Anyone want to test out my keyword research theory?
-
Hi all,
I'm relatively new here but not new to the world of SEO / SEM. Over the years I've loved using SEOmoz and other tools but of course have found certain limitations with respect to how I like to work. That's the case with any tool / service.
So over the years I've put together a keyword research / competitor analysis process that has worked well for me and I'm wondering if it might also work for others.
I've spent the last 15 years of my life as a director of a range of companies, mainly in printing but also in systems development, marketing, etc. I spent a large percentage of my time developing systems and tools to help me with my search engine marketing. I've now sold all my companies and I'm semi-retired, somewhat bored, and would love it if I can assist others with the process I've used over the years.
I'm curious to know whether SEM professionals agree with the way my system ranks search terms from "best" to "worst". If you're interested in testing this process and telling me if you think the resulting list of search terms that I come up with for your website is "spot on", "not bad" or "horrible!", then please read on.
My key motivation here is to educate myself as well as others. I'm not charging for any of this...
If you give me your website URL, your top 5 competitors and your top 5 search terms, I will return to you:
- a complete list of search terms including "niche" and longtail search terms
you can then...
- really easily filter out irrelevant search terms, thus creating a list of negative keywords, ready to import into your Adwords campaign.
- easily group your search terms in "education" and "purchase" search terms so I can analyse these two groups of keywords separately
- see which words are used most often across all the search terms so you can easily create keyword specific Ad Groups in your Adwords campaign.
You can tell me which options you prefer:
- broad match, "phrase match" or [exact match] when getting search engine results
- specify any country you want the SERP results for, or even any city.
I will then:
- do all the keyword research, getting the latest (live) Google SERP results
- combine all competitor metrics (page rank, domain age, juice links, etc) and search term information (search volume, CPC, search term length, etc) together to give you a list of search terms ranked from "best" to "worst"
- do the same for both organic search terms and paid (Adwords) search terms
- do the same for both direct search terms and niche search terms
- take into account "word count" (number of words in a search term) as longtail keywords generally higher-converting search terms
And you can adjust things to change how the keywords are ranked:
- specify "thresholds". eg; you can ignore the really competitive search terms, or ignore the really short search terms
- specify "weightings". eg; you can put a greater emphasis on search term length, or a lesser emphasis on cost per click
As a result of the keyword analysis, it'll also show you who your organic and adwords competitors are based on all keywords, or just your top ranked ("best") keywords.
In that competitor data you can see:
- which paid ads appear at the top, side AND bottom of the results page
- which organic results are shopping, image, video, and local results
- all the metrics for each competitor (page rank, domain age, juice links, etc)
All of this is is handled in a simple web interface that I threw together recently. It's really simple, merely asking for your site and preferences and then an interface to view / sort the results.
Interested?
I'd like to hear from any SEM professionals who want to test this process.Once I have your basic details, I can get a keyword list together simply (using my internal process / software) and then you need to do some basic sorting, particularly if your search terms are in an industry that I know nothing about. Your input will be required.
From there, give me 24-48 hours and I'll return 2 lists of search terms: "organic", and "Adwords". I'd love to hear your opinion about the relevance of the search term lists. I hope it will also spark some interesting discussion and hopefully help people learn a bit more about keyword / competitor research.
If you're interested, please shoot me a private message letting me know why you'd be a good candidate to test this system. I really do want people who are well versed in search engine marketing. So please include a basic "resume" about who you are. If you have an SEM company and that's your main career focus then I definitely want to hear from you.
Adam
-
Well Spyfu is awesome, no doubt about that.. except..
I'm in Australia. Spyfu only covers the US and UK.There are quite a few tools that simply don't cater for Australia.
My software caters for nearly 30 countries, and most major cities in those countries.
Sure, SERP results will change on a city-by-city basis but that's a problem any tool is going to have. If the tool uses the Google API then the SERP results from the API are different (sometimes vastly) from an actual browser searching on Google.
I'm not sure how to overcome the geolocation issue entirely. I don't think it's possible.
But otherwise, what I find frustrating with all these tools is they give a bunch of data but don't give any answers. So spyfu shows me historical CPC which is fantastic but it means I'm left to try and use that data to answer my question which is really simple: "which keywords are the most profitable based on ALL data available?"
The Kombat function in Spyfu does what the SEMRush "comparison" tool does - shows me which competitors share keywords. For a seasoned SEM specialist this is great because he / she can interpret all that data and make customized suggestions to their clients. But again, for me... I ran a business. I just needed an answer.
It's about having something that summarizes all the data and presents options to me.
Maybe I'm over-simplifying it, but what I wanted was to be able to give my system my website and 5 keywords, it would return 1,000 keywords that might be suitable, and then it'd automatically collect every key metric for every competitor across all 1,000 keywords and then rank those keywords from best to worst based on all the back-end mathematics.
I created an infographic to help explain the process a bit.
-
Hi,
Not to be a stick in the mud, but it kind of sounds like spyfu
but with that said good ideas in ranking most important to non, the issues I think you would run into is the geolocation change in serps (someone in dallas, might not get the same results as someone in new york for certain queries.)
Shane
-
Hi Sean,
It's software I've written that collects all the metrics... domain age, page rank, home page rank, backlinks, CPC, etc, etc.
I would actually collect domain and page authority as well and for a while even the "keyword difficulty" metric from SEOmoz as I trust their metrics a lot and it's good to see if my results are similar to theirs.
As mentioned to David above, it could all be automated but at the moment there's a bunch of manual tinkering I do after my software collects all the data.
At the same time, full automation wouldn't be possible as the client needs to be involved in filtering out the irrelevant keywords, picking which keywords are "education" or "purchase" keywords, ignoring keywords of less than x searches per month, etc.
However I have developed nice little online modules for these steps that help do this quickly. So you can group the keywords, and filter by various methods, and make mass-changes (like deleting groups of keywords) with one click.
I think if those steps are made really simple and quick then people will be happy to be part of the process. The result will be a more relevant list of search terms in the final ranked list.
If you already have a website for which you're confident you've got an awesome keyword list for, I'd love to know if my system yields similar results.
I hope, if it doesn't yield similar results then people would be interested in breaking down why, I make modifications, and so on. It would be fun (but then again, I have few friends!)
Adam
-
Hi David,
It's software I've written. But it's an application that runs on PC / Mac.
The client needs to be involved though. So I need to be given the basics, then my software compiles all the keywords, gets monthly search volumes, and then the client would need to get rid of the irrelevant ones and then I get my software to do all the research, gathering absolutely everything.
It's a massive amount of data normalizations and calculations with the result being the most profitable keywords ranked from 100% to 0%.
The client can get involved again and tinker with some settings to get the list of ranked keywords tailored to their own preferences.
For the parts where the client would need to be involved (initial info, clean up the keyword list, tinker with the results), I've programmed those steps in an online interface so I can have people test this process.
I could have a sign up form for beta testers but really anyone who's an SEM professional who already has a list of keywords for a particular website is someone I'm interested in talking to. I want them to compare what my system / process outputs to what they already have.
So it doesn't really require an online form... just an expression of interest with a 1 minute bio and I'll pick a few people. At the moment I have to trigger each stage of my software to do it's thing, clean up some of the results, etc - it's not fully automated as I never had any intention of making it publicly available. So I want to make sure I'm spending my time doing all this for someone who is REALLY interested in it and can provide some quality feedback.
If you're keen, let me know
Adam
-
Hi Adam
That is a detailed description, I would also be interested in learning a little more about the tools you are using as there would seem to be several applications working together.
How much of the process involves a person rather than automation?
I like the fact that you plan to split the terms in to education / research and buying terms, this is a valuable recourse for companies.
-
Hi Adam,
Sounds interesting, I'm curios to know what tools you're using to compile your data?
Also, you mentioned a web interface, have you considered opening the tool up to limited beta access with user access / sign-up form? (instead of requiring people to pm why they'd be a good candidate / message you back and forth etc.)
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I can see competitors ranking for certain long-tail keywords but cannot find them on web pages. What am I missing?
Hi there. I'm pretty new to SEO and I've been doing a fair bit of training but there is one aspect I have yet to grasp. When I carry out keyword research, I get all these results and I understand the metrics. What I'm not getting is, when a competitor is ranking highly for say "where can I buy fresh turkeys", I assume that that phrase must appear somewhere on the page, but it doesn't. I realise I'm just not thinking about this in the right way. Can anyone offer clarification, please? Kind regards, Bruce
Competitive Research | | BruceBarbour0 -
Cant find any keyword for my site
I searched for keyword rank for shoreloop.com but couldn't find any. What could be the problem?
Competitive Research | | killerseo20200 -
Keyword strategy for wordpress category base blog in competitive industry
Hi friends, We have a client in the movie review blog industry, which we are aware is highly competitive, but we have tons of content (over 10,000 unique posts) and a good team of reviewers for fresh content. I was wondering about any input on keyword variations for our SEO Title of our wordpress main categories, like "Movie Reviews". I was thinking a modification to "Latest Movie Reviews", but the competition is only slightly less, and still seems questionable for attaining eventual rankings. "Best Movie Reviews" is slightly higher than "Latest Movie Reviews" but the competition still seems tough. What would be a good long term strategy with these category pages, any suggestions?
Competitive Research | | JustinMurray0 -
What's the value of Exact Match Keyword Domains vs. Company Name Domains?
Hey Mozers, I was in a discussion this morning about the value of Exact Match Keyword domains vs. a company name domain and wanted to get a little more clarification. Let's say we are doing a site for a company called Favored Dental, and they have had the domain favoredental.com for quite a while and have their authority built up in it. Is it better to have favored-dental.com or favoreddental.co or keep its current form? The reasoning behind the alternate domains would be they have the exact match keyterm, in this case lets say "Favored Dental" is the keyterm we were going after. To my knowledge EMDs aren't as relevant as they'd use to be as Google would rather branding of companies instead of keyterm domains? Is this correct, or do EMDs of keywords you're going after hold higher authority? Thanks for the clarification!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Does anyone use the Google Custom Search API?
What has your experience been like with the API? Do you prefer a rank tracking tool? If so, which one? API: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
Competitive Research | | CIEEwebTeam0 -
8500+ seomoz errors and still rank one for high traffic keywords
I plugged a competitor into the campaign manager that is ranking #1 for many target keywords like "sprinkler parts" (18k broad, 720 exact) and "sprinklers"(550k broad, 4400 exact) and #2 for "sprinkler"(1mil broad, 8100 exact). This site has over 8500 errors on SEOmoz - I have spent a good deal of time fixing errors on all of our client websites and have gotten them down to 0 errors. I am just wondering if I have been wasting my time and if the errors that SEOmoz reports on even make a difference. How can a site rank for such high traffic keywords when it has 4k duplicate content and 4k duplicate page title errors? The site has 75 linking root domains according to opensiteexplorer. any help on this would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | Splashme-1391910 -
Keyword Ranks reported by SEOMOZ don't match actual searches
SEO Moz reported that various keywords I was tracking were not in the top 50 results on Yahoo or Bing, yet when I did a Yahoo or Bing search for those keywords (from multiple computers and not logged into any Yahoo or MSN/Bing account) I found the keywords easily. What's the scoop?
Competitive Research | | Cybernautic0 -
My client has shown me a similar site, though not a competitor. He wants to know what sites they are linked from that give them such a good Google rank for certain kewords. Can SEOMoz tell me this?
When using google.com.au and searching for "travel to france", www.frenchtravel.com.au is the 3rd organic result. (the 1st two are not travel businesses, they are non profit travel guides) My client, who runs www.visituk.com.au, an Australian site that organises tours of the UK, said "so we just need to add these sort of words to the site?" I said, yes, but it doesn't end there. The real task is to have a link to your site on other sites surrounded with the words "travel" and "UK". He asked if he could see a list of the sites the french site was being referred by relevant to the search phrase. Is there an SEOmoz tool for this? Or is there another way I can generate that list? Thanks Simon
Competitive Research | | electrik0