Do you research the keywords you’re targeting for your sites?

For this blog, apart from the domain name, I haven’t done any keyword research and it will stay that way. With this blog what will happen, will happen!

With other small sites though, I do conduct a little research. It’s pointless targeting search terms that no-one is ever going to search for isn’t it? Especially if your goal is earning an income, whether it is small and part-time or a full time income.

The Usual Keyword Tools

Now most people are aware of the usual places to research their keywords. Most notably are Wordtracker and Overture. With Wordtracker seeming to target solely American searches and Overture rumoured to have not been updated in 8 months. This shouldn’t be a problem to most people as it still gives them a pretty good insight as to what is being searched, but some want more. So you bump up your research with Google Adwords suggestions tools, Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz. If you were to analyze all the results you would have current and recent ideas of what people are likely to search for and be able to craft your wording accordingly. You’d do pretty damn well from it and stay a few steps ahead of the average site!

But what if you could find exactly what key searches have been driving traffic to your competitors sites in the last fortnight?

Ask them? In honesty I doubt many would want to tell you! Search for your self and it would take an eternity!

The next step in keyword research

In steps SEOdigger, a free to use search query site that parses over 60million search results to a depth of 20 results in Google. Simply enter the site URL you are querying and SEOdigger does the rest. You will find where a site ranked on a set date for a certain keyphrase, it even gives you the Overture and Wordtracker scores for the keyphrase. It’s like getting into your hardest competitors Google Webmaster Search Queries and having a good snoop about!

You don’t need to register with SEOdigger but it is worthwhile in doing so. Non registered users can only search for one site page at a time but registered users can search the complete domain in one go, and complete upto 10 searches an hour. I registered with them 3 months ago and I’ve found it very helpful in completing the bigger picture in my keyword analysis.

Visit SEOdigger and try for yourself.

As an after thought, wouldn’t it be nice to find out what people searched for before coming to the search terms that resulted in a visit to your site?

I’ll let you know in my next post