BEFORE start to promote product, I started to read forums, blogs, and articles about search engine marketing. Usually I started searching for popular keywords using a popular free keyword research tool and found a phrase with at least 500 searches a day in Google alone.
I’m going to check the competition and realized there is not much. Then I bought the domain and developed, then launched my first made for adsense (MFA) website-blog. After several months, my blog was on number one spot in Google.
I told myself, yeah this is easy. Day one passed, and I got 2 visitors. Day two, I got 3. I waited for days, expecting for hundreds of visitors, but all I got is between 2 and 5 visitors per day without any campaign and just waiting visitor from search engine.
I think there is something wrong. The keyword tool says it must be 500 searches per day on average but I got 2 visitor everyday. After further research, I learned that the keyword research tool was flawed. What’s disturbing is that e-books, online forums, websites, and SEO books promote these kinds of tools.
I have learned my experience since then that being popular doesn’t mean it is correct. Keyword research can not be automated. You need the right tool and the right process to do it successfully. There’s no tool that can do everything for you.
The intention of this manual is to help you find and accurately measure the true value of a keyword or phrase. This is not a book about search engine optimization but instead a guide for you to discover keywords with proven traffic and less competition, so you can easily dominate it. Do you agree whit this?
Now let see that people do keyword research mainly for the following reasons:
1. Finding a niche.
2. Building a “made for adsense” website.
3. Marketing articles.
4. Promoting blogs.
5. Campaign for pay per click (PPC).
And so you can always develop your own keyword research process. Keyword research is tiny fraction of search engine marketing, and this is solely for keyword research. Here are the steps to keyword research failure:
1. Gather keywords using a free or paid keyword tool.
2. Check the search volume according to the keyword tool.
3. Check the competitiveness.
4. Define which keywords to use.
5. Develop the content to target these keywords.
Looks right, isn’t it? But it is not! The keyword tools that I referred in the steps are those that use data from meta search engines.
What’s a Meta Search Engine? A meta search engine “is a search engine that sends user requests to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list or displays them according to their source.” From the definition, the “several other search engines” do not include the big three: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Meta search engines use data of 1.4% or less of the search market. Though this data is within U.S. market only, we can have an idea how small percentage meta search engines occupy in total search engine market worldwide.
Most keyword research tools, free or paid, use meta search engines in their reports. With only 1.4% share of search market, the result is not as accurate as it should be.
A further research on where and how these keyword research tools get their data I have done. Surprisingly, most of them did not specify how exactly they gather their data. Here are the results:
Wordtracker
According to them, “our database is entirely made up of Metacrawler/Dogpile queries for the past 130 days and makes up approximately 0.63% of the search engine market (emphasis mine).”
Keyword Elite
They claim that they use Google, but since there’s no API or direct access to Google keyword database, they’re just doing it manually in a browser level like every ordinary person does it using Google Adwords Keyword Tool. With billions of keywords out there, importing a substantial data manually from Google is an impossible task.
Nichebot
They claim to use Google as their source for their website but do not exactly tell us how much of their data are from Google. They also use Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.
Wordze
They claim to use Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, and AOL; but like Nichebot, they don’t tell us how much of their data come from big search engines.
Google has better and more tools to help search engine marketers, webmasters, and Internet entrepreneurs to develop a better website. And it is free! We will use mostly Google tools as free to use tools.
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