I want to do keyword search but i dont have much experience, most of the time i outsource keywords research, Can anyone tell me is Google keyword planner give right data about searches ? or any free other keyword research tool which will provide accurate data ?
Basically first i want to try free keyword research tools then i will go for paid ones.
Hi Nut-Nights ? paid keyword research tools are largely a waste of money.
Instead, do this:
1. Come up with a list seed keywords for your niche. So, brainstorm, do a normal Google search and read the results, look at the title and description tags and keyword tags in the results of the top 10 (the free Moz toolbar is useful here), et cetera. You will stumble across new seed keywords at various times ? just add them to the list when you do.
2. For each seed keyword come up with a bunch of actual searches containing that seed word. This is where Google Keyword Planner falls down, as it strips out 90% or so of the searches it knows about. (This is so people like us can't reverse engineer it, I guess. Ha ha!) A good way around this is to use a "suggest scraper". In other words, one which scrapes Google suggest, Yahoo suggest, YouTube suggest, et cetera et cetera. For me, the tool of choice here is Super Suggester which does this one job extremely well and it's not expensive. If you want 'free', use ubersuggest.org but it's more fiddly. And if you've got Scrapebox then you can use that, adding a, b, c, etc sequentially to your KW searches in one operation. SS is very handy and less intimidating than SB - if you use it you'll see what I mean.
So now you've got a ton of possible keywords but you don't know search volumes.
3. Get search volume. GKWT limits you to 200 results in one operation. If you've got thousands (I often get 6 or 7000 from Super Suggester) then it's easier to use Market Samurai (free version is ok) which manages to get volume from Google keyword planner for up to 2000 keywords at a time. Yay! List all your keywords with volume in a spreadsheet and sort by volume. Now go through the list putting an 'x' next to the keyword phrases you think might be promising ? the ones you think you might be able to create some content for and optimise your pages for and get some traffic for. Sort to get all the 'x' items at the top. That's your target list.
4. Competition. Now you need to know what the competition is. To my mind, all the usual ways of assessing competition ? GKWT, Market Samurai, etc - are useless. This is why I say most keyword research tools are a complete waste of money for most of us. All I want to know is: "How many people have already tried ranking for this search term in an effective way?" And I check that by doing two Google searches for allintitle:"keyword phrase", and allinanchor:"keyword phrase". After doing the searches, if the same eight, nine, 10 domains are in each one then that's a no-no. But if only one, two or three domains are in both top tens then that should be a home run. 4-5 might be doable. Lots of web 2.0's, Youtube, forums, in the top ten improves your chances. So, an overlap of 6, say, with 2 being YT pages makes that definitlely doable especially if another one is a forum - which you can maybe join and post there yourself someone.
Job done!
This is a pretty simple process, makes sense I think you will agree, and is cheap. And it's better than the expensive keyword tools. What more can you ask for?
The trouble is, it's a bit time-consuming. Well, that's a good thing in a way. Not many people will go to all this amount of trouble to do their keyword research so you won't have much competition. I have automated some of these processes to speed things up where I can and maybe if you've got Winautomation or similar software, or if you are a whizz with Outwit Hub you could do the same thing.
Does anyone know a quicker way that actually works? (There's SECockpit I suppose at nearly 100 bucks a month. But I have yet to play with that but I know it does make use of suggest scrapers.)
Anyway, I'd say hesitate before spending anything on keyword research tools except for Super Suggester which I like a lot and saves me time.
I hope this gives you food for thought
Malc
