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How?
Using the Google Keywords Tool
Free Keyword Search with the Google Keywords Tool
The Google keywords tool is free and convenient and offers a vast data base. You will find it at
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Videos showing how to use the Google keywords tool are available here:Here is an article showing step by step how to use the Google keywords tool. It shows the tool as of December, 2008, and it only uses the number of searches. It shows how to look up by hand the number of pages that would be found with an exact search. Looking up the exact matches is tedious, but a tool is available that automates it for you; see the Long Tail Keywords Tool page.
It doesn't show the strength of competition for the keyword nor the intent of those searching to make a purchase. For those, see
- Strength of competition for the keyword
- Commercial intent
- Long Tail Keyword Research
How To Find Keywords By Hand with the Google Keywords Tool: An Example From T-shirt Design
Here is an procedure to find keywords by hand. It was adapted from the ebook All Income, No Costs: Sell Your T-Shirts On The Web by Thomas Christopher, which explains why it is talking about T-Shirt Shops.
Actually, it is much easier to use MicroNicheFinder, which provides a front end to the Google keywords tool and additionally automates looking up estimates of
- how many web pages contain the keyword.
- what fraction of people using the keyword are interested in making a purchase.
- how many pages contain the keyword in their URLs, page titles, and anchor text of links to a page. Together, these indicate the level of competition for the search engines' attention.
- whether domain names consisting of that keyword are already taken.
- the number of back links that you might need in order to land you on the first page of Google.
I find Micro Niche Finder so useful and convenient, that I use it all the time. It's worth its price to me, but if you want to save yourself the expense, particularly if you don't plan to do that many searches, here is an example of how to do it:
You probably already have an idea for a design to put on T-shirts. If you want to make money, you need to ask yourself, "How many people will look for something like this? What keywords will they use trying to find it?" If there are too few people interested, try a different idea.
Example: Space photos
Here's an idea: We can get NASA photos, including beautiful Hubble space telescope photos, free. Why don't we put up T-shirts with those photos? The cost is nearly zero, but there are other considerations:1. Do enough people want to buy them?
2. What keywords will they use to find them?
3. Can we get our shop pages listed on page one of Google's results for the keywords?
This page is devoted to finding the answers to the three questions based solely on knowledge of keywords typed to search engines. For our ongoing example, we will restrict ourselves to images of the planet earth.
Procedure
Here's a procedure for finding keywords, numbers of searches, and competition.Ideas for keywords
You need to try to figure out what keywords people will use when they are looking to buy a product like yours. It is not trivial to figure out. You start off with some keyword ideas. Use a thesaurus to give yourself more ideas. The Google keyword tool can help you try out keywords for web searches. The results from Google will give you more ideas to try out.You are going to set up a print-on-demand T-shirt shop. What products will you be offering? T-shirts, of course, but how many ways are there to say T-shirt? At least these: T-shirt (which Google translates into “t shirt”), T-shirts, Tshirt, Tshirts, tee shirt, tee shirts, tees (but “tee” often means golf tee). There are other varieties of apparel there: tank, spaghetti strap, camisole, baseball jersey, sweatshirt. For that matter, we could generalize: shirt, shirts, apparel, clothing. And there are non-apparel items: BBQ apron, coaster, tote bag, cutting board, mouse pad, or generally, gifts.
Since we are interested in using NASA photos, we can look through what they are offering. Here are some words people may be using: astronomy, universe, galaxy, cosmos, space, nebula, star (although this is more likely used for movie stars), stellar, solar system, planet, moon, sun, mercury, Venus, earth, mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, comet, asteroid, ... and people may combine those with telescope, Hubble, photo, photograph, image, ... There are a lot of combinations to explore --- a lot of work and a lot of opportunity. For this page, we will build our examples around photos of planet Earth.
Get a spreadsheet of relevant keywords and search frequencies.
You will need to find keywords that will bring you a lot of customers. You need to know how many people search for the keyword per month, and you need to know how much effort it will take to end up on page one of Google and other search engines. Try out words and phrases with the Google keyword tool (see the image above). It can tell you how many searches are made for the keyword on the average each month and how intense the advertiser competition is for the keyword on Google Adwords. You want a keyword that has a high number of searches, since this number is the upper bound on the number of people who will find you through a Google search.
The advertiser competition makes the greatest difference if you advertise through Google Adwords: the higher the amount of competition, the higher the price you would have to pay per click. Beyond that, the advertiser competition indicates whether others think the keyword is worth using. It is also a warning: high competition may mean it will be hard to get onto page one of Google's “organic” (non-paid) results.
The Google keywords tool gives results that are not perfectly reproducible: two successive days it may estimate different numbers of searches per month. It is the same on search results pages: the estimate of the number of matching pages may be far off.
The Google keywords tool will ask you whether it should “use synonyms.” Allow it to: it will give you some useful suggestions. Click the “Get keyword ideas” button and Google will give you two lists: “Keywords related to the terms entered” and “Additional keywords to consider.”
Download the list of “keywords related to the terms entered” with their search frequencies: At the end of the list, Google will allow you to “Download all keywords: text, .csv (for excel), .csv”. I use “.csv” (“comma separated values). I load the keywords into StarOffice Calc and save them as a spreadsheet. (StarOffice, also known as Open Office, is a free alternative to MS Office.)
Clean up the spreadsheet
Sort the spreadsheet first by the Keywords column. Look through the spreadsheet removing obviously irrelevant entries. The image above shows a spreadsheet with obviously irrelevant lines marked in red. We will remove those rows.
Don't expect this step to be done all at once. You will look up more related keywords, download them, and append them to the spread sheet. Looking over the spreadsheet will give you more ideas for keywords to look up and download.
Sort by decreasing search volume
Sort the spreadsheet by decreasing average search volume. Delete those terms with too few searches. In the image above, planet-related keywords are sorted by decreasing numbers of searches per month. Those marked in red have too few searches for me to care about --- I'll delete them. ("Minus one" means inadequate data. I get rid of those too.)What's “too few searches”? The expected number of searches gives you an upper bound on how many customers you can attract when you optimize your page for this keyword. If you get an estimate of 90 searches a month, that's about three potential customers a day, maximum. Even if all 90 searchers came to your website and bought a product for a two dollar markup, that's only $180 a month. Is that really worth your effort? You might want to place the don't-care point much higher than I did. Ebooks and eCourses are much higher mark-up products, so fewer hits a month would be acceptable.
As before, you will keep getting ideas for new keywords, asking the Google keywords tool about them, and incorporating them into your spreadsheet.
Color green the rows that have a satisfactory number of monthly searches. They will be at the top of the sheet. These are candidates for primary keywords. What's satisfactory? Maybe 1000 or more as a round number. Or 1500 or more, 50+ searches a day. It's your choice. If you can't color any green, change your products, your keywords, or your goals.
Color yellow a band of rows below the greens.These are candidates for secondary keywords -- targets of opportunity. They don't have enough searches to rely on, but enough searches to be worth a little bit of effort. Again, you decide at what point it's not worth your attention.
Create a column of page hits.
Create a column for the number of hits, or reported matching pages, when you search on the keyword. Look up those keywords that have enough searches per month. Google will tell you approximately how many pages match. It's important to put the key words in quotes when you do the look up; otherwise Google will include in its count a large number of web pages with only a tenuous connection to your keyword. For example, typing the planet shirt into Google reports about 1,530,000 for the planet shirt. With quotes, "the planet shirt", Google reports about 112 for "the planet shirt". Copy Google's estimate of the number of matching pages back into your spreadsheet. With a little practice, you can do this look up with few mouse clicks.If you want a more exact number, keep clicking the highest number at the bottom under the “Goooooogle” until you come to the last one. If you get a low number, you might believe it. If you get somewhere over 600 with a message like “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 898 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included” you should suspect they're trying to brush you off. In that case, just use the number you copied from page one.
A problem with keywords is that, while you can find out how many times they were searched for per month, you don't know what the searchers were looking for. While you are finding the number of matching pages, you can take a look at what the matching pages are about. This tells you what the authors of those pages thought the searchers were after. For example, we're thinking of putting up T-shirts decorated with Hubble telescope photographs, so we try out the keyword "galaxy T-shirt". When we do, we find a lot of matches for "la galaxy t shirt". Spanish? French? A glance at the matching pages informs me that there is a sports team called the LA Galaxy. This warns us of two things: first, the people looking for that keyword phrase are not looking for our products, and the second, the owners of the sports team will not be pleased if we start identifying our products with its name.
Sort the spreadsheet by increasing numbers of matching pages.
Sort the spreadsheet by increasing numbers of matching pages. You want your site to end up on page one of the Google listings -- preferably "above the fold," i.e. immediately visible on page one when somebody searches for the keyword. The more pages that Google finds, the more competition you have for being on page one, the more effort it would take to get there, and the less likely you are to succeed if you try.The column KEI stands for “Keyword Effectiveness Index,” the number of searches per day squared divided by the number of competing pages. It gives a hint of how valuable the keyword might be; although it has no scientific basis. In this spreadsheet, the formula for “planet earth shirt,” F6, is =(D6/30)^2/E6 .
What happens if someone searches without quotes around the keyword? The exact match for the query may still boost your page's perceived relevance, but it won't guarantee you'll end up on page one. You'll need to apply a lot of the other techniques we discuss in this book.
Find primary and secondary keywords
What you are looking for are keywords that have a lot of searches and few competing pages. Those make good primary keywords, the keywords that you optimize your page for. Keywords with very few competing pages may make good secondary keywords even if they do not have a lot of searches.You'll have the quickest success if you optimize first for the best key words with the lowest competition. Go down your list of keywords looking at the first few keywords colored green. The earlier the keyword, the fewer the competing pages and the easier it will be to end up on page one of Google. Don't necessarily take the first you come to. A keyword a little further down may have many more searches and only a few more competitors. You'll have to balance in your mind the expected amount of effort versus expected number of customers.
Looking over the image:
• “Planet earth shirt” looks promising: maybe 880 searches a month, 30 a day. In itself, not large, but there are other keywords that overlap it (“the planet shirt” and variations of “planet shirt”), so we could add in some other searches. We also have an inkling of where to find other potential customers: people concerned about the environment and the sustainability of life. We can get some free photos of earth from NASA, and it won't take much effort to put them into designs, so there's a chance of a modest return for not much effort.
• “Planet shirt” and “planet shirts” have an attractive number of searches, but the numbers of competitors make it look difficult to get to page one.
• “Planet t shirt” and “planet t shirts” have way too many competitors. It's nice to know we shouldn't devote any time to them.
If you are left with no good candidates for primary key words, maybe you should give up and try some other idea for T-shirts. Maybe you just need some more ideas for keywords.
If however you have found primary key words, look at the yellow keywords with few competing sites and check them out as possible secondary keywords. For these, you are primarily interested in few competing pages.
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To Find Keywords For Free See our page on the Google Keywords Tool.
If convenient, when I mention a product or service, I include an affiliate link to it. That means, if someone clicks on the link and makes a purchase, the vendor pays me something out of their advertising budget. I'd be foolish not to. Here is how my affiliate links work.
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