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Keywords, and their results, make up the terrain of search marketing – and knowing the terrain (and who else is playing in it) helps you find the best ways to position a brand on the web. 

Mike Tekula over at Search Engine Journal has a nice post on the 7 Overlooked Sources of Keyword Data.  Like Mike points out, everyone is using the conventional Google tools.  Real advantage comes from looking in places where your competitors aren’t to identify “under the radar” keywords.  Mike recommends the following:

• Misspelling Tools
  While misspelled keywords won’t have the traffic volume of correct-spelling versions they are rarely targeted by competitors. People’s fingers slip a lot more than you might think.  SEOBook’s free Typo Generator is a great tool for finding and taking advantage of these slips.
• Technorati tags
  Browsing here is a good way to find out what topics are buzzing in the blogosphere lately – and, more importantly, what language is being used. You won’t find volume data here, but it’s a great place to look when you’re brainstorming keyword lists.
• Twitter
  Twitter’s real time stream provides a good study of the topics of the day and the language people are using to discuss them.
• Facebook Lexicon
  Facebook released Lexicon in April of 2008. Essentially, it allows you to enter a keyword (or multiple keywords) and it graphs their use over time. It’s a good way to research keyword seasonality.
• SEOBook’s Keyword Selection Tool
  This tool brings a tremendous amount of data and other research tools to your fingertips. It provides daily reports for WordTracker, Google, Yahoo! and Bing. It also links you to various other research tools – automatically pulling up the data for your keyword to save you plenty of time.
• Google WonderWheel
  This experiment from Google shows keyword relationships with a nifty wheel/hub visualization trick. This tool is great for brainstorming keywords – leading you to related keywords you may not have thought of.
• Your own analytics
  Take a fresh look at your own analytics, or try one of these essential free tools.

Being creative with keyword research is great, but it’s important to remember the basics.  Sure, you need to know the keyword phrases searched most frequently by customers in your market. But that information alone is not enough to guide your SEO efforts and create the right keyword-rich editorial content.  You should also figure out how many searches are done each month on each individual keyword phrase in your keyword universe.  The simple but often overlooked truth is this: There’s a popularity contest going on within your keyword universe, and some keyword phrases are used much more often than others. That can create an intense competition.  When it comes to keywords, you should pick fights you can win.  

If you do the math, you’ll realize that there is a keyword risk ranking inside each keyword cluster in your keyword universe, and this information can help prioritize your choices. You may discover that it is unwise to target the most popular keyword phrases, if there is a lot of competition for those phrases.  The best SEO keyword strategy might be to target keyword phrases that are more modest in popularity, and for which there is little competition.  To use an economic metaphor, you’re looking for modest demand and low supply.

The Google Keyword Tool can tell you the demand. The Keyword Competitive Index (KCI) reveals the relationship of demand to competition.  The KCI is your estimated annual search impressions (monthly average searches taken from the GKT times 12 months) divided by the number of exact match search engine results (the competition) at a point in time.

But if you’re looking for a quick fix or jumpstart for your rankings, here’s a tip that has worked for me .  Many people start their search by typing the words “how to” and a verb in the query box. Adding “how to” and verbs to your primary keyword phrases can result in optimal rankings.  I try to do one “How To” post per quarter with the brands I manage.  It keeps us top-of-mind, positioned as experts, and usually provides a shot in the arm for our Google rankings.

Right now, I’m in the midst of re-optimizing one site and newly optimizing another.  Mike’s article brought some great ideas to light for the former, but for the latter, I’m staying focused on the fundamentals.

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