KEYWORD RESEARCH FOR

PROFESSIONALS

Richard Baxter, Founder, SEOgadget

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Keyword research is not just data

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It’s learning how people search for

your products and where they are

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It’s learning what content you have

and what content you need

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To create an actionable outcome.

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This is how I do keyword research

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Gather Group Analyse Report

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Data Gathering,

Listening Tools

Processes and Tricks

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GOOGLE ADWORDS API PLUGIN FOR EXCEL

Capture search volumes and seasonality data straight into Excel

http://seogadget.co.uk/google-adwords-plugin-excel/

=getAdWordStats()

=getAdWordIdeas()

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EXPAND: SUGGEST SERVICE IN SWEDEN

The ArrayGetAdwords ideas query fetches suggested keywords from the Adwords API for

ANY country code

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Stage 1 – Data Gathering

Tools, Processes and Tricks

http://www.google.com/trends/

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Find the conversation:

http://seogadget.com/tools/content-strategy-generator/

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Yahoo Clues: http://clues.yahoo.com/

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Search flow – what do people search for before and after

their search?

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GATHER / ANALYSE YOUR UGC

AND THEN RETARGET WITH CONTENT

Read: http://justinbriggs.org/content-based-retargeting-

strategy

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Social listening and identifying

people

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http://www.tweetarchivist.com/

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http://www.tweetarchivist.com/

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We learned rather quickly that our target market tend to share similar content

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Back to the data bit…

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http://ahrefs.com/

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Grab all of your competitors keywords: http://seogadget.com/extract-your-competitor-

keyword-strategy-excel-skills/

COMPETITOR KW EXTRACTION BY SITE CRAWL

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EXTRACTING KEYWORDS WITH XENU

=LEFT([@Title],FIND(" for sale",[@Title],1))

=MID([@Title],1,FIND("on Auto",[@Title],1)-1)

Large, optimised sites are often extremely predictable. If you can extract the data (and if it’s

easy to get search data) then why not give this a shot?

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YOU HAVE TO LEARN THESE

+

http://seogadget.com/tools/the-links-api-extension-for-mozscape/

And

http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/

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WHAT DO PEOPLE LIKE?

Import XML Sitemap > Fetch FaceBook Likes > Get post titles

Using =FacebookLikes() can rapidly increase your understanding of what visitors to competitor sites will

like (http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/ )

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DON’T CLICK SEARCH

http://www.slideshare.net/wilreynolds/do-real-company-stuff-mozcon-2012-version

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QUORA SUGGEST SCRAPING

Google Docs style Xpath scraping is easily possible. Separate into columns using the “;”

delimiter. In theory this would work with any XML style search suggest output...

Use concatenate to form query URL then:

=XPathOnUrl([URL],"//li")

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ALCHEMY

Download this tool: http://bit.ly/alchemyexcel and get an Alchemy API key here:

http://www.alchemyapi.com/api/register.html - use a website’s top pages report (OSE)

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MORE KEYWORDS!

Alchemy is particularly awesome at tagging and categorising content. It can be used to identify entities in content

(http://www.alchemyapi.com/api/entity/) and it has a very powerful content scraper (http://www.alchemyapi.com/api/scrape/)

which can extract content without the use of xPath

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POPULAR INTERNAL SITE SEARCH TERMS

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Check out the start pages report in GA – what pages do people search on? What terms do

they use and do they find what they’re looking for?

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CAPTURE RANKINGS IN GDOCS

Check out the point made by Tom Critchlow about the use of the &time query for larger scrapes here:

http://seogadget.com/playing-around-with-importxml-in-google-spreadsheets/

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QA FORUMS ARE AWESOME FOR BLOG POST IDEAS

View this Gdocs spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/9Fs7aF via: http://seogadget.com/playing-around-with-

importxml-in-google-spreadsheets/ then learn how to do the job properly:

http://www.distilled.net/blog/distilled/guide-to-google-docs-importxml/

http://www.seomoz.org/q/browse?utf8=%E2%9C%93&visibility=0&time_range=0&sor

t=0&x=54&y=9&limit=10

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How do I find low competition, high

volume keywords?

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http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty/

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SEOGADGET MOZSCAPE API EXTENSION FOR EXCEL

LINKS API EXTENSION

FOR EXCEL

SEOgadget.com/mozscape

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My process

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GET AWR CONFIGURED AND READY

Rank checking is never perfect, but If you’re using a decent proxy service located in the correct host

location, the data is useful – especially for measuring visibility by keyword group / content type

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Here’s how I have my proxies configured in this installation of AWR

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Grab my organic keywords

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Grab keywords from search metrics (including my competitors)

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Searchmetric’s long tail keyword data is extremely useful – export it here.

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Paste the data into Excel and create tables with CTRL+L

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GOOGLE SUGGEST

Ubersuggest. THE Google suggest scraper tool. Also scrapes Google News!

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Scrape Ubersuggest with XPathonURL. Simples!

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INSTANT keyword expansion:

http://ubersuggest.org/?query=seo&format=html&language=English%2FUK&source=web

AND

=XPathOnUrl(CONCATENATE($A$3,$B$7,$A$4),"//ul/li/span")

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Create a master table of all keywords, being careful to deduplicate your list.

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Paste all of the keywords into AWR and get rank checking!

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Import your ranking data into Excel – name the table “rankings”

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Name your impressions data from GWMT in a table called “impressions”

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Let’s begin to construct a data table…. Use VLOOKUP and IFERROR to fetch data from each of your

tables

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Using the adwords API extension to get web and mobile search volume in Sweden…

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Our completed “master” data table ready for categorisation…

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Data Categorisation

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Consulting Tech / Wordpress Excel Guides CRO

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WHAT SORT OF TERMS MIGHT INDICATE…

CONSULTING INTENT?

“Agency” “Consultant”

“Links”

“SEO”

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BUILD A KEYWORD TYPES LIST

Our completed “master” data table ready for categorisation…

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/keyword-research-using-categories

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KEYWORD CATEGORISATION QUERY

Our query checks across an array for strings that can be found in the keyword in cell A2.

The output uses the column name to return a easy to understand label.

=IF(SUM(NOT(ISERROR(FIND('KW Types'!$A$2:$A$4,$A2)))*1)>0,C$1,"Non-"&LOWER(C$1))

of anything in this range

found in this cell

Return a start position

Prettify the output

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Beautiful, categorised data – we’re discovering things!

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Analysis (Strategic and IA)

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http://seogadget.com/how-to-make-a-pivot-table-and-chart-in-excel/

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LEARN HOW TO BUILD THIS: 1

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Beautiful, categorised data – we’re discovering things!

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CONVERTING CATEGORIES INTO NAVIGATION Suggested Navigational Structure

Category: Outdoor toys

• Children’s Bikes

• Girls Bikes • Boys Bikes

• Paddling Pools • Scooters

• Kids Scooters • 3-Wheel Scooters • Mini Micro Scoters

• Wendy Houses • Play Houses • Play Tents • Toy Castles

• Kids Motorbikes • Go Karts

• Pedal Go Karts • Pedal Cars • Kids Quad Bikes

• Swings • Baby Swings

• Garden Games • Climbing Frames • See Saws • Slides • Toddler Scooters • Toddler Trikes • Trampolines

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If you’ve built bullet proof categorisation in your keyword research, you can start thinking

about putting your navigational structure together

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And be visual! Wireframe the outcome.

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IDENTIFY YOUR LOW HANGING FRUIT

Keywords that rank in the top 30 that that are receiving organic search traffic could be extremely valuable

Low hanging fruit – the easiest and potentially highest value keywords in terms of ROI, if

you have the content...

............................................................................................................................................................................................... Product URL + Revenue

Average ranking

Combining Average Ranking with Total Monthly revenue on product pages can indicate

where to focus your link building activity…

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Build awareness

of rich snippets, image, video and local results…

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How many of my top referring keywords from

organic (Google) search have rich

snippets in their SERPS?

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Top 500 Referring Keywords for SEOgadget that Compete With a Review Snippet on Page 1

snippet

no snippet

Ok, no surprise here. In SEOgadget’s top 500 referring keywords from Organic search, 13%

have a rich snippet on Page 1 of the search results.

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Wow – Less than 9% of the top 500 search queries to this UK retail site DO NOT have rich

snippets on page 1

Top 500 Referring Keywords for a UK Ecomm Site that Compete With a Review Snippet on Page 1

snippet

no snippet

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A GOOGLE SEARCH RESULT IN NON-JS VIEW

With JS disabled, Google’s serps use class=“star” – when the value is “.”, there’s a rich

snippet in the SERP.

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THE QUERY

=(IF

(XPathOnUrl([@Column1],

"//div[contains(@class,

'star')]“

)=".","snippet","no

snippet")

Use this with SEO Tools for Excel. Massive thanks and hat tip to Daniel Butler (@Dbseo) for

finding the “.”

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THE DATA

Is there a review

snippet in the top 10

results for this

Query?

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RESULTS PAGES THAT DON'T HAVE SNIPPETS

Wait, these results pages don’t have rich snippets of any kind? That’s nice to know…

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Build image, video, local and shopping results

into your data set

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IN AWR:

Run a Universal Search campaign in Advanced Web Ranking, and use “split the result type”

in the export settings…

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COMBINE ALL THE DATA

Image, Video and

Shopping results count

In the top 30

Think about how you can use this – where saturated results exist, pick off non-image and

video results. Where no snippets exist, target those.

Richard Baxter, Founder, SEOgadget

Twitter: @richardbaxter

Blog: seogadget.co.uk

Email: richard@seogadget.co.uk

THANK YOU