How you can drastically improve web traffic with keyword research
Would you be interested to know which Google keyword phrases they think are most related to your Google search query? Would you like this results list to be kept up to date all the time? How about being able to access information for free?
And besides, how about I mention that you can get all the information using nothing more than Firefox (or any other browser) and a standard Google search?
At least a little interested? Ok, let’s get into the details…
First of all, let’s take a step back and look at relevance, since this term is at the center of Google’s search engine results.
Google wants to provide the person searching with the most accurate and relevant results possible. Google knows that if they can’t provide this information, users will likely stop using their services altogether, and no users means no ad revenue, which is their main source of revenue!
For a great example of a search engine dropping the ball, think AltaVista? In its day, it was the most used search engine, and very quickly lost the crown to Google because it dropped the ball with relevance.
I doubt there is such a thing as search engine loyalty (at least not for the non-search engine internet marketing person). If a better solution comes along, the everyday user will just start using that search engine.
Trust me when I say that The Powers To Be At Google are well aware of this, and put a lot of thought and manpower into making sure that when you use Google, the results that come back are very much related to the search term you used. .
They have to keep the average user happy so that they use Google all the time.
Webmasters, of course, have found ways to “game” Google in the past so that their own sites appear instead of what should be the most relevant results, and such techniques are still used today.
Usually, Google detects these hacks and is getting smarter to find these types of hacks.
Google seems to get it right most of the time, and certainly more so than the other major search engines right now.
Okay, since Google currently returns the most relevant results and has the largest user base of any search engine, and it’s obvious that its main goal is the relevance of information to its users, doesn’t it have Does it make sense to use Google search? results and further use this information when conducting keyword research?
For example, let’s say you’re searching for the keyword phrase web traffic
When I entered that keyword phrase into Google, I got a list of the current pages that Google thinks are most relevant to that search term (along with a large number of ads).
But in addition to these results at the bottom of the page they also provide (and here’s the key)…
Searches RELATED to: targeted web traffic (your words).
Hmm interesting a list of keywords that Google thinks are relevant to my search.
Google actually shows you the search terms it finds most relevant to your search.
If you do some research on this, there’s a lot of speculation about how Google decides which words are displayed, but no matter what you think, I think it’s worth looking into more, isn’t it?
In my tests, I found that the keywords it came up with seemed to be highly searched keywords.
In the case of web traffic, the search terms I got were
increase website traffic
free web traffic
buy web traffic
Google web traffic
web traffic report
web traffic generator
web traffic monitoring
measure web traffic
They all seem pretty related to my original search.
And you can drill down by clicking on a search term to get keywords relevant to that keyword. For example, you could have clicked on increase web traffic and received a list of phrases related to that term.
This is getting interesting. Before you discount this method compared to using your favorite keyword tool, I would ask you to consider the following.
1) The information for these searches comes directly from the Google server, so the information has not been corrupted in any way.
Many keyword tools don’t use Google data at all (Wordtracker) or combine data from many sources. Here we have information straight from the source!
2) The information returned by Google is of course very up to date, unlike a lot of other keyword research data that can be months out of date.
I’m not saying to ditch all other keyword tools in favor of this technique, but I recommend you check it out. With the latest over-hyped and conquering software tools being released seemingly every day, sometimes it pays to take a step back and go back to using a very simple method like googling.
In my case, I use this technique in conjunction with other keyword tools and get the best of both worlds. My 2 favorite keyword research tools currently are Nichebot and Market Samurai (google them).
I think the best use of this technique is when searching for new niches or when trying to establish the feasibility of entering a particular niche.
One last thing to remember is that unfortunately not all keywords are supported. Sometimes no related search terms are provided for a given keyword, but since it’s free, I’m happy to overlook that oversight.
And sometimes I have to say that the returned terms seem a bit strange. But this seems to be in more unusual niches for which Google may not have collected enough information (my speculation).
Go out and take a look at the related search function on Google. The returned keyword phrases could end up being very useful.
