Keyword Research Without Paid Tools
Lately, there has been lots of talk in the SEO world about keyword research and how to do it properly. There are many expensive tools that have been designed for doing keyword research including Micro Niche Finder, Long Tail Pro, Niche Finder, WordTracker, etc. But the truth is, keyword research is not a very difficult task and it definitely does not require any sophisticated software to do effectively. There are only two things that a marketer needs to find great keywords: the Google Keyword Tool and Google.com.
All the tools that I mentioned earlier derive their data from the Google Keyword Tool so why not use the tool directly for free rather than pay to use it through other people’s software? The only claim to fame for the paid keyword tools is their apparent ability to judge a keyword’s competition. But from my personal experience, keyword tools tend to be pretty bad at gauging a keyword’s competition in organic search results. This is likely due to the fact that they rely too much on numbers and statistical data.
Don’t get me wrong, statistical analysis is very useful and it can do wonders when analyzing and sorting lists of potential keywords, but when it comes to actually gauging organic competition in the search results, automated tools fall flat. The primary reason for that is there are far too many factors that go into determining the rankings for any given keyword. What most automated keyword tools do is look at how many results are shown for a specific keyword and use that as the main indicator for competition. That couldn’t be farther from an accurate indicator of competition. In order to determine what accurately indicates competitiveness, we must look at the factors that determine how websites are ranked.
There are two main areas that search engines look at when deciding where a website will be ranked: on-page and off-page data. On-page data includes title/meta tags, H1/H2 tags, domain/URL, number of times the keyword is mentioned throughout the content of the webpage, LSI keywords, etc. If a keyword is found in the title, H1 tag, domain/URL, and is mentioned fairly often (but not too often) throughout the content, and related keywords are also mentioned throughout the content, there is a very good chance that the webpage is relevant to the keyword and that is a very positive sign to the search engines.
The other factor (off-page data) refers to the quantity and quality of the backlinks that point to the webpage and the anchor text of those backlinks. The main indicator for the quality of backlinks is determined by the location of the link on the webpage and the Pagerank of that webpage. Links that are in the sidebar or “blogroll” or footer are not considered nearly as valuable as links that are in the actual content of the page (also known as contextual links). The ideal scenario is for the backlinks to be from a wide range of domains and IP addresses with a diverse set of anchor texts. This is especially important after the latest Google algorithm update.
So now that we have a pretty good idea of what factors determine how Google ranks webpages, all we need to do is look at the webpages that show up in the search results for a particular keyword to decide how competitive that keyword is. If the search results consist of webpages that don’t have the keyword in their title or H1 tags, or they have very few or low quality links pointing to the pages with irrelevant anchor text, that is a very good sign that the keyword has low competition and that it is a good keyword to target. Things like the number of results or the number of results with the keyword in quotes or the “allintitile” or “allinanchor” queries (all of which many keyword tools use) are pretty much irrelevant because it is only the top 10 results that truly matter.
And that’s basically all there is to it. If you think that is too much work, there are indicators in the SERPs that can speed up the process. For example, if you see webpages from free article directories (Ezinearticles, Buzzle, etc) or free blogging platforms (Blogspot, Tumblr, etc), which typically do not have many quality backlinks, it is a very good sign that the keyword has low competition. Just a couple of weeks ago, I started a niche site targeting a keyword with more than 1 million search results with the keyword in quotes because the top 10 webpages consisted of unoptimized webpages with very few backlinks and today I’m ranking on the third page for that keyword and I haven’t even done any link building! I would have never found this keyword if I had used automated tools. Rather than being a slave to automated tools and statistical data, determining competition in the SERPs manually by analyzing the SEO of the top 10 webpages is not only much more effective in gauging competition, but also allows marketers and SEOs to gain more experience and knowledge of how Google rankings work.
Bio: Rob is a webmaster, marketer, SEO aficionado and enjoys writing about various topics in online marketing.
His current project is a web hosting review site which you can find at bestwebsitehostingservices.org.
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15 Responses to “Keyword Research Without Paid Tools”
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Keyword research is the most important task in SEO. Good keywords helps your website to increase the visibility of your website and gain traffic. Such good and informative information. Thank you.
Rob
I’ve been follow the Daily SEO tips for many months and generally they’re very useful.
But, today’s column is riddled with poor advice. A lot of what you say is factually correct, but that doesn’t mean it’s good advice. It’s not.
I’m interested in knowing how to run businesses effectively. So, I hope you’ll take my comments as constructive criticism; that’s the intent behind them.
There are many reasons why your thinking is flawed. Here are five. [If it's alright with you, I'll use Wordtracker as an example; I know the product well as I'm Wordtracker's CEO]:
Sohel Parvez Reply:
September 1st, 2012 at 7:41 pm
Justin
Your explanation is really awesome.
1. SEO requires specialist knowledge.
You say that “keyword research is not a very difficult task.” Which is true, but only once you know what you’re doing.
Anyone who’s new to SEO, or is researching an area for the first time, will have questions. We all do.
Yet, free tools don’t provide any support or guidance. Use Google’s AdWords tool for your keyword research and you’ll be hunting around in Google’s forums looking for help that doesn’t exist.
Most paid tools offer some level of support. Which can be incredibly useful and save you hours of time.
At Wordtracker our customers can ask whatever questions they like as part of their subscription. We run monthly webinars and we have reams of help material in our SEO Academy (you can access this even if you don’t have a subscription, just search for “Wordtracker Academy”).
2. SEO software can save you hours and hours of time
You say that keyword research “definitely does not require any sophisticated software to do effectively”. That advice sounds sensible. But it’s not.
Quite often, free software doesn’t get the job done quickly enough.
Keyword research can take many hours using Google’s AdWords keywords tool. And, as the saying goes, time is money – so we should use it wisely.
Let’s take an example. Say your SEO software costs about $1 per day (Wordtracker costs $1.23). And let’s say that the software saves you an hour a day that you’d waste by using free tools.
Hopefully, you’re in a business where your time is worth more than $1 an hour? And if you’re not, then you’re probably hoping to earn more than that in the near future.
So, that’s a fantastic investment. In fact, time-saving SEO software could be one of the best investments your business makes.
3. Google’s data is often misleading (part 1)
You say “All the tools that I mentioned earlier derive their data from the Google Keyword Tool”
That’s just plain wrong.
There are lots of sources of keyword data. Wordtracker has a proprietary keyword database (we have partnerships with some of the smaller search engines).
This is important because it gives users access to the long tail of keywords. These are the longer keyword phrases that Google doesn’t show you.
As a result, when you target long-tail keywords you’ll usually encounter much less competition than when you target the more popular head terms that Google provides.
For instance, Wordtracker gives you up to 2,000 long-tail keywords per search – many more than Google provides, even via its API service.
So, you’ll be two steps ahead of anyone who’s only using a free tool.
4. Google’s data is often misleading (part 2)
Google’s keyword data is provided for people who are working on PPC campaigns.
That’s because Google wants to make it easy to spend money on its AdWords service.
Google isn’t interested in helping us get to the top of its organic search results (which is where we’ll get the free traffic we want).
So, for instance, Google’s competition figures show how much competition there is for ADVERTISING, not SEO.
Wordtracker’s figures, by comparison, show how much competition there is to get on to the first page of the organic listings. We measure exactly the factors you mention: “The quantity and quality of the backlinks that point to the webpage and the anchor text of those backlinks”. We use these to assess the SEO competition.
Your advice that we should “all we need to do is look at the webpages that show up in the search results for a particular keyword to decide how competitive that keyword is” is right. But, it would take many hours to do that work manually.
Why would you choose to waste your time like that?
5. SEO tools offer much more than keyword research
If you’re serious about SEO, you’ll want to do more than keyword research. Any professional SEO software will help you with other SEO tasks.
So, for instance, Wordtracker will help you:
monitor your on-page SEO (are you targeting keywords properly)
check for SEO problems on your site
monitor your site’s position in Google’s results
and much more.
So, the cost of your subscription should save you time in all your SEO work, not just keyword research.
I hate to see people wasting their time doing tedious manual work that could be automated easily and cost-effectively. It’s a waste of time and talent.
So, do yourself a favor – invest in the right tools for the job!
Rob Reply:
September 5th, 2012 at 7:12 pm
Justin,
“Your advice that we should “all we need to do is look at the webpages that show up in the search results for a particular keyword to decide how competitive that keyword is” is right. But, it would take many hours to do that work manually.”
Hours to analyze 5-10 webpages? It takes me about 1/2 hour. Once you get the gist of it, it really doesn’t take long.
“SEO tools offer much more than keyword research”
There’s a difference between SEO tools and keyword research tools. I use many SEO tools for checking backlinks, tracking rankings, etc and they are extremely useful and save me a lot of time.
I was only saying that the keyword research tools that offer nothing but statistical data analysis based on a limited number of metrics while ignoring lots of other important data leave much to be desired.
Justin Reply:
September 20th, 2012 at 10:45 am
Rob – I agree that it doesn’t take long to check the competition for one keyword. Half an hour sounds about right.
But, most websites will need to target hundreds, probably thousands of keywords (and the long tail niche that’s associated with that keyword).
That means several thousand half-hours, if you’re taking your competitor research seriously.
Oh, and you’ll need to do that work every few months, as the rankings change.
I can’t imagine that many people have that much time spare.
Justin
Rob Reply:
September 20th, 2012 at 12:01 pm
I don’t know any webmaster who even does any keyword research for thousands of long tail keywords. Long tail keywords don’t get many searches at all and almost all of them have very low competition so it’s a waste of time to do competitive analysis for them. Besides, for most niches, there are only a handful of sites that dominate the SERPs and if a webmaster wants to start an authority site that will target thousands of keywords to compete with them, it’s a much better idea to analyze those authority sites you’re competing with rather than do competitive analyses for the thousands of long tail keywords they’re ranking for.
Un article très riche. Le SEO fait vraiment tourner la tête des propriétaires de sites et des référenceurs. Merci du tuyau.
Keywords tool is just give you idea about the keywords as you already selected with market and competitor resreach and suggest some new keywords which is hide from your research so i think tool is useful at any cost.
While some of the points here are good, the simple fact is that many paid tools do a MUCH better job (and save a LOT of time) when compared to duking it out with only free tools
Justin Reply:
September 20th, 2012 at 10:45 am
I agree Kevin – a LOT of time.
Thank you for Great article.
Live and Learn.
Great article Rob, and good discussion going here. Just +1 it.
Emmm, i understand.. YQ
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