How To Analyze Competitive Keywords For Your Website

Human think in a different way, but a lot of them thinking the same thing. It could be 'bread' right this second, it could be 'fix my television'. This is the sort of thing, as a webmaster/SEO consultant, to think about. What are the words that people may be thinking when they use the search engine to search for something. How are you going to decide what to put up? But first, why?

Setting up proper keywords for your website would mean two things; traffic and popularity. Depends on how you set up your keywords, your site may appear on the first page of search engine or the 20^th. Put yourself into the customer's shoe. Would you want to keep clicking on 'Next' on the search engine result until page 50 to find what you are looking for? I don't think so. Studies had shown that people tend to stop browsing through the results until page 10. Personally I would stop at page 3. Therefore, getting and setting your keyword is absolutely important. The single biggest mistake that newbies would do is to skip this whole keyword mambo-jumbo.

Now, before you have your head exploded, there are tools out there to help ease your headache. Some of the tools are the following. Some of the tools out there are free, and some of them need to be paid.

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool:
   https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. SEOBook.com's Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis Tools Gadget:
   http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/#kw
3. Trellian Keyword Discovery:
   http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
4. SEOBook.com's Google Suggest Keyword Suggestion Scrapper Tool:
   http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-information/

Type in the search boxes the keyword that people may be 'thinking' when they use the search engine to find products/services related to yours.

For example, let's say that I have open up a website dedicated on teaching people how to play the guitar.
In Google Adwords Keyword Tool, first I type in 'learn play guitar'. I can see that 'learn play guitar' and 'learn to play guitar' have high search volume that 'learn play the guitar'. That's it! The most suitable keyword would be 'learn play guitar'. How astonishing that a single word would mean big difference.
But! Look at the Advertiser Competition. 'learn play guitar' have high numbers of advertisers using/bidding it. Surprisingly, 'learn play the guitar' have medium numbers of competitiveness. If you want to avoid using keywords that most people out there are using, your second best bet would be the keywords with not much of competitiveness. You can still use keywords with high numbers of bids, but you are competing with the rest of the world (and popular sites!)

To check and see the statistics of how many websites are using the same keyword, you might want to check out SEOBook.com's Google Suggest Keyword Suggestion Scrapper Tool. Type in the keyword, and then it will display amount of competing pages, what Google suggest, and what does the Wordtracker would suggest.

You can try to check out out popular websites out there that are similar to yours and see what sort of keywords they are using. That would give you some rough ideas. Be reminded though, eventhough you can just copy-paste their keywords, you will learn nothing. If you are still unsure about what keywords would be suitable for your website and its content, you can hire SEO firm(s) to deal with it. They're the experts afterall. Setting up good keywords would guarantee you traffic. Afterall, you have what they're looking for.

By Jim Tan, Operion Founder, Jan 8, 2008