Keyword Research Approaches – Wide (multidimensional), Deep (directional) and Selective

When I am working on keyword selection and niche finding I decided to divide my keyword projects into two categories, one is Multidimensional and that’s where I go wide and wild, I explore keyword associations, synonyms common expressions, related topics, you name it, anything that may be related to the topic from which these keywords derive. I extensively use Google Keyword tool and many others. I do it to educate myself on the topic, I have learned that the more I know about the topic the better long tale keywords I will find.

It is not time consuming to find most popular keywords and check the level of competition. But it certainly takes more time to see what they may have missed. May be I am an old fashioned skeptic, but I can’t just rely on keyword tools, no matter how good they claim to be, to fetch me the one that my or my clients’ competition supposedly “missed”. May they did, or maybe it’s a dud and I don’t want to waste my time with “batch indexing master file comparison Florida” term.

When I do directional keyword research I already know the main key phrase (s) and perform what is known as “going deep” research on closely related terms and check the popularity of any long tale keyword that may come my way. I like long tale, but more often than we would like it to be, long-tailing ends up being a waste of time.

And that takes me to the third step of keyword research and analysis where I select my primary targets from the list generated from the Directional or Deep keyword research. On average I am usually at 10-20 valuable keywords to start with and the rest goes into “keyword archive” to be resurrected when needed.

Picking the right keywords is very important when working with clients because it will determine whether you will help them or not. Way too many SEO professionals impress clients with ranking reports. The less valuable the keyword is the more impressive ranking report will look. Your clients may be impressed with skyrocketing charts, but the reality is that the higher you climb with a bad batch of keywords the harder as a SEO you will fall in your client’s eyes. When you hit the top spots in search resutls for keyword phrase that no one cares about and your client doesn’t see any traffic, who do you think will be blamed? The economy? I doubt it.

Checking rankings is only viable when you know that you are competing against someone who is making money using the same keywords. If there is no evidence of that, it is a bit of a gamble and believe you me, clients do not like when their consultants are gambling. SEO is about traffic. If SEO or a marketing firm produced traffic than far as keyword research and search engine optimization or ad campaign management concern, the job is accomplished. If the product doesn’t sell, than it is a marketer’s fault. Could be bad landing page, bad product, bad offer, bad title, bad market targeting… well many bad things happen to incompetent marketers.

For most SEO clients, this is all new, unknown territory with a whole bunch of ridiculous terms and uncertain explanations and that’s why it is so easy to sell a business owner on a ranking report, almost like an earnings report. I don’t bother with that and I don’t bother my client’s with that, these reports can serve well to SEO professionals to trigger alarms for competition analysis or SEO errors.