At this point in many tutorials and books the authors will attempt to show you how to do all of your keyword research using free tools. They will give you links to hundreds of tools throughout their pages. While this can work, it isnt even close to optimal. I am not going to do that. I will be specifically recommending two products that will speed up the work you do and make better use of your time.
For quick, complete, and easily understood keyword research, competitive analysis, and website analysis you will want to get copies of Market Samurai and SEO PowerSuite. These tools take a lot of the grunt work out of this process. If you want to waste many hours, and more likely days, then you can try and use all of the free tools. For me, I prefer to do things right, and right now. Both tools have free trial versions that work well and can be used for some of the work in this section, but the purchased/commercial versions have a lot more features to offer.
There are many overlaping features in these two peices of software, but they are both good in their own way, and both are really neccessary to do the work ahead of us.
Market Samurai
This tool will be used for keyword research and competitive analysis. It turns three hours worth of research into five or six mouse clicks and ten minutes. If your time is important to you, then I highly recommend purchasing this tool right now so I can help you get used to using it for your research.
Get Market Samurai
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SEO PowerSuite
Link Assistant have really won this game. There is no other software that can even compete if you want to do SEO at an enterprise level, or for a living. SEO PowerSuite is made up of four different peices of software, and like Market Samurai, it works on Windows, Apple (Mac OS X), and Linux. The four tools are Rank Tracker, SEO SpyGlass, Website Auditor, and Link Assistant.
We will get deeper into each tool, and descriptions of their usage, as they come up in the training.
Get SEO PowerSuite Professional
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Keyword Research
Market Samurai
Keyword research with Market Samurai couldn’t be easier. Market Samurai provides a large quantity of information, should you know how to go looking for it! Let’s take a brief look at keyword research using this handy tool.
As with most keyword research utilities, Market Samurai relies heavily on Google’s keyword research tools. Underneath the surface, the software collects dozens of metrics from the search giant’s expansive data collection. Things ranging from monthly searches, to the average cost per click a keyword could generate. As with Google’s research tools, all Market Samurai needs to get started is a single keyword or keyword phrase, and it will find as many as 800 related keywords. Let’s start a new project, and enter a keyword. We’ll go with “Yoga” for our example.
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Once you’ve created the new project and entered your keyword, click on the Keyword Research module. This is where the related keywords collection begins. First of all, make sure your Google Adwords account is active, and be sure the credentials for the Adwords account is entered properly in Market Samurai’s settings menu. If you don’t have a Google Adwords account, you can acquire one here.
Once your account is all situated, click the Generate Keywords button. No need to alter any parameters at this point. Depending on network traffic, and your connection speed, this process should take a few minutes. When it is done, you should see at least a few hundred keywords (usually ~800) listed. At this point, you can use the check mark and X buttons to exclude words from the entire set of results, or ONLY include keywords containing a certain word. When you’re ready to continue, hit Keyword Analysis.
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This page has a lot of tick boxes and potentially confusing words and acronyms. Almost every aspect of this screen has a tool tip upon mouse-over that will briefly explain that item’s function. For standard keyword research, there are two metrics you really want to focus on. One is “SEOT” or SEO Traffic. This tells us how many visitors a page could expect to receive should they reach the #1 spot in Google for that keyword. The time range is user specified, and defaults to daily. The second important metric we want to pay attention to is SEOTC, or SEO Title Competition. This number is a very valuable peice of information to have as it tells you exactly how many web sites are specifically targeting that keyword, based on how many pages include the specified keyword in their title tags. PBR (Phrase to Broad match ratio) and Trends are also useful pieces of information. Match your settings to the example to the left, and click Analyze Keywords.
Now all that’s left to do is sift through the list and find highly relevant keywords with the highest SEOT while maintaining the lowest SEOTC possible. These keywords will generally garner the best results for your SEO campaign, and deliver you the most traffic at a lower cost. For more information on Market Samurai and how to use the software, visit the Market Samurai Dojo.
