This is the third and final part of my three part series on understanding keyword research. If you haven't read the first part you can find it at Understanding Keyword Research Part 1, and the second part can be found at Understanding Keyword Research Part 2. In part 1 we looked at, why we do keyword research, the importance of it and the different types of keywords we will come across. In part 2 we looked at how to do manual keyword research, and introduced a couple of free tools you can use to speed things up a bit. In this post we are going to look at another 3 tools that you can use to speed up your keyword research even more.
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A Few Tools You Can Use To Speed Up Your Keyword Research
Following the steps above for researching your keywords will definitely take a couple of hours it could even take days for you to find the best keywords for you to target, but it is still worthwhile knowing how to do it manually. It can come in useful if you just want to do a quick check on a specific keyword. But, instead of doing all of the sorting and sifting for each keyword manually there are a number of tools you can use which will speed the process up. If you are on a budget then two of the tools you can use them for free, but you are limited to the data you get and also the number of times you can run them a day. The other tool is a paid tool but it is a one time fee and in my opinion it is totally worth it.
Finding Long-tail Keywords With Power Suggest Pro
Power Suggest Pro is a tool that I use regularly, why? Because I can put in my main keyword and it will find me all of the long-tail keywords that Google recognises as being related to my main keyword. So how does it do that? Well if you start typing a query into the search box then Google will start filling in the blanks, using their knowledge of what previous searchers have entered. This is known as Google Suggest. If you look at the bottom of the search page you will also see another 5 or 6 search terms that Google deems to be relevant to what you have just searched for. Now if you put a space at the end of your search term and then the letter a, Google will show you some more possible searches. Then if you do b, you will get some more and so on and so on. Now how long do you think it would take you to go through the alphabet and write all of the keywords that Google suggested down? Quite a while. Well Power Suggest Pro does that in seconds. Plus you can put wildcards in, have the letters and number at the front, search through not just Google, but Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon, Ebay and Bing and not just in the UK, but all over the world. the once you have the keywords you can delete the ones you don't want, export them to text files or copy to the clipboard.
As you can see in the image below I entered the keyword SEO Leeds and it found 29 terms that Google recognises as being related searches. Now as I said before if you put these into the Keyword Planner the likely hood is that they will show zero searches. So how did they get into Googles database then? Hmmmm. But irrespective of the number of searches these keywords are ideal not only to target themselves but also to add into your content, in place of your main keyword.
So in a nutshell I think Power Suggest Pro is an awesome tool. It is a paid tool but its a one time payment of $97, which if you are going to be really working on your website to get it ranking for all of your keywords then to me its and investment and not a cost as to the amount of time it will save you.
Finding The Keyword Difficulty with Kwfinder.com
With this tool you enter you keyword phrase, select your country and language and then it will come back not just with a list of keywords, but it will also show you the top 10 sites and score them for you from Easy to Difficult. As you can see "SEO Agency" gets a score of 49 and possible. Which means yes it is possible to get your site on page one but it is going to be a challenge. When you are starting out it would be a good idea to target keywords that fall in the green section 20 - 29 score range or less which is classed as easy. With this tool you get a number of searches per day and a limited amount of the data for free or you can pay €314 per year to get all of its functionality.
Competitive Research, Backlink Analysis And More Semrush.com
Semrush can be classed as an all in one SEO platform. Its probably not the best tool for some things but it is a very good tool and you can do a lot with it. You can use it to look at how much traffic your competition are getting, the keywords they are targeting, the backlinks they have and even the ads they are running.
The SEO Content Template is probably the most interesting part of this tool. You simply enter your keyword and then the tool will analyse the page one results and give you a load of useful data. It will show you how many words your content needs to be, what are the semantic keywords that you should be using in your content, the sites that you should be trying to get a backlink from and your readability score. So by using this tool, with just one click, you can fully automate all of the keyword research!
In Summary
So that's it congratulations if you have gone through all three os these posts, well done. But now it is up to you to put what you have learnt into practice. If you take action and follow the steps in these three posts, even if you do it over a couple of weeks or months and just use the manual version, your SEO strategy will definitely improve your chances of competing against the big boys in your industry. Ideally you want to be looking for about 5 to 10 keywords that you want to target with your site. These keywords will then give you a clear idea of how to start developing both your on page SEO and your off page SEO strategy.
