These days, it seems everyone struggles with their keywords; they just seem to grasp at anything in their site's content that may have the slightest possibility of helping them generate traffic. I think people over thinking the problem, so I want to share one of my solutions for generating great keywords.
I use a site Keyword Spy which allows you to type in a site or keyword and get a large amount of relevant information that you can use to generate larger list and better target your audience through search engines.
If you type a keyword into the search box, the site will give you the number of search results for that keyword and the number of clicks a day it generates, along with the average cost per click on ppc campaigns, and the sites using that keyword in their ppc campaigns.
From there, you can dig deeper so you can look at the list of people advertising on that keyword and see what other keywords they are advertising on. For example, I did a search on the keyword "water", which returned the results you can see in the image above. Now looking down the list of those who pay for advertising on that word, we find several companies and nonprofits, so by clicking on one of those sites we can get information on just how that site is doing, its advertising items, including a list of the paid and organic keywords being used to generate traffic.
This is where is gets really handy, and where we answer the question which keywords to use. Keyword Spy will give you a list of the keywords combined with a rating for their return on investment, search ranking position, competition ranking, average clicks per day and the average cost per click for every keyword in the list. This will help you determine exactly which keywords are going to help you more and which ones you are going to be competing a little more on.
Now for those using ppc campaigns to drive traffic to your site, you can even get a list of ad variations that articular site is using, which can help you get ideas for how to word your own ads.
Finally, it will let you export the list of keywords to either a text or Excel document so that you can save them and use them wherever you like, however you prefer.
Now Keyword Spy does have two levels of membership: the first is free, which is honestly all that I use since it gives you quite a bit of information there. If you decide you need more, then upgrade to the Pro account, which is $139.95 a month. But, for the average nonprofit just looking to drive more traffic and awareness, I think this is a bit extreme. Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think. It has always worked well for me.
Comments