations that had a large search volume of around a 1000 or more a day, and were likely to have low competition.

 This process can sometimes take hours to find good keywords. And this is just a preliminary screening for our keywords. I wanted to also mention that this method is often a very good way of finding your niche. Instead of finding your niche first, you sort of let your niche find you. This approach can often root out some really great niches. As you can see when we look for our keywords first without any one niche in mind, it would be a lot easer to find some great keywords, because we wouldn’t have the restraints of being confined to a particular niche. You might be asking how you start a keyword search without even knowing what your niche is going to be.

 One method is to do a search in Google by typing something into the search textbox, like “500 most search terms” and then check one of the pages with this information. Look through the list of terms on the page, for services or items that you could find an affiliate program for or something you could make a product for. Using the keyword terms that helped you find the niche, start looking for other keywords based on your new found niche.