Keyword research tools and tips

When it comes to writing for the web, it's important to understand how people will find your content. Perhaps you're well known enough for people to navigate straight to your website to view your content (known as direct traffic), but for most people, website and blog traffic comes from what Google Analytics calls referring sites. 

Referring sites is quite a broad term that incorporates search engine websites such as google.com, traffic from social media networks such as Facebook, and other websites and blogs that simply have displayed a link to your website.

Web industry professionals are likely to break this down into more descriptive terms that include:

• Direct Traffic - traffic to your website following people entering your website address straight into their browser
• Search Traffic - traffic to your website from search engine results
• Social Traffic - traffic to your website from links posted in Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks

When it comes to writing a title for your new web page or for a new blog post, it's important to carry out some keyword research to help your content appear in search engines, and also some research into effective titles so that you can make your title appealing for social traffic and for your regular website visitors.

You'll also need to know a little about the title tag of your page. Read the NZS.com resource on title tag guidelines for help with this.

This often means finding a suitable keyword phrase and then adding words such as determiners to help make the title more interesting and to define the content. Finding the keyword phrase itself can be tricky but is made much easier with the use of keyword research tools that can be found online.

Before you start with these tools, it might also be a good idea to check out this video created by Google's own Matt Cutts - head of the spam team at Google. Matt explains how search works and also touches on keyword use in titles, URLs and page content.

There may be some content in this video which is a little dated but mostly it will give you a good impression of how search works in relation to keywords in the search term and on your website.

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Keyword Research Tools

There are a number of free-to-use keyword research tools readily available online. Many of these are provided by Google themselves. Here are some good places to start:

Google Search Suggestions and Related Searches

A good place to start looking for ideas for your keyword phrase is by using Google's search suggestions. Think of some words related to the content that you want to write about and then head to Google and start entering some of these words in the search box. 

Google will come up with some suggestions as you type. It takes these suggestions from popular searches so you can use this to get a feel for phrases that people are searching for. It can help to have 'instant search' turned on as you will see the results as you type.

Example:

Let's say you run a bar that has a website and you want to add a new page about your new beer tasting evening. The term 'beer tasting' itself already has a lot competition so you want something a little more specific and targeted for your audience. As well as the page itself, you want to write a blog post to help support the page. 

Start typing 'beer tasting' into a Google search box and you'll see some suggestions appear relating to that phrase.

Often, you'll also see some 'related searches' of keyword phrases that are similar to your search term. These can appear underneath the search box or in the left column. 

You can see in the example above that you already have some ideas for titles related to your content - beer tasting guide, beer tasters, beer tasting notes, etc. The key is to find a phrase that is likely to have a good number of searches, i.e. people are actually searching for that term, and isn't too competitive, i.e. you would have a hard time ranking for the term 'beer' alone as too many other large and high authority websites will be ranking well for that term. 

To define your keyword phrase further, you can use the next tool.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

The name would suggest that this is a tool only used for finding keywords to use in Adwords campaigns. In reality it's a good place to find ideas for keyword phrases that might work well for your content. You can also get an idea of how many people are searching for that term and how competitive it is. 

To use this tool, head to the Google Adwords keyword tool and enter a few different keyword phrases in the 'word or phrase' box.

Next, click 'advanced options and filters' and then select New Zealand in the location section (if you're targeting a New Zealand audience). 

Hit 'Search' and view the results.

You should see a table that shows the keyword phrases you entered along with their competition, global monthly searches and local monthly searches. Perhaps the most useful column for your purposes is 'local monthly searches'. As well as your own keyword phrase, you'll also see a number of suggestions for related phrases along with their number of searches. 

Choose a few of these that you think might work well and then perform a search in Google for those exact terms. This should help you to get a feel for what content is already ranking for that term and how competitive it is. 

If your content is specific to a region, consider including a regional term in your title. This could give you a better chance of appearing well in results for a targeted audience. 

Insights for Search

Another Google tool that can be used for keyword research is Google Insights for Search. 

This tool is quite effective when you're trying to decide between two different words. Especially two versions of words that mean the same thing, or even two different products, such as beer and wine.

It's also a great tool for showing how a keyword trends over time and also across different regions of New Zealand. 

If we add 'beer' as one word and 'wine' as the other, the total results and interest over time don't show a great deal of difference between the two, but if you take a look at the regions you can see that Auckland and Wellington are pretty similar when it comes to searches for beer and wine, but in the past 12 months, Canterbury has higher search traffic for the term 'beer' (in blue) than it does for 'wine' (in red).

This information can help you to choose between two similar words or to target specific regions.

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Check Out Your Competitors

Another method of keyword research is simply to perform a few searches and look at the results that are appearing.

Once you've spent some time doing this, you'll have a much better feeling of what ranks well and you'll be able to get some ideas for titles that you could manipulate to suit your own needs.

You may also find some opportunities for writing content that hasn't yet been covered by others.If you think of a term like this, be sure to run it through the above Google Adwords Keyword Tool to see if people are actually searching for that phrase.

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Write for Your Audience

Finally, it's important to remember to not get too carried away with inserting keywords into titles. Search engines long ago realised that people were creating content with keywords repeatedly 'stuffed' into titles and descriptions.

Today, search engines are much more clever and there's far more importance placed on writing content that generates interest, encourages discussion and is more likely to be shared on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

If in doubt, you can always contact a copywriter that has experience in writing for the web. They can help you to find a good content strategy plan for your website or blog.