Gathering Keyword Data For Your SEO Keyword List

February 23, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 294 views // View Comments

Tips to help you gather data on your target keyword set.

In my last article, I talked about Using Keyword Research Tools to help you find potential keywords for your SEO campaign. In this article, I’d like to talk about Gathering Keyword Data for your SEO Keyword List.

Keyword Data Metrics

There are 4 Major Data Metrics that you can use to evaluate your SEO Keyword List:

Search Popularity. How many people are searching for the given keyword?
Keyword Competition. How many & how well sites are targeting a given keyword?
Keyword Relevance. How relevant is a given keyword to your site goals?
Keyword Effectiveness. Which keywords will be most effective for your SEO campaign?

If you’ve used an Excel spreadsheet to track your keyword list, it will be very easy to add and compare keyword data. I’d recommend creating a column for each of these topics, so that they display next to each keyword.

Search Popularity

Search popularity is the a measure of the average number of monthly searches that a given keyword receives. Determining how popular a keyword is will help you when determining what keywords to target for your SEO campaign.

If you are using Keyword Research Tools (such as the Google Adwords Keyword Tool), you’ll be able to see valuable data telling you how often a given term is searched for on a monthly basis. This will help you make decisions about your keyword targeting for your SEO campaign, as it will allow you to have a better understand of which keywords may perform better.

Keyword tools often pull their data from at least 3 months prior to the current date, and some keyword tools pull their data from last year’s trends.

Collect this data and input it into your Excel spreadsheet in the “Search Popularity” column next to the appropriate keyword.

Keyword Competition

Keyword competitiveness is a measure of how many & how well other sites are targeting a given term. When targeting keywords, it is very important to understand just how competitive they might be.

How well you pick you’re battles here may determine how successful your SEO campaign is overall. Picking the wrong battles to fight at the beginning is often the biggest mistake of many webmasters. Sure, everybody would like to rank for popular terms like ‘real estate’ or ‘games,’ but once you factor in the sheer amount of time & effort you may reconsider.

There are a couple of ways you can collect data on Keyword Competition:

Use your keyword research tools to find the raw data. For example, the Google Adwords Keyword Tool has a section labeled “Advertiser Competition.” However, this particular tool is tough to go by as it doesn’t give you any raw numbers.
Use the search engines to find your data. Visit a search engine (I prefer using Google), and perform a search for one of your keywords. From there, you can see how many sites are listed for that search and that will give you a pretty good idea of how competitive a keyword is.

Collect this data and input it into your Excel spreadsheet in the “Keyword Competition” column next to the appropriate keyword.

Keyword Relevance

Keyword relevance is a measure of a keyword’s relevance to the content on your site. There won’t be any raw numbers in this section, so it is more of a judgment call on your part.

For this you will need to put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. Ask yourself some questions:

How would a searcher feel if they search for this term and found your site?
Would your site fulfill their need or resolve their question?
Does the keyword you were found under match the landing page the visitor entered on well?

For this data metric, I recommend classifying the relevance of your keywords on a scale from Very Poor to Amazing. There are many shades of Grey in between, but I’ll leave those to you since you know your biz much better than I do.

Collect this data and input it into your Excel spreadsheet in the “Keyword Relevance” column next to the appropriate keyword.

Keyword Effectiveness

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) is a measure that compares the number of searches for a keyword vs. the number of search results/competition to determine the keywords that will be most effective.

You want to find the words that will pull the most traffic to your site relative to the amount of competition. To do this, you need to look for the keywords with the highest KEI.

You can determine KEI by hand! For example, lets say the number of searches for a keyword is 10,230 per month and Google displays 1,810,000 results for that keyword. Then the ratio between the popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is 10,230 divided by 1,810,000. In this case, the KEI 0.005.

Keyword Effectiveness Index

In addition, if you are familiar with WebCEO, I would recommend using Web CEO’s ‘Find Keywords’ Tool. It will make your effort a little easier.

KEI Scale
0.2 & Above = Good
0.2 – 0.01 = Average
0.01 & Below = Ineffective

Once you pull all of this data together in your spreadsheet, you’ll be able to make valuable decisions that will help your SEO campaign take shape. In the next lesson, I will be talking about Trimming & Finalizing Your Keyword List.

Photo Credit: law_keven on Flickr

Tags: Keyword Research, Search Engine Optimization

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AdWords Adviser

Wow! I've been looking for an article that explains these terms properly and in an easy to understand way for a long time. I'm printing your article off now and will be keeping it handy as a reference guide for quite some time.

Have you seen this article on theming your AdWords Keywords Lists?

Adrian Key
Editor of the AdWords Adviser, making AdWords more profitable for you.
garry

hey nice site. keep up the good work:)
CuocThiSEO

Another good post guy. I do think WebCEO help some but still wondering if there is any better SEO (analysis) tool on the market? Better if free! hihi.