Brainstorming
for
Keywords
Some
people who read
this book will already have sites. Others will not. Either way, you
have to get
good at brainstorming for keywords because that’s where it all starts.
Those of
you who have a site will be looking for valuable keywords that fit in.
Those of
you who don’t will be looking for
valuable
keywords to
base a site on.
When I
brainstorm, I
like to find thousands and thousands of keywords at a time (that sounds
a lot
harder than it actually is). I’ll go more into this later in the book
but by
starting with thousands of keywords it makes it a lot more likely that
I will find
a bunch of winners. I like to make my list as large as possible (while
staying
within the scope of my site) before I do any analysis at all.
Fortunately there
are tools that make it easy to get a list that’s thousands of keywords
long.
With these tools you can enter in one keyword and have 100-800 come
out. It’s
easy to find a few thousand.
I start
this process
by using the Adwords Keyword Tool. In order to get all of the
information
you’ll need, you’ll have to sign up for a free account. The tool is
intended
for people who are interested in advertising on Google but we’re going
to use
it a little differently. Go ahead and sign up
and get
signed in.
Once
you’re signed
in you’ll need to click ‘Tools and Analysis’ and then ‘Keyword Tool’ to
get to
the right place:
Once I’m
there, I
start by entering the main topic my site is about. Let’s say for
example
purposes that my topic is ‘cooking’. You will change the Match Type to
‘[Exact]’, enter ‘cooking’, and click
‘Search’:
You will
then see a
list of a bunch of phrases that are related to cooking. It looks like
in this
example there are about 800 phrases that are related to cooking:
Before
we download
these keywords, we need to make sure that we have all of the data we
need. I
personally like to see ‘Competition’, ‘Global Monthly Searches’, and
‘Approximate CPC’. You can choose the information you see by clicking
the
‘Columns’ button:
After we
have the
data configured properly, we can download this list by clicking the
download
button:
I
download as ‘CSV
for Excel’. CSV will also work. Keep track of where you’re downloading
the
files. We’ll need them all later in the process Now we want to expand
our list
a lot further by taking terms from our original list and putting them
back into
the tool. I like to sort my original list by search volume to see the
terms
that have the most – those are the ones I put back into the tool. You
can do
this in the Adwords tool or in Excel – to do it with the Adwords tool
you can
click ‘Global Monthly Searches’ at the top of the column:
After
you do the
sort, you can see the highest volume keywords. These are the ones you
want to
put back into the tool to expand the list:
So you
will now take
‘cooking games’, ‘Barbie cooking games’, etc. and will run them with
the tool.
Note: I
personally
would not use ‘cooking channel’ or ‘cooking mama’ in this process. I
stay away
from keywords if I believe that people are searching for something that
I
obviously can’t provide. I am obviously not the cooking channel and I’m
not
cooking mama either. I’m ok with Barbie cooking games because I can
review
Barbie cooking games and point people to where they can buy them. If
you put
‘cooking games’ into the tool, you will see a list of a few hundred
additional
keywords:
If this
was your
cooking site, you would have to decide if cooking games related
keywords fit in
with the scope of your site. If this was my site, I think they would
fit in
fine because I could create a resource around them. After I downloaded
the
‘cooking games’ keywords, I would just continue down the list running
new sets
of keywords and downloading them. Here are some other examples of
things I
would run to expand my list: Recipes, menus, cooking ideas, food,
Mexican food,
Italian food, healthy food, breakfast, lunch, dinner, cookies, cake,
desserts,
chicken, steak, soups, salads, main dishes, side dishes, pasta,
seafood, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment