Keywords research is a fundamental and highly important factor for any Internet Marketing and/or Search Engine Marketing activity; no news here. A new research by MarketingSherpa shows that the traditional ways of doing keywords research are not necessarily the most effective nor commonly used ones.
Keywords research is not anymore about using a keyword suggestion tool like the one from Google, the one from WordTracker or others. Those are still very valuable but limited and are not considered as the most effective tactic. It's a good starting point for any campaign and surely for a new website, but it only a starting point and limited in its results.
The results of the research MarketingSherpa conducted shows that companies are using other means and tactics for getting effective results for their keywords research.
The most used tactics reported in the research is analysis of the Web Analytics data. This makes a lot of sense: since Google Analytics is free, there is no barrier to use it on any website and the profficiency of using the data collected by Google Analytics gets better all the time. Regardless of the tool, analyzing the keywords used by your visitors to find your site is a priceless tactics and actually shows any website owner if his/her SEO and PPC efforts are on the right track as well as gives new ideas for keywords that are a great opportunity to optimize the site's pages for.
As the research shows, a bit of further analysis on those keywords - which of the keywords convert better and which of them are being used more frequently - will take the keywords research to the next level. There is no surprise those are reported to be the most effective tactics, regardless of the size of the company.
The ease of using web analytics tools such as Google Analytics to track and analyze the search phrases visitors are using on the site's internal search makes it another great way to learn on the website's keywords to get optimized. What is more simpler than that: you collect data on what visitors are searching to get to your website as well as what they are searching when on your website.
But your site and company don't operate in a silo: how about your competition? More and more website owner realize that just like competitive analysis served them in traditional marketing, it is greatly effective online. What's better than to see which keywords your competitors are competing for with their SEO efforts and with they Pay-per-Click campaigns?
The new entrant in the list of most effective keywords research tactics is "social semantic mining". Using social media by monitoring the major social networks and bookmarking site (e.g.: delicious, StumbleUpon, etc') enable analysis of new words in your market and niche. If your target audience is using those keywords to communicate and engage in the social networks, what is better than to optimize your website (and your social media presence) for those keywords?
A word about the budgets: for some, the amounts that are presented in the image above might look irrelevant. They shouldn't: Most of the tactics reported for the keywords research don't cost or don't cost much (Google Analytics is free) and there is barrier to use those tactics. It is simply a good practice to see what the bigger spenders are doing and use the same tactics even if your budget is significantly less.
As a conclusion: there are multiple ways available to perform keywords research, beyond the simply straight-forward ones. Use a combination of the keywords research tools with your Analytics data, competitive analysis and Social Media monitoring to get to those best keywords you are looking for.
The full article on the effective keywords research tactics from MarketingSherpa could be found at: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?id=31582
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