Keyword Research – First Steps in Search Success

By Greg Hluska

Canopy - June 2009 Issue

While this site currently runs Wordpress only, we have some serious changes waiting in the wings.  What you see is a default templated version of one small section of the larger dream for reginastreets.ca.  My plan is to eventually adopt dual Content Management Systems (CMS) to run this site – the magazine will be run on Wordpress, but the rest of the site (the business directory, the event calendar, our Guide to Regina Downtown, and the associated Google Maps tie-ins) will run on a CMS called Joomla.  Complex?  Yes.  A cool experiment and learning experience?  Definitely.

I know much more about Joomla than I know about Wordpress and the Joomla forum is one of my serious online hangouts.  Joomla was actually a big factor in the formation of my open source for non-profits concept, but that is another topic for another time.  A very interesting topic came up in the Joomla forum and this article was born moments after reading it.The forum post in question started as a question about title tag conventions and morphed into a discussion of keyword research.  Since keyword research is one of my favourite subjects, I decided to turn those few posts into a more substantial article.

For the purposes of this article, we are going to restrict our access to Google.  Google is the biggest search engine out there and it is also, in my mind, the absolute best.  While it is quirky (see the hidden meaning behind the phrase ‘Google Voodoo’?), it is also dead accurate (most of the time).  As such, it is a good place to start – great results in Google can easily turn into great results in other engines!.

Google provides three really great tools for keyword research.  They are Google Adsense, Google Insights for Search, and Google Trends.  Each is a little bit different and I will briefly cover each in this post.  Additionally, while each uses the same data, they also reach different conclusions and provide slightly different recommendations.  It is always wise to consult as many data sources as possible.

Finally, in our examples, we are going to use the keyword, “child poverty”.  You can use these methods on any keyword you like.

Google Adwords

Google’s famous cost per click advertising vessel comes pre-equipped with a powerful tool for keyword research.  See the screenshot below for an idea of some of the information you can get from Adwords.

Google Adwords Screen shot - Child Poverty

As you can see, Google Adwords is a great place to start.  It also gives you a good idea of how many people search for a certain term.  Finally, it is a great tool to generate some more ideas for keywords – without this, I might not have thought about targeting my content towards the term ‘child poverty statistics’.

Google Trends:

With keyword ideas in mind, your next step should be Google Trends.  Google Trends gives you several key pieces of information – it shows you historical trends in search volumes, as well as what parts of the world search the most for certain keywords.

Child Poverty - Google Trends Graph

If you scroll a little bit further down the results page, you will get a chance to see geographical information on search popularlity.  Trends gives you a chance to look at what parts of the world search for a particular term the most.  As this picture shows, that information is broken down by country and by city:

Google Trends Shows What Parts of the World Search for a Particular Term the Most

Furthermore, Google Trends lets you analyze the trends in a particular region of the world.  This graph shows search volumes for the term, “child poverty” in Canada:

Search volumes for "child poverty" in Canada

With Google Trends and the Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool in your arsenal, you can make an informed choice when it comes to targeting Google traffic.  These tools can give you an idea of how many people regularly search for a particular term.  They will also show you if people’s searches follow a particular pattern.  For example, are volumes going down?  Do they follow a regular pattern?  Or are they on the upswing?

Moreover, these tools can be useful for brainstorming and getting new ideas for keywords to target.  Sometimes, getting people to your non-profit (or other) site can be as simple as changing the words you regularly use in your titles and your content.

However, if you wish to push your research into another level, you have access to Google’s most advanced tool – Insights for Search.

Google Insights For Search

If you want to dig really deep into a particular keyword, Insights for Search is going to become your absolute best friend.  However, before we dig into Insights for Search, I am going to warn you that the statistics you get from Insights For Search will not always match the statistics from Google Adwords and Google Trends.  In other words, no matter how proficient you get with it, do not use Insights for Search on its own – always validate the data with at least one or two other terms.

There is one other note – Google Insights for Search assigns a number to search volumes.  I think that too many statistics cause problems for beginners, so I prefer to encourage newcomers to look at these numbers as absolutes.  However, seasoned pros will want to know that they are not absolutes, that they are normalized to help show broad trends in search volumes for that particular keyword.  The idea is simple – the month with the highest search volume will be assigned a number of 100 and every other month will have its volume expressed in a percentage of the highest month.

Confusing, hey?  Look at it this way:

Let’s look at a nonsense search term – ‘ blah blah blah blah blah blah blah’.  100 people searched for that term in January 2007 – that was the highest volume ever.  In May 2009, only 80 people searched for that term.  May 2009 would be assigned a value of around 80 (80/100 = 80%).

To avoid getting too bogged down in those numbers, I encourage you to look at those numbers as absolutes, and to always focus on what appears to be the average.  For example, consider the Google Insights for Search report on ‘child poverty’:

Google Insights Graph of Child Poverty Searches

The highest volume was in Nov. 2004.

If you look carefully (and run your mouse along the graph), you will notice that the graph follows a fairly regular pattern – it bottoms out every July and August.  It also reaches regular peaks in November and March/April of every year.  This graph is fairly predictable and the numbers are safe – people regularly search for child poverty so if you write good content about child poverty and properly promote it, you will get traffic to your site!

Finally, I think it is important to look at the ‘average’ of the data.  There is a scale on the right side of the graph – always look for sort of an average on that scale.  In the last graph I showed, I’d estimate that the ‘average’ is around 50 – 55.  Now, take a look at this graph, which shows the search volume for the term, ‘UNICEF’.

Searches for the term "UNICEF"

Take a look at recent results – their average has been between 20 – 40 for the last two years!  Clearly, a few months saw massive results – what happened in those months to spur that sort of search volume?  Can anything be learned?  Are certain terms falling out of popularity?

The point of this is that if you are going to invest time in a keyword, it is wise to make sure that that keyword will return results.  When given a choice between a few keywords, why would you devote your time towards those keywords that are getting 20% of their highest search volume?

Conclusions:

We have information from three sources, now let’s put it all together and analyze it.

“Child poverty” is an easy term to predict.  Canadian and world-wide results (from different sources) all follow a pretty stable pattern.  Results drop in July and August and reach their highs in November and March.  Moreover, traffic has been quite stable.  When compared to a term like UNICEF, child poverty’s traffic has not bottomed out.  Recently, it has been reaching 50-60% of its best ever traffic.  UNICEF, on the other hand, has recently been averaging around 20% of its best traffic.

The next steps, from a traffic point of view, are to analyze why these swings happened.  For example, why does search volume drop in July and August, but reach heights in November and March/April?  Is this a sign that traffic on child poverty normally comes out of school assignments?  And why has UNICEF experienced such an incredible swing since its high point?  What happened in January 2005 to create five times as much traffic as it receives now?  Or, is that term just terribly unpopular for political/cultural reasons?

Finally, I have shown you three tools and given you a few applications for these tools. Your challenge is to take that information and use it to figure out what kinds of words to use in your titles and opening paragraphs if you want to start getting consistent traffic from search engines. Next article I write on keyword research will take these numbers with some information on keyword difficulty and put it all into a spreadsheet. Then, we will use this spreadsheet to estimate traffic and to generate a metric to help you decide what keywords to target.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask….