Kevin Anchi

Welcome to the first in our seven day series on getting the most out of Wordtracker’s Keywords tool.

Watch this video and you’ll learn:

• How search engines work
• How to find relevant keywords quickly and easily
• How to prioritize those keywords and use them in your website copywriting
• How to make sure you’re getting keywords in your inbound links (an SEO must)

Here’s what’s coming up

In the ‘Profit from Keywords’ series, we’re going to show you:

Day 2: Keyword mapping and site structure
Day 3: Titles and Descriptions: Vital elements of your page
Day 4: Site audits: Things you never knew about your site
Day 5: Keyword Rankings: Monitor your progress
Day 6: Using keywords as linking text
Day 7: Expand into new markets and beat the competition

Once you’ve watched the tutorial, you can click here to sign up for a free 7-day trial of the new Keywords tool. Or click below to learn more about the Keywords tool

Did you know we offer a risk-free guarantee? At any time during the first 30 days you can ask for your money back and we’ll happily refund you.

Read the transcript

Hello there, and welcome to the first of our seven lesson series on getting the most out of your first week with Wordtracker.

My name’s Mal, and over the next few days together, we’ll look at how to amass more traffic, more sales and push your site further towards the top of the search engine rankings.

Wordtracker has some great tools that go way beyond keyword research and into the realms of tracking your search engine rankings …

… and finding SEO mistakes on your site, which pretty much everybody has.

Let’s start with a couple of basics – so to kick off, how does a search engine work?

Let’s look at a quick example. If I were to type chocolate into Google, this is what I would get:

You’ve got sponsored, paid, pay per click listings here:

… and the organic or free listings here:

While free of direct cost, getting to the top of the organic listings does take a bit of time, effort and savvy.

So, what makes the search engines tick? How do you get to the top of Page 1 in their results? Well, we can uncover some basic clues by looking at the sites that are already at the top.

Let’s have a look at Hotel Chocolat’s website. You can see here how Hotel Chocolat uses the keyword I searched on, chocolate, across its site.

For a page to rank well for a particular keyword, it’s vital that that keyword is used in prominent positions on that page, such as in the title tag, headlines and in the body text.

But don’t overdo it. Don’t stuff as many keywords as you can onto the page. It’s far, far better to write naturally, use variations on your keyword – things like plurals, synonyms and similar words.

There’s a lot more to search engine optimization than that. SEO is a never-ending process.

We’ll start with keyword research (which is essential to target your pages effectively), but then it’s time to move on to planning your site structure and site navigation; we’ll help you plan, create and optimize your site content; build inbound links; check your website is behaving properly; and monitor your successes and build on them up with some more keyword research.

We’ll look at most of these topics in the rest of these SEO videos, but for now, let’s get started on using the tool.

You can log into the Keywords tool from the Wordtracker home page:

From there you’ll be taken to the ‘Quick Research’ tab, which is where we’ll start:

Let’s begin with one basic seed word, chocolate and we quickly get back up to 2,000 resulting keywords, each containing the term chocolate.

We’re going to look at the results in more detail shortly.

But, first you should know that you can choose between results from the Wordtracker database and Google’s database.

Each will give you different results, so pick the most appropriate terms for your business.

Wordtracker presents you with thousands of potential keywords. You should try to find terms that are popular, but where you don’t face too much competition.

If you’re building a new site it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get get lots of visibility on competitive terms straight away. So, think about targeting low competition keywords.

If you’ve got a more established site, then you don’t need to worry quite so much about the competition.

Either way, Wordtracker can help you find keywords that suit you best.

Let’s look at the numbers the tool shows.

In the first column we see the number of searches. This gives an indication of the keyword’s popularity – it’s the number of people who’ve used that keyword when searching.

Next we see the competition figure.

Shown on a scale from 1-100, the Competition figure gives an indication of the number of pages that have been directly optimized for each keyword – the higher the number, the more pages are competing for that keyword.

Live Competition

You’ll see this metric for up to 30 keywords at a time when you click this button. The Live Competition metric is based not only on the amount of competition you face, but also the strength of that competition. The higher the number, the stronger and harder to beat the competition is.

As I said, you should be trying to find keywords with lots of searches and low competition. That’s why we’ve invented KEI, or the Keyword Effectiveness Index.

KEI uses advanced math, or maths, to find the best keywords for your business. If you want a quick way of finding keywords, just sort on the KEI column and look for relevant terms with a high KEI.

There are some more advanced settings here which we’re not going to worry about too much, but you can include plurals, choose adult keywords, or select between US and UK listings. So, there’s some interesting and helpful flexibility.

Let’s take a look at our results.

Now, you’re bound to get a few listings that just aren’t relevant to what you’re doing, such as those recipe listings here.

Fortunately it’s quite easy to remove them using our filters. For instance, I can remove all the terms that contain recipe as I don’t want those keywords on my site.

All the keywords we’ve looked at so far have contained our seed word chocolate, but Wordtracker offers a special lateral searching capability that allows you to expand your keyword ideas, and we do this using the orange Related Keywords tool.

Let’s enter our usual seed word chocolate. The tool then searches the websites of your competitors – the sites that are already ranking well in the search engine results – and looks for the keywords that those sites are using.

As you can see, you do indeed get some great keywords that have fantastic potential – terms such as truffles, wedding favors, gift baskets and so on.

You can pick as many related keywords as are relevant from the 300 that the Related tool will provide. Add as many of these keywords as you like to your Wordtracker or Google keywords list by checking in the right hand column, choosing your destination and just hitting the button, and we’ll fetch the search volume and competition metrics for them.

As you work through your list, you’ll want to remember the keywords you’ve seen that interest you – it’s easy to flag these using the ‘target’ icon on the right hand side. When you export the list, these targets are remembered, so it’s easy to sort them up to the top.

Finally, bear in mind that when you’re looking for keywords for your website, only you can really decide which results match your products and target markets – your own knowledge and insight are essential parts of the process here. But bear in mind that, as we’ll discover later, highly specialized keywords, or long tail keywords (that’s keywords that are three or four words long, or longer), tend to fare better than the ultra-general ones like chocolate that we looked at today.

That’s it for our Day 1 tutorial

In our next video, we’ll be looking at the process of managing your site structure and quickly creating new niches for your keyword research in Wordtracker’s unique keyword map. See you then.

More on Keyword Basics

For more on keywords have a look at our Keyword Basics articles

Your thoughts?

We’d love to know what you thought of this video. How useful was it? What did you learn?

And, if you’ve questions, please let us know below:

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About Mal Darwen

Mal Darwen leads Wordtracker’s tweeting, runs webinars and has been with Wordtracker since 2008. When not Wordtracking Mal plays with a band called Praying for the Rain. He also plays guitars and basses with a number of other artists in the UK. He lives in London with his family and two slightly insecure cats.