If you haven’t completed day 1 of the SEO course, you can review: Analyzing The Viability Of Your Niche before starting this post.

“What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives following? The extra mile.”

- Gary Ryan Blair -

It’s time to  get the keywords that go with your Niche!

Keywords are at the core of your entire SEO strategy.

No matter how much money or how much time you have on your hand, if you really want to get noticed in the search engines through organic search results (non-paid listings), then you owe it to yourself to have the right keywords.

Selecting good keywords for which you should optimize your site is the result of many different steps.

Without the shadow of a doubt, the first step consists in build a strong primary keyword list.

2 Keywords List Building Methods

There’s basically 2 ways you can build your keywords list:

• Manually for free (except for the time spent)
• Automatically with paid software or tool.

Honestly, which one is the right one for you depends of your involvement online I would say.

If you are only producing a few pages here and there from time to time, you may just do well by doing all the work and research yourself.

On the other hand, if you have hundreds or thousands of pages to work with, you’ll love the way professional software can simplify the tasks for you.

Now, even if you go for a paid solution, I strongly recommend you to learn how to do the research manually as this will help you build necessary experience in your keyword analysis to determine which keyword is the one you want to optimize for.

Either way, just remember that when doing online business, time is your most valuable asset, so use it wisely!

Building Your Keyword List Manually

Yesterday in our first lesson “Analyzing the Viability of Your Niche”, we managed to find or refine what our main niche should be.

Today we are going to pursue on this work with building a specific keyword list for our niche.

Yes, it’s true that there’s an almost infinite possible combinations and thousands and thousands of different keywords that we could possibly use to build our keyword list; however, doing the work manually our goal is to optimize our time and effectiveness, so we are only going after the keywords that have volume.

We’ll always have more time to chase after more keywords as time goes, but building the list of our primary keywords that will be used in the basic structure of our site is key for the moment.

How to qualify those keywords is subject to another lesson, today we’ll compile a descent list of keywords.

We are now going to learn how to gather keywords from 3 different sources:

• Google AdWords Keywords Tool.
• Google Wonder Wheel.
• Wordtracker Keyword Tool.

Also, in order to better organize our keyword list work, I strongly suggest you to use a spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel (or any software alike) and set a template design like this:

Google AdWords Keywords Tool

Ok, so let’s get started with the Google AdWords Keywords Tool we used yesterday to analyze the viability of our niche.

Repeat the same search process as we did yesterday, but this time using your “definite” niche search term.

By now, you should see 2 lists of keywords populated for you by Google:

Keywords related to terms(s) entered

Additional keywords to consider

At the bottom of each list, there’s a link for you to download the keywords list, click on “CSV(for Excel)”

Depending on your browser, a popup alert will ask you whether you want to “save” or “open” the file. The choice is up to you, in this case, I will simply open the file.

Once opened in Excel, the list I just downloaded looks like this:

We don’t actually need all the information that is there, so let’s refine the list to fit our needs.

Delete the “Advertiser Competition” and “Global Monthly Search Volume” columns.

Can you see how some search results return a volume of “-1”?

These are the same results we saw in the Google Adwords Keywords Tool that didn’t have sufficient search data. They are currently useless for us, so delete them too. (We’ll find some use for them later, but that’s another lesson).

Ok, now just copy and paste those data onto your Keyword Research Spreadsheet.

Repeat the same process for both lists of keywords populated by Google

At this point, we already should have a nice little list of keywords, but that’s not enough, so let’s dig a bit deeper with another Google tool.

Google Wonder Wheel

If you haven’t done so yet, I strongly recommend you to go and read my post regarding Google Wonder Wheel before going any further.

Using Google Wonder Wheel, make a new search for your niche keyword (for me, I’ll use the “nail polish” as example).

What is interesting about Google Wonder Wheel is the fact that it returns not only what Google considers highly relevant search terms, but also only search terms with sufficient volume to be worth mentioning.

Anyway, as we are on the Wonder Wheel first results, add to your list all the keywords that are suggested.

Then click on one of the suggested term to get a second level of keywords, add them too and repeat this process for all the suggested terms.

Once this is done, click again on one of the suggested keyword and add them all too to your list.

You could go on forever like that, but for the sake of our example and first list building, there’s no need yet to go further than 2-3 levels deep.

Of course, there’s no need to say that if the keywords suggested are already in your list, there’s no need to add them again.

Now, for each of those keywords you just added through Google Wonder Wheel, I want you to go back to the Google AdWords Keywords Tool and research each of them to get their search volume data.

Add this information to your keyword list.

In order to expand our keyword list beyond Google, we are also going to use a keyword tool called Wordtracker.

Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Yes, Wordtracker offers both free and paid tools, but for this example, we’ll use the free tool.

As you can see the interface is rather simplistic.

Just type the search term you want to analyze in the search box and click “Hit me” button.

You should then see a list of keywords populated as well as search volume information. Now, keep note that Wordtracker gives daily search volume information and not monthly like Google; also they are using different data sources so the results are different.

Currently, we are just going to overlook the search volume, and copy and paste the keywords they suggest us onto our list.

This first level of data should be sufficient for the moment, but just like Google Wonder Wheel, if you click again on one of the suggested keywords, another list with longer tail keywords will then be populated for you.

Just like for Google Wonder Wheel, I want you to research the search volume data for those keywords.

For all your keywords in your list, you have the keyword name and search volume, I want you to go to Google and search for each of those terms, and add the result volume to your data list as per the template I gave you.

Congratulations, you just have completed the basics of a keyword list building.

Automated Keyword List Using Paid Software

This kind of software cost money at first, but they really are worth it as huge time savers.

Personally I use Keyword Elite.

Let me show you how much easier the work is with this keyword software.

Type the Niche I want to build a keyword list for (here “Nail Polish”), then select where I want it to find the keywords from, as well as how many keyword I want to have in my suggested list (up to 10,000 keywords!), then all I need to do is click “OK”.

Once my keyword list is populated, I send them to another project which will then collect all the data for me, such as search volume, result volume, Search/Result ratio, KEI, etc…

Done, here’s my keyword list. That was easy!

There’s other software like that out on the market, but I’m not familiar with them, Keyword Elite is the one I use and recommend for the people who intend to purchase such kind of software.

Since keyword research is at the core of SEO, don’t consider these tools as expenses, but rather investments that will allow you to work faster and better in the future.

If your niche doesn’t have 200 keywords possible, then you are in an overly narrow niche, and you should reconsider you plan seriously before wasting any more time and money on this project.

Exercise

Well I guess it’s pretty obvious, today you’ll have to build a keyword list for your site. Try to collect at least 100-200 keywords.

I know it’s not difficult but time consuming, but this task is very important you mustn’t skip it as we’ll be using this list throughout this entire course!

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments area below.