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View Full Version : Major lesson learned with Keyword research.


allowthenow
02-19-2010, 04:07 PM
As you well know, your discoveries during the keyword research phase of your muse development tell you which direction to head in and more importantly, whether or not your target market has enough traffic and commercial value to realize your TMI.

From my recent experience, do not use WordTracker.com (WT) for keyword research.

Why?

The data they pull is sourced from Dogpile and Metacrawler, which when combined, total 1% of search market share.

As such, results you receive in WT will ipso facto have to be compared to results in Google's Keyword tool (extra step, more work) to make sure the two are in agreement.

To make matters more complex, let's say WT and Google are in agreement on a given keyword, the way you will know this is by seeing a result with X traffic in WT and then usually 4 or 5x that amount in Google (because of the difference in market share).

As such, I recommend using Google's Keyword research tool for your initial round of research to determine a market's commercial viability. After you have figured out which major keywords you are going to target, I would then recommend throwing those into WT to find new phrases for blog posts or other such nuggets to help drive traffic to your site.

Anybody have a different understanding?

ATN

PS. After testing with Market Samurai (keyword and competitive research tool) for about a week, I'm going to push the button on it today. Really useful tool that will save you hours and hours of work.

networkmemetics
02-20-2010, 03:52 PM
Good Info.

In an keyword tool, there will be big differences between search volume from organic traffic and what the tool says.

The best way to test the level of organic traffic you will receive is to run a PPC Campaign where you rank #1 for the searched term.

If some of you have read my other posts you may think that this counter to what I have said in the past...

PPC is good for testing actual volume of searches. For a beginner muse money maker, I recommend you stick to free methods to drive traffic.

allowthenow
02-20-2010, 10:21 PM
Good Info.

The best way to test the level of organic traffic you will receive is to run a PPC Campaign where you rank #1 for the searched term.

If some of you have read my other posts you may think that this counter to what I have said in the past...

PPC is good for testing actual volume of searches. For a beginner muse money maker, I recommend you stick to free methods to drive traffic.

I would add on to this to keep in mind average click-through rates.

Avg. CTR for #1 ranking on Google = 42% (btw: this seems to be the agreed upon number in the SEO community, though Google does not publicly release this data. It came from a leaked source at AOL :p)

Avg. CTR for #1 ranking of a Google PPC ad = probably 1-1.25% (you never know though without testing ... if your keyword is highly relevant/targeted, you will likely see a higher CTR).