Sep
12Adwords Tool, competition indication, whats good ?
Tags : SEO Posted in: Search Engine Optimisation
We’ve been using the adwords keyword tool to try and find good keywords. My initial thoughts where that I should avoid ANYTHING with any competition but have at least a thousand search volume.
However, Aaron found a video on how to use the tool and this changed our / my understanding of it.
Heres the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDB6T_L-mqs.
In the video it says you should have around 100,000 search volume and the guy ignored the competition indicator.
Mike, whats your understanding / thoughts?
I’m not thinking I should have waited with my directory submission until I’d found good keywords to use in the links, however I can now change them I guess, so it doesn’t look like I’ve got lots of the same.
by
JM
EDIT: I’ve also learned from the video, that you REALLY need to know your keywords and near keywords, I mean, I did realise this to a certain extent, but this guy knows numbers too. I think I’m going to have to keep records, I just don’t know what. Although, I guess keyword / phrase and search volume, would be start.
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I did - and still do - most of my research by looking at the competition. I have many keywords and the “big” ones (a set of about 6 phrases) account for an ever decreasing %age of the traffic - now not much more than 10%. I covered a few points on this topic in this old post.
In my niche, there simply aren’t 100,000 searches/ month. I target phrases commonly used in the niche then research variations. I’ve always taken the point of view that if you are competing with other sites you need to know their keywords and work on those as a priority. At least that way you know you aren’t missing something they know.
The adwords tool is a recent happening. I’ve checked the keywords I aim for and confirmed I’m on the right track.
As for the directory submissions, I wouldn’t worry - you’ll actually benefit more by switching anchor text and descriptions fairly frequently - just keep on submitting to a few every now and then and build up coverage of a range of keywords.
I’ve also had success with other forms of link-building - nothing dodgy! - but I’ll only talk about those via email!
I didn’t really look at the competition indicator. I just search on Google/ Yahoo etc and see there’s lots and lots of competitors. I’m trying to match what I think are the best of the competitors. I did notice a gap on a small set of keywords where my normal competitors didn’t show up in the results so I decided to optimise on those phrases too but I have no evidence really to say whether those specific phrases result in a decent proportion of my sales.
Glad you have a logo now.
Right I see, I’m really unsure how to determine which keywords to use. I’ve printed out my traffic report for my ebay show as I have exercise books etc on their. And it shows me the keywords used to find my listings. I’ve also got a printout from the top searches from google webmaster tools.
I had thought I’d find high search volume in the keywords tool and low competition.
How do you determine which websites are optimizing for the keywords in serps and when not to use them?
From that video its suggests that high search volume is a good keyword, but again it doesn’t say what is achievable.
Can you point me in the right direction on this, I’m like a dog chasing its tail atm.
Do you think I could safely use the competition indicator?
I’ve no experience with the competition indicator. I’m not even sure whether it applies to specific regions, e.g. UK or India, or works as an average across all googles.
All I’ve done is analyse competitor sites using some of these SEO tools and worked out a range of keywords to optimise for. If I look on the Adwords tool I get confirmation that these keywords are the right ones.
The googlerankings tools pick out keywords from websites. Those which have the highest density should equate to the most important ones on the site being analysed.
As a general comment, I’d say that all this SEO stuff is really very simple when it’s reduced to the basics. I wouldn’t recommend anyone go looking for a magic ingredient that will suddenly get you loads of traffic because I don’t think there is such an ingredient. Even a high ranking on Google won’t necessarily bring lots of traffic. In the 9 months I’ve been interested in SEO, on the whole I’ve found a lot of repeated stuff (some of which are no doubt mis-interpreted myths after being repeated 1000 times). In those 9 months, the best, simple and most realistic advice was given to me by the SEO guy I employed to optimise 2 pages. I haven’t read anything to contradict his input since.
Not the whois - although that is interesting. By googlerankings, I meant this one:
http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php
Ignore stage 2. Stage 1 works fine for me - at least I certainly see the word security using the default, unchanged options.
Oh ok…
It is just keyword density.
I’m surprised there isn’t a tool which gives a score (like the whois tool) which takes h1 and title into account.
Ah well thanks for your help.
The whois score is purely guesswork though.
Remember noone knows really what makes for a truly well optimised page so any such SEO rating tool would be somewhat subjective, i.e. give a different score depending on the rules being applied/ measured.
Going back several comments, I was saying that all I had done was analyse competitor sites. This tool was the one I mainly used - other than reading the sites myself of course.
The few basic rules I now apply when writing a page are covered in earlier posts - we applied them step-by-step to softtester over several posts and I’m pleased to say that the SoftTester traffic is still increasing nicely - last week there were almost 4 times the number of visitors on some days that there were when we started back in June.
I haven’t tracked msaccessdatabasesecurity in any depth since I wanted to wait until you finished with directory and shareware site submissions. The visits from directory owners and shareware site owners reviewing the site will distort the figures.
Oh. Don’t worry about the actual density %age. Though obviously if the tool says that a certain phrase is “dense” then it must be important.
OK..
So I guess we can say…
The words next to “Most often used keywords:”
Are the ones we should be looking at.