Advanced Keyword Research

This information is based on an interview between Charles Heflin of SEO 2020 and Russell Wright of Theme Zoom. You may listen to the actual interview and read the full transcript by visiting the advanced keyword research call.

The purpose of this article is to make key points from the call more clear and understandable.

Based on the call it became very evident that in order to conduct proper keyword research for your market you must go to the broadest possible category or keyword for your market.

For example, if your website is about dog training you don't look for only keywords related to dog training, you look for keywords related to dogs or dog. You want to go to the highest and broadest category and look down on the "entire" market not just the "dog training" market.

By doing this you are able to find more keywords that are related to dog training specifically than you could by focusing only on "dog training" keywords. By doing this you end up with important keywords that you would surely miss by focusing on the much narrower category of dog training alone.

You must look at your market from the top down rather from the bottom up.

To build a site to take advantage of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), you would start with the broadest term possible (super general term). For dog training we would start with the super general term "dog".

Go to Google and type in tilde (~) dog: ~dog

Then look at all the words that come up in bold.

From this tilde search on the word dog we get:

• dog
• dog breed
• pets
• dogs
• pet
• puppies
• breed

These are not thesaurus based synonymic (related) terms, they are search engine synonymic (related) terms. This is the key point that many people are missing. When designing a website, it is best to use search engine proven synonyms rather than a thesaurus to come up with related terms.

Why?

Because you will gain higher ranking power by focusing on what the search engines (especially Google) consider to be related.

To get more related terms we can do a tilde search on Google for "puppies". A tilde search for puppies yields the following new keywords.

• puppy
• dogs for sale
• dog breeders
• puppy dog

These are search engine proven, related terms that we have compiled from our example so far:

• dog
• dog breed
• pets
• dogs
• pet
• puppies
• breed
• puppy
• dogs for sale
• dog breeders
• puppy dog

You can continue doing a tilde search for each term to drill deeper into the search engine proven synonymic terms.

Now that you have all of your synonyms you can then begin doing keyword research for each term and extract terms that are related to your "dog training" site and then do tilde searches on those results as well.

Semantics and Content

Russell says:

Basically what Russell means is that, when creating content for your site, you should focus on more than just your primary keyword for any given page. You should also include synonymic terms within the body of your content.

For example. Let's suppose you are writing a page for your site that you want to target the keyword "payday loans Wisconsin".

To take full advantage of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) you may want to include the following keywords within your article:

• payday loans Wisconsin
• cash loan
• cash
• loan cash
• Wisconsin
• loan
• payday loan
• payday loan
• loan Wisconsin
• loans
• payday cash loan

This list was derived from pulling bolded words from the tilde search on "payday loans Wisconsin".

Notice that, contrary to logic, the keyword "cash advance" is not proven to be related as far as Google is concerned. The word "cash" is related but "cash advance" is not.

This is a scary proposition because logic tells us that "cash advance" is related to "payday loans" but according to Google it is not. So as a savvy webmaster, you should understand this. Don't live and die by this, but simply use Google as an indicator as to what is related and what is not.

When writing the body of your article on "payday loans Wisconsin", you will need to include the words "cash", "loans", and "cash loan". Do not be concerned about the order of your primary keyword either. You can rank for the keyword "payday loans Wisconsin" even if your article uses the text: "get a fast cash payday loan anytime in the great state of Wisconsin".

Are you beginning to see the point?

Russell Says:

Using the Adwords Keyword Tool

If you don't have a Google Adwords account, you can easily get one for a $5 fee at http://adwords.google.com

Log in to your Adwords account and click "tools" and then click "keyword tool". Type in your broadest term and check the "Use synonyms" box to get Google generated synonyms and keywords.

Extract keywords from top sites using the Adwords Keyword Tool:

Click on the "Site-Related Keywords" tab:

Go to the top sites in your niche and paste the URL into the box and click "Get keywords". Google will extract the keywords from the site you enter and present them to you. This is a powerful tool that many webmasters have either overlooked or simply don't know about.

Another Important Point

Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker and the rest may show zero traffic for an extremely specific term but this is in no way an actual indicator of the traffic and it cannot be trusted.

Russell Says:

Russell discussed an example of a company that ranked for the term "Toxic waste uranium conversion module refractor unit". You would never find this term unless you begin your keyword research from the top of your vertical market. In this case the top would be "toxic waste".

If you were to start your keyword research from the bottom (using more specific terms) you are very unlikely to extract and discover micro-targeted keywords that are important in your industry.

Of importance is to note that fact that the keyword "Toxic waste uranium conversion module refractor unit" only gets traffic from about 4 or 5 visitors in a month but out of those visitors a sale of over $500,000 is made.

The only way to discover hidden nuggets of gold like this is to conduct thorough research either manually or by using a tool like Themezoom that does all of this automatically.

Keep in mind that manually extracting keywords from the very top of your vertical market can take weeks or months if you are doing it correctly and free tools simply don't have the depth to conduct this kind of research efficiently.

The industry term for this kind of research is called "Vertical Market Assessment".

Themeing

We are concerned with themeing in order to take advantage of the ranking power of latent semantic indexing (LSI). With this in mind you should be more concerned about the global perspective of your entire vertical market not just the niche within that vertical market that you are focusing on.

The Google Adwords keyword tool is the best free tool to use (with the exception of the initial $5 fee) to extract "real world", "real time" keywords and synonyms to master your market.

The secret is to use the largest company in the world that is serving up data to help clients "buy" keywords. Google and Adwords is just that. They are motivated to "sell" keywords that are effective so they take an extra step that other keyword tools can't match. Though you wouldn't be using their tool to "buy" keywords, you should be able to glean the power of using it to extract "good" keywords. By using the Google Adwords keyword tool you are taking an exclusive peek behind the Google firewall to extract relational data straight from the horse's mouth.

Putting it all together

1. Build your keyword list using Google Adwords keyword tool to get search engine proven synonymic terms for the broadest term in your vertical market.

2. Then do a search on Google for the top 10 websites under those terms and then use the Google Adwords "site-related keywords" tool to pull keywords from the top 10 sites for each term.

3. Do a synonym search on Google Adwords for each of those terms from step 2 and add those to your keyword list.

4. Then repeat step 2 for the keywords you generate from step 3.

5. Then use Word Tracker, Keyword Discovery, etc. to find more keywords for each term you produced from steps 1 - 4.

6. Repeat the steps with Google Adwords for terms you produce from step 5.

9. Copy and paste your keyword list into the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator tool. Log into your Adwords account and click "tools" then click "Traffic Estimator".

10. Order the results from the Traffic Estimator from least traffic to most. This will be the order in which you complete your articles. Start with the least traffic ond work your way up to the top.

Here is what Russell has to say about the Google Adwords keyword tool:

Keyword Priorities:

Here is how Themezoom determines keyword priorities:

What Themezoom does is, it goes throughout the search engines to find out what the authority sites are already writing about related to the vertical market you are targeting. It does this by dealing with intersections of primary themes, relating to specific terms both on the website content and in the meta tags and a variety of other places.

In essence, it's able to find out what major topics on specific themes are about throughout the internet automatically.

Themezoom can sort and parse that data based on whatever you want. Traffic, cost per click, etc.

The priority of article content is determined in a very sophisticated algorithm, which the Themezoom programmer Sue wrote. It determines, based on the overall theme that you are doing, the things that you are going to want to talk about in topics and articles to a hungry market in order of priority.

How the actual algorithm works is privileged information that cannot be disclosed. It is very difficult to come up with a content strategy apart from starting with less trafficked keywords and working your way up unless you are an expert at silo-ing and themeing.

This is where the power of Themezoom comes into play. Its algorithm and decision making processes are built in which play on the expertise and knowledge of themeing and silo-ing experts.

Themezoom can do in minutes what it can take months to do manually. Themezoom goes well beyond keyword research by giving you an exact content strategy based on proven algorithms.

The bottom line

You don't "need" Themezoom to conduct your keyword research and develop a plan of attack for your niche. You will at least need a Google Adwords account ($5 to set up) and some kind of keyword tool like Word Tracker or Keyword Discovery.

The question you have to ask yourself is...

"By the time I pay for a monthly membership for Keyword Discovery or Word Tracker, would it not be wise to go ahead and subscribe to Themezoom instead?"

Where to Go From Here

Now that you have your keywords it is time to group those keywords into silos.