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Keyword Research with Keyword Discovery: A Few Tips
October 5, 2006
If you're smart, your SEO project begins with solid keyword research. We've subscribed to Wordtracker since (it seems like) the late '60s, but we've also subscribed to Keyword Discovery for about a year.
This post shares a few simple tips into how to interpret and maximize the data you get from Keyword Discovery.
Dealing with Strange Numbers in Results: Sometimes a term search results in some strange numbers. For example, in the following graphic, you'll note that a lot of people seem to search for odd terms, such as 10025 cotton shirts and discount women27s hanes t shirts.
You'll see odd results like this when hexadecimal codes aren't properly translated into their HTML symbol counterparts. On a hex-to-HTML chart, 25 correspondes to the % sign, and 27 is a single prime (more commonly used as an apostrophe). So the actual terms here are 100% cotton shirts and discount women's hanes t shirts.
If you run into some confusing instances, look at the table on a page like this one to convert hexadecimal codes to their actual HTML characters.
Finding the Demand Trend: Early on, in the Analyze pane, you could get a nifty graph of the last 12 months' demand for a specific word or phrase. I was blown away when I noticed that the feature seemed to disappear. Thankfully, it didn't; it was merely relocated. Now, to find the demand graph, you need to click the specific number of results in the Searches column in the Research pane immediately after you hit the Search button. For example, in the graphic above, you'd click the number that I've highlighted in pink. Following is a sample demand graph for a specific phrase:
This data isn't always perfect. For example, the spike in April looks a little suspect, or it might correspond to a large TV ad campaign or other offline project. But if you trust your data, we feel the best time to make changes to your pages or test some optimization is during the beginning of a lull - so that you can have time to refine your changes before the next seasonal growth spurt hits.
Negative Filters: You can filter out terms from the search box to save time. For example, if you're looking for terms related to social or business networking in Los Angeles, you might enter the following string at the search box:
los angeles networking -computer -computers -it
Currently, you can filter out up to five terms. After that, if you need to delete additional veins, I recommend exporting to Excel and doing additional custom sorts to find the irrelevant terms.
Plurals: KD doesn't yet handle plural forms well. For example, if you search for terms with computer, you'll need to do a similar search for the same terms with computers as well. According to the KD support forum, they're working on it.
Flushing a Project: Depending on how you allocate your projects, you might (as I did) find yourself taking forever to delete the contents of a permanent project, 100 keywords at a time (the program's max). I don't know why it took me so long to figure out, but a much smarter way of working is to simply delete the project and immediately create a new project with the same name.
The growth of Keyword Discovery has (in my opinion) forced WordTracker to make some improvements of its own. In a followup post, I'll discuss some of Wordtracker's latest enhancements.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at October 5, 2006 6:57 AM
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Comments
Excellent post about keyowrds research. To me choosing right keywords is the sarmrtest thing to do in SEO.
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