Peter Fuller MBA CA

In the videos below I show you two slightly different ways I perform Keyword Research for free.

In the first video I start with the Google Keyword Tool by entering keyword phrases I obtain from SEO Book.

SEO Book’s free keyword tool is powered by Wordtracker.

Google Keyword Tool is also free however I suggest you obtain a gmail account and login when doing research. That way you will not be limited on how many results Google will give you.

Links to all of the tools I mention are at the end of this post.

Make sure you click the Full Screen icon in the bottom right of the video after you start to play, otherwise you are not going to be able to see what I am doing.


Video 1 – Google Keyword Tool and SEO Book

In the second video I use the Google Keyword Tool by entering a competitive website.

Again, watch the video in full screen mode.


Video 2 – Google Keyword Tool using a Competitive Website

Keyword Research for Free Steps

Google Keyword Tool and SEO Book

Step 1 – Enter your starter keyword and press Submit.

Step 2 – Export the Keyword list to a spreadsheet.

Step 3 – Copy the keywords (100 of them) into Google Keyword Tool “Word or Phrase” box.

Step 4 – Ensure you are searching all locations and not your local location then press Search.

Step 5 – Sort the keyword list by “Global Monthly Searches”.

Step 6 – In Match Types unclick “Broad” and click “Phrase”.

Step 7 – Download the results to your spreadsheet by clicking “Download” and selecting All from the drop down box.

Note – I changed Google’s Keyword Tool results from Broad to Phrase before I downloaded the results to my spreadsheet because the Phrase totals are more relevant for what we are doing. The Broad search result totals are for all of the words in the phrase which are of no use to us. I also did not choose any Categories. If you are doing keyword research for an affiliate product you may want to consider selecting relevant categories.


Google Keyword Tool using a Competitive Website

Step 1 – Search Google using your starter keyword. Make sure you are searching the appropriate Google country and not your local one, unless of course you want to search local. To override Google from redirecting you use the following url : http://google.com/ncr

Step 2 – Select one of the sites returned in the search results, not sites like Wikipedia, Ezine Articles, but rather one where the top level domain was returned.

Step 3 – Copy the domain name and paste into the Keyword Tool “Website” box.

Step 4 – Ensure you are searching all locations and not your local location then press Search.

Step 5 – Sort the keyword list by “Global Monthly Searches”.

Step 6 – In Match Types unclick “Broad” and click “Phrase”.

Step 7 – Download the results to your spreadsheet by clicking “Download” and selecting All from the drop down box.

Step 8 – Reload the Google Keyword Tool page to clear out all of the previous returned results.

Step 9 – Copy the keywords (100 of them) into Google Keyword Tool “Word or Phrase” box.

Step 10 – Ensure you are searching all locations and not your local location then press Search.

Step 11 – Sort the keyword list by “Global Monthly Searches”.

Step 12 – In Match Types unclick “Broad” and click “Phrase”.

Step 13 – Download the results to your spreadsheet by clicking “Download” and selecting All from the drop down box.


Spreadsheet Analysis

I use Excel as my spreadsheet, however you can use a free version from Open Office. Their link is below.

Google Keyword Tool will give us 800 keyword phrases. I will combine those 800 results with my initial 100 keywords and using Excel’s duplicate remover I will trim down the list. This post is not meant to be an Excel or other spreadsheet tutorial so if you do not understand something just ask.

I am only interested in three columns; Keyword, Global Monthly Searches and Average CPC.

I delete all other columns and I sort by the Average CPC, lowest to highest.

I will also filter the columns to show me Global Monthly Searches higher than 500. (You may decide to look at searches greater than some other higher number.

I will add a column to record Google’s number of results for phrase searches I may be interested in.

Now comes the manual work (remember we are not using paid tools).

I will scan down my spreadsheet looking for keyword phases that interest me that have reasonably good monthly searches and a low CPC.

Obviously if the CPC is really low, like zero, that may indicate a poor keyword. If the CPC rate is high that may indicate a keyword that is too competitive.

While scanning down the list I ask myself “If someone typed in that keyword phrase are they looking for me?”

When I identify a keyword phrase of interest I will do a phrase search in Google and note the number of results. If it is less than 60,000 I am interested.

The next step, assuming the search results are low enough, I will do a broad search to see what the top ten results are. I do a broad search because that is how people actually search.

This is where Firefox and the “SEO for Firefox” add-on come into play.

I will do my searches using Firefox and determine how competitive the keyword phrase is by looking at all of the wonderful stats that “SEO for Firefox” will show on the search results. I look at PR and backlinks mostly.

It is very important to review the search results and determine if you can beat some of them.

If the top results include just high authority sites then move on, especially if their domain names are listed as opposed to some deep page. It is possible to beat authority sites when the competition is low and their search result is for a deep page.

So that is how I do keyword research for free, or at least how I use to do it.

I now automate most of the process.

In a future post I will show how I automate the process using a paid program.


Keyword Research Tools

https://adwords.google.ca/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

http://www.openoffice.org/

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

Peter Fuller MBA CA
905-566-1927

P.S. Share your thoughts below in the comments and if you found this post valuable please do share using the nice icons below. I truly appreciate all of your comments, whether you agree with me or not.

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