I have been doing a ton of keyword research lately. Clearly every marketer has a preferred method. I’ll admit, it took me a long time to catch on to how to do keyword research effectively.

When I first built some of my websites, I did not know much about targeting keywords. Now I’m going back and doing some of the research I wish I’d done then, to optimize better and improve my rankings.

By following along with Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge, I was introduced to Market Samurai, a brand new keyword research tool. It’s really still very much in development. Some modules have been rolled and some have not, which is fine. I could say a whole bunch about whether or not I recommend the software, but I’ll save that for another time. For right now, I’ll say it is invaluable for its SEO Competition module.

That said, in the 30 Day Challenge they recommended we search for keywords within our niche that have greater than 80 searches a day and fewer than 30,000 competing pages in an exact match search on Google. Market Samurai is supposed to do both of those analyses for me, but it doesn’t. It draws a blank with the competition search, so I have to do that by hand.

Here’s the keyword research process I’m following:

1. Do a search in the Google External Keyword tool for my niche topic. Note the volume of searches and look for related keywords that look interesting and viable.

2. Do an exact match (in quotes) search in Google for the keywords.

3. Enter the keywords in the SEO Competition module in Market Samurai. This helps determine whether or not it is feasible to rank on the first page in Google for the keyword. It is very cool.

4. Start building backlinks for the best keywords. Improve the on page optimization as well.

A couple observations from my research:

1. In the Google External Keyword I noticed for some niches there is HUGE decrease in search volume when comparing the September numbers with the Average numbers. Many keywords were researched 1/3 – 1/2 as often in September compared to the monthly average. These are not words that I would consider to be seasonal. I don’t want to draw any conclusions about this right now but it will be interesting to continue to watch for trends.

2. The exact match competition numbers do not appear to have much, if any, bearing on whether or not it is feasible to attempt to rank on page 1 in Google for any given keyword. Some keywords having only 10,000 competing pages look impossible to infiltrate on the first page. Others with 500,000 competing pages, or more, are wide open if you do some decent SEO.

I have heard dozens of times that a keyword is good if it meets the search and exact match competition numbers. That’s exactly what Bum marketing is based on, if I’m not mistaken.

I’ve also heard from a few sources that your only real competition is the results on the first page of Google. I think that’s the camp I’m in after what I’ve seen in my research. Time will tell.

Thanks for visiting. Have a good one!