I’m not using MS Excel, but instead running another spreadsheet program on my computer.

It sounds as if I cannot run the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool to perform MS/Yahoo/Bing keyword research if I don’t have MS Excel. Is this correct? Is there an alternate tool that does not require MS Excel?

Which keyword research tools do you recommend be used to perform keyword research exclusively for Microsoft/Yahoo/Bing?

Providing a couple of names of keyword research tools & their urls would be mighty helpful.

Thank you,

Wendy

Hi Wendy

It’s true that MS Advertising Intelligence is a tool designed for MS Excel, however you can download the .xls file and open it with non-MS programs such as Google Docs and Open Office (for Linux).

There are also plenty of other KW research tools around to help you find keywords for Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo. Try these for size:

MS adCenter Labs – Keyword Research Tools

Search Engine Wiki – Keyword Research Category

Hope this helps!

Kalena

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I’m trying to optimize a site for the first time. Its a fashion jewelry site. I have come up against a couple of stumbling blocks that I need a little clarification on. One is the target market – its a New Zealand website, but we want to target New Zealander’s, Australians and the rest of the world this brings up issues of spelling – do we focus on Jewellery (New Zealand/British spelling), Jewelry (US spelling, but where a lot of the current customers come from) or Jewellry (a common misspelling).

Secondly, I’m having a hard time trying to choose my keyword phrases. Silver jewelry and costume jewelry (which seems to be the most common way people search for fashion jewelry, even though fashion jewelry sounds so much more modern!! – found out through the Google Keyword tool) seem to be the best as they are well searched for. I want to be more specific however i.e *women’s silver jewelry*, or *silver jewellery nz* or *buy silver jewelry* etc. but the search volume according to the Google Keyword tool is well below 20 per day.

Can you please suggest what I should do in this situation?

Thank you!
Mitchell

Hi Mitchell

To answer your questions:

1) The regional spelling issue is a tricky one. There are a few ways you can approach this – do you have the .com as well as the regional Top Level Domains (TLD) .co.nz and .com.au? If so, you can use the American spelling on the .com domain and the British spelling on the regional domains. However, this may create duplicate content issues unless you block robots from the near-duplicate pages.

Alternatively, you can simply use the appropriate language version for your largest target market as the default throughout your site. For example, although we are based in New Zealand, our main target market for Search Engine College is the US, so we use American English throughout our web site. Most regional markets will understand that American English is common on the Internet, so you should not isolate them by doing this.

Another, trickier, option is to use British English on your main site to attract organic local search traffic and then create a Pay Per Click advertising campaign (e.g. Google AdWords) with tailored landing pages and ad text using American English to suit your other markets. Then, run your PPC campaign targeting only those countries where American English is used more commonly, making sure you block search engine robots from indexing your American English landing pages. You could do the reverse if you decide American English should be your default language.

As for misspellings? Those are fantastic for picking up extra traffic your competitors are missing. Best way to get that traffic is by targeting the misspelled keywords within your Pay Per Click campaign or by including the misspellings in your Page Titles and META Tags (the META Keywords tag is a particularly good place for them if you don’t want human visitors to see them).

2) You are spot on wanting to target the longer tail keyword phrases such as *women’s silver jewelry* and *buy silver jewelry* because it is these specific phrases that are more likely to bring you qualified visitors who are more ready to purchase. But the beauty of targeting these longer phrases is that they also contain the more popular shorter search terms such as *silver jewelry* and *women’s jewelry*. So, by default, you are also optimizing your web site for these shorter phrases by integrating the longer ones into your tags and page copy.

Choosing long tail phrases that contain more generic popular search ones is a great way to save valuable keyword real estate in your page titles and meta tags. For example, instead of having to include both *buy silver jewellery*, AND *silver jewellery* in your meta description tag, you only need to include the longer one as it covers both. A META Description tag of “Buy women’s silver jewelry from French Fashions” sounds a lot less redundant than “Buy silver jewelry and women’s silver jewelry and silver jewelry from French Fashions”, don’t you agree?

When researching keywords for multiple international markets, remember to use a keyword research tool that offers regional search data so you can pinpoint what persons are searching for in each country. Apart from regional spelling, regional jargon such as (accommodation vs lodging) can impact keyword search trends considerably.

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Just before Xmas, I spent a fun few hours testing out the new tool and tracking down the earliest reference I could find to the term *Lord of the Rings* – way back in 1815!  You can check out how I did it via the article I wrote for SiteProNews about my experience.

Happy New Year to you all!

I have a business here in the UK offering training in Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel and Outlook.

I am a bit confused about the keywords I should be optimising my web site for and I was wondering if you could give me a little advice on my choices?

My first instinct is to optimise the site for the following:

1.Training
2.Excel
3.Word
4.Help with spreadsheets
5.Excel consultancy
6.Spreadsheets
7.Essex
8.Suffolk
9.Online support
10.Onsite support
11.Training
12.Excel help

thank you!

Mary

Hello Mary

The main purpose of keyword research is to get you thinking about all the possible keywords you could target, including those used by competitors or more importantly, those NOT used by competitors. So as well as coming up with your own seed list, you should be looking at your competitor’s web sites to see what keywords they are targeting and whether or not you should be using similar keywords.

However, I am a bit concerned by the keywords you’ve chosen for your own site. How many people who type the word *training* into a search engine are specifically seeking training in Microsoft products provided by a consultant in Essex, UK? People typing this search query in might be looking for football training coaches, or training shoes. Or scuba dive training in South Africa. Same goes for the word *Essex*. People typing that in are more likely to be looking for tourist information, accommodation or school project information than for MS training.

You’ll realize this as you learn more about search engine optimization, but you need to choose two, three and four word keyword phrases that are more tailored to your exact offering and therefore more likely to attract visitors to your site who are specifically seeking the services you offer. These visitors have a higher likelihood of converting to customers.

Search phrases you’ve listed like *help with spreadsheets* and *Excel help* are great, but phrases such as *MS Office training* and *how to use MS Word* would be more relevant for you than some of the other keywords you’ve listed.

Once you have a good seed list of keywords, you can run them through a keyword research tool to check how much potential traffic they will bring to your site and streamline your final choices for SEO.

Happy keyword hunting!

Kalena

Dear Kalena,

Is keyword stuffing a bunch of the same keywords or is it a bunch of unrelated keywords?

Willie

Hi Willie,

The term “Keyword Stuffing” describes the practice of  repeating a particular phrase (often many times) within the text on a single page.  Typically this would be done with the same or closely related keyword phrases – with the aim  of trying to raise the profile of that particular web page for search queries on that keyword.

Usually a few mentions of a particular keyword phrase (or related phrases) would be acceptable (and normal), but it quickly becomes very obvious to users if a particular phrase is repeated over and over again within the content of a single page.  This type of “unnatural” repetition of keywords can be very annoying from a users perspective and may actually incur search ranking penalties. If a search engine considers the page to be “over optimised” it is unlikely to achieve good rankings.

Whilst mentioning your target keyword a few times within the content of your page is sensible, overdoing it can be detrimental.  In most cases when you are writing content, you should be trying to write it for the benefit of  the user rather than the search engines.

If you are concerned that some of your pages might be “keyword stuffed” an easy test is to simply read them through.  If the pages read well, are informative and feel “natural” then you are probably OK.  If the content is awkward and there are obvious repetitions of particular keywords, I’d suggest that you consider re-writing the page.

A handy online tool that I often use to get a feel for what a page is about is Tag Crowd.  This tool allows you to specify a URL, or paste in text, and it will create a Tag Cloud of the content provided.  If one or two keywords jump out at you from the tag cloud it generates, it is possible that your page may be over-optimised.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting SEO (Brisbane)

I’m not sure about keywords. Should the most used keywords be used to promote a website to the search engine, or least used words?

Florence

Great question Florence,

There is a great deal of confusion over how to go about selecting which keywords to optimise, and part of the confusion is because there is not really a “correct” answer.  The keywords to choose for optimisation will depend on what you are offering, what your goals are, the niche you are targeting, and may very well include  high volume (popular) keyword phrases or low volume (long tail) keywords – or a combination of both.

At first, it might seem obvious that the high volume phrases should be the ones that are most important, as these are likely to generate the most amount of traffic.  But high volume phrases also tend to be more competitive, and you are likely to find it much more challenging to achieve good rankings for these phrases.  Also be aware, that high volume phrases might also be more “general” in nature, and the people using these phrases may be more likely to be in “research” rather than “buy” mode, so even if you get the visit, they may be less likely to follow through with a sale.

Lower volume phrases, tend to be more specific, and are also likely to be much easier for you to achieve good rankings.  Low volume phrases (which are often known as “long tail” keywords) are also more likely to have a higher conversion rate, and although generating less traffic may actually provide you with more sales.

Ultimately, the keywords you optimise for should be the ones that convert the best – i.e. the ones that result in the most sales, leads or enquiries.  You should be able to determine this by analysing your site usage statistics (analytics), or if you are running a Paid Advertising (PPC) Campaign, you can look at the types of keywords that are generating sales – these are the keywords that you should be optimising for organic search.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting (Brisbane SEO Consultant)

I feel like I am stuck with my keyword research.

I am researching SEO keywords for an Australian business that specializes in tree removal and tree felling. The keywords I chose for them were “tree removal” and “tree lopper” however when I enter these into Keyword Discovery for Australia I get nothing (although “tree removal” comes up quite a bit for global search).

These keywords best describe the business and although the tree removal operator prefers not to be called a tree lopper he is happy for me to use this term for search engine purposes. Yet when entering these keywords into Google it seems a lot of competitor sites come up. I am confused! Can you help?

Louise

Hello Louise

In my experience, most keyword research tools (such as Keyword Discovery or WordTracker) are highly inconsistent or downright inaccurate when it comes to regional search databases.

What I would do is to use the global database when choosing the best keywords to target and then see how they go in terms of bringing you traffic. You can tweak the keywords as you go based on the response and traffic you get. I would start broad e.g. “tree removal”, “tree felling” and then narrow your market based on the responses you receive e.g. “tree removal [city]“ or “tree felling services”.

Another way to measure your potential regional market is to set up a basic pay per click campaign using Google AdWords, targeting Australia only and targeting the keywords you wish to test. Then monitor the number of impressions that your keywords get. Note I said impressions and not clicks. Set the budget low or design your ads in a way you don’t necessarily attract clicks (so it’s a cheap and dirty experiment).

The number of impressions you get per week will give you a ballpark idea of how many Australian searchers are looking for those particular keywords in Google per week.

Dear Kalena…

Any idea about this: When i select USA as a country in Google keyword tool and I search for ‘link building’ as a keyword… after data get displayed, from show and hide option i have selected show ‘local search Volume’.

When I scroll down a bit more, I see this: for key ‘affordable link building’ there is ‘Not enough data’ under local searches, but I can see ’260′ monthly searches under global searches. What does it mean?

Does it mean – that keyword is no one searching from USA (as I selected my local country USA) but globally it’s being searched by some small portion of people around the globe but not from USA, because it is showing ‘not enough data under ‘local search volume’?

If that is a case, than it means I shouldn’t target those keywords for USA which are showing ‘Not enough data’ under local search volume, because there is no one searching that keywords and I will waste my time isn’t it?

What is your opinion on this? Thanks in advance!

Arshad

Hi Arshad,

The Local Monthly Searches column in the Google Keyword Tool provides an approximation of the number of monthly searches for a particular keyword, averaged over the last 12 months, for the “locality” specified. The “Not enough data” message (which in the current version of the tool shows up as a “-”) does not necessarily mean that the search volumes are too low to report, it indicates that (for whatever reason) there is insufficient data to calculate an average. This may mean that there are low search volumes for your selected area – but could also mean that for some reason the data over the last 12 months is incomplete.

Any decision you might make on whether or not to target a particular keyword phrase within a particular region, should not be based solely on search volumes. If a keyword phrase is highly relevant, and/or if it has a high conversion rate, you don’t necessarily need high traffic volume for it to be a worthwhile phrase.

Keyword Tools provide an approximation of historical search volumes, but it is often the relative volumes between keyword phrases which is more important than the actual volumes themselves.

Your question does highlight though that whatever tools you use, it is VERY important to understand the source of the data, and what rules have been applied in gathering and collating it. Without an understanding of this, any analysis you do, or any interpretations you make from the data may be invalid.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting (Brisbane)

Another quick one if I may. In terms of providing keyword research to a client – could you please provide an example of what this might look like?

Thanks
Trina

Hi again Trina

I generally present the client with an Excel spreadsheet which has different tabs at the bottom with each keyword theme highlighted.

Within each tab, I collate the keywords in various ways e.g. alphabetically, by potential traffic, by KEI (keyword effectivness indicator) and by SEO potential.

Some keyword research services will do this for you e.g. SEO Research Labs

We are actually in the middle of editing our online Keyword Research 101 Course at Search Engine College. It goes into much greater detail about this topic. I don’t wish to provide a sample spreadsheet here, as it will be part of the Keyword Research 101 course curriculum, but a sample keyword research spreadsheet will be included in the lesson material for that course.

I have been looking into some free keyword research software and noticed there are a few out there; even Google’s free tool has gotten good kudos.

In lesson four of the SEO 101 course, you mention a few SEO tools that if we wanted we would have to eventually pay for – can you please let me know what the main differences are between the free and paid versions?

And if, I am just starting out in SEO and have a limited budget if the free versions will do what I need.

Thanks
Trina

Hi Trina

The main difference between paid and free keyword research tools is usually the number of keywords you can research. Also, some of the paid tools give you the ability to search specific databases e.g. Australia only or the last six months of search data versus the last five years of search data.

Our Search Engine Wiki has a pretty good list of keyword research tools. One great new tool I haven’t added to the Wiki yet is Ispionage. It’s particularly useful when researching target pay per click keywords for your AdWords campaigns, because it shows what your competitors are targeting.

Oh and try Raven Tools too. It’s more of a holistic SEO tool but it has great keyword management functionality.

Also don’t forget my previous blog posts about keyword research – they might help too.