How to find keywords using a keyword suggestion tool

Written by Marc Roberge | 14 June 2011

Once you have a general topic or generic keyword, the next step is to try and discover variations on your keyword and gather enough data to be able to see which ones are viable. I used to perform this step using free keyword tools such as Google Keyword External Tool, Wordtracker and Wordstream and will sometimes go back to Google Keyword External Tool every now and again for a quick search, but for the past 8 months or so, I've been using Market Samurai for all my keyword and SEO research, analysis and tracking. More...

Market Samurai isn't free, although they do offer a 12 day fully functional free trial, at $97 (if you purchase within the first 7 days of your trial period - $149 if you wait), it is, hands down, the best money I ever invested on any website related software. I'm not going to go on about it here, although I will be demonstrating how powerful, comprehensive and downright simple it is to use throughout this step by step series. Suffice it to say, while I will be showing you how you can perform various keyword research and analysis using free Google Keywords Tools, you will quickly see how much faster and complete a keyword analysis tool Market Samurai is.

Find Keywords And Keyword Variations

So now that we have a general focus for your new website, it's time to dig a round to see if we can't find some good keywords that we can target. If you are using free Google keywords tools, I would suggest you start at the source by using Google Keyword External Tool. You can find it here.

You, of course, will be performing a search using your generic keyword or keywords for your specific site focus. For example, if you are building an information site about "dog training", then you would start with those specific search terms. In my case, as you will remember from our previous article, I'm looking for keywords for a site about "online movie rental" - so those are the search terms I'll be using.

Type in your search terms in the "Word or phrase" box. You can further narrow your search by selecting specific Locations and Languages if you will be targeting a specific audience or market by expanding that option (click on the + sign) and choosing the appropriate options. You will also have to fill in the Captcha security field.

: Google Keywords Tools - Google External Keyword Tool 1

Click the "Search" button and Google Keyword External Tool will return 100 keyword matches and relevant keyword variations for your search terms.

: Google Keywords Tools - Google External Keyword Tool 2

There is quite a bit of useful information here. First and foremost, all the keywords generated by Google Keyword External Tool are actual search terms people use when performing search engine queries in Google which is important because targeting these specific keywords or keyword phrases in your content will improve your chances of being found because your keywords will exactly match searches performed by Google users. The other nice thing is that, in addition to stats specific to your original search terms, Google keyword External Tool is a great keyword suggestion tool as it offers both narrow and broad matches which should provide you with several good variations on your original generic keywords.

Google Keyword External Tool also provides 3 more columns of relevant data pertaining to each keyword suggestion. The first column shows the relative level of competition for each keyword variation. I say relative because it doesn't actually give you a numeric breakdown of the competition, nor does it help you determine how strong that particular competition may be as far as Page Rank, Age, Authority, Backlinks and other metrics are concerned. Nevertheless, the small competition graph bar does give you a quick, albeit rough, idea of how much competition your up against for each keyword or keyword phrase.

: Google Keywords Tools - Google External Keyword Tool 3

The second column shows you Global Monthly Search statistics which essentially shows you how many people search those specific keywords or keyword phrases each month globally. This not only gives you a fair estimation of how much traffic you could potentially get, organically, if you manage to position your site in the top 3 search engine results or at least within the first or second page. If your site is the 1st search engine result for a keyword or keyword phrase, you could potentially get about 56% of the Global or Local Monthly Searches. 2nd position in Google SERPs will get about 13% of clicks, 3rd about 9%, 4th to 6th about 3%-4% and progressively less for all other results. If you are targeting a Global audience, Global Monthly Searches are what you will look at. If, on the other hand, you are targeting a specific region such as the United States or Australia, you will likely be more concerned with Local Monthly Searches.

: Google Keywords Tools - Google External Keyword Tool 4

You can sort these results alphabetically, by competition level, by Global Monthly Searches or by Local Monthly Searches simply by clicking the corresponding column header. As you can see, Google Keyword External Tool does a great job as a keyword suggestion tool and also provides some basic metrics that you can use to evaluate potential traffic versus competition levels. Next, we need to sort through these results and attempt to find one or two good low competition keywords that also have the potential for decent organic traffic. This is where Google Keyword External Tool starts to break down because you now have to perform secondary searches using other tools to further help you narrow your keyword choices.