My favorite keyword tool by far is Market Samurai. It gives you far more detailed information about the keywords which you are targeting than you can get from any other tool, you can get results with each search of up to 800 keywords, and oh yeah, it’s FREE! Here a video on how to do keyword research so that you know exactly how to use this wonderful free tool to select great keywords for your site.
What Is a Good Keyword
Something which I don’t cover much in the video, however, is what makes is a good keyword so you know how to choose that first keyword to plug into the program and find more keywords. In this post I’m going to cover the 4 things which account for what is a good keyword so that you know exactly where to start.
Relevancy: Before you go any further, make sure that the keyword you’re about to target is related to the focus of your site. It sounds obvious, but targeting irrelevant keywords to your site is a good way to both NOT rank well for the keywords you’re targeting… or if you DO rank well for them it’s a good way to completely irritate whoever visits your site and sends them bouncing faster than you can say what is a good keyword!
Volume: Search volume is also a key aspect of a good keyword. If no one is searching for your keyword, what’s the point in targeting it? Sure you may rank number one for it within a day, but it doesn’t matter if no one is searching for it to see it. Acceptable minimum levels of monthly or daily search volume for a keyword are up to you and will likely vary from one niche to another.
Competition: On the other hand, if the competition is way too fierce in terms of either quality, quantity, or both, then you shouldn’t waste your time going after that keyword because you know you’re going to get muscled out of ever breaking into the top 10. Market Samurai let’s you set limits on how many competing web pages there are for a specific keyword you’re targeting so that you can say to yourself you only want to target keywords which are used in the title tags of less than 10,000 web pages.
Specific limits of competition will range from one niche to another, but Market Samurai offers a couple of presets which they recommend so that your results are filtered by their standards and you’re only left with a list of keywords which meet the program’s “golden keywords” criteria.
Commerciality: Lastly, is there money to be made from your keyword? This doesn’t necessarily mean that this keyword phrase needs a product’s name in it or the word “buy”; but is your keyword being used by people who are potentially looking to spend some money. A good way to gauge this is to plug your keyword into a Google search and check out the displayed text ads. If that phrase is used word for word, this is an indication that there is money to be made from that keyword phrase, otherwise those advertisers would not target it; so basically you’re letting them to the work for you.
Of course Market Samurai also has a commerciality feature with it which saves you a lot of time, as well.
In Summary: It’s important to keep in mind that you have to consider every one of these 4 factors to find the best keywords to target on your site. If the number one ranking web page for a keyword only gets 10 visits a day in search volume (something else Market Samurai will tell you), then you may decide it’s not worth your time.
BUT if that keyword has very low levels of competition, then you know that you have a good shot at reaching the number one spot fairly easily, so it may be worth your time to target it, claim the top spot, and enjoy 10 more unique visitors to your page a day.
By targeting and dominating dozens and hundreds of these low competition keywords, you can quickly see your daily traffic flow explode into the thousands of uniques each day.