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Improving Your Keyword Analysis With WordStream

It isn’t very often that I shout about how good a specific is, but in this case I’m going to have to make an exception. We have started using WordStream‘s ‘Keyword Suite’ alongside the other SEO analysis software that we use and I can honestly say that this product is a real life-saver.

One of the most important stages of any SEO campaign is the initial keyword analysis (which I have talked about in-depth in one of my previous blog posts). Having said this, it can also take a long time to carry it all out! We’re always investing in new software and tools to try and streamline this process and make it as effective as we can, so when Larry Kim of WordStream gave us a free year’s license to try out their software, I was very happy. So let’s look at what the keyword suite actually offers…

The first feature is the ‘keyword suggestion tool’. What this allows us to do is to type in a broad keyword or subject area and the software looks across Google’s search volumes, CPC costs and competition to provide you with a list of related keywords. For this example I used ‘social media marketing’ so that we can see some similar keywords that could be used. Once we have all of this data, we can then export it to an Excel spreadsheet with more extensive or ‘deeper’ results.

This tool is a great to use once you have settled upon the landing pages that you want to optimise for. For example, if there is a page on your website devoted around your social media marketing services, then performing a search like the one above will give you a few different ideas for some keywords that could be used to get people there from the search engines.

The next thing that you can do via WordStream’s keyword suite is use the ‘niche finder tool’. This tool is a personal favourite of mine as it tries to look for keywords that fit your specific niche and will really help you to get the most out of your long-tail keywords. The way to use this function is to type in a broad subject related to the landing page that you are optimising (in this case it is ‘social media’). After this, you can then find the specific ‘niche’ of the page, for example, if it around social media management, social PR, social networking, social media tools, etc, then you can find specific relevant keywords that can be used to drive traffic through to your page. In the above image I have selected the ‘social media marketing’ niche and from this there are lots of different keyword phrases that I could use related to the social media marketing niche.

The next stage is to group the list of keywords that we have generated to see the different types of keywords that are comprised within the list. From this you can then decide on which ‘types’ of keywords are relevant to your content. For example, if we have lots of keywords focused around a specific location (the below example shows a lot of keywords related to ‘Edinburgh’) that your business doesn’t serve, and then you are able to remove all of these. This is done using the ‘keyword grouper’ tool:

Now that I have all of my keywords grouped together, it is easy to remove any that are not related to the landing page that I’m optimising. In this case, the ‘keynote’ and ‘Edinburgh’ terms wouldn’t be particularly relevant and they would be removed.

Once the final list of keywords has been determined, the next stage of keyword analysis can take place. This involves looking at how competitive a keyword is and how achievable high page rankings for the term could be. One fantastic tool that we use in the office is the SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool, but there are loads of them out there. Overall though, WordStream’s keyword suite gives you an effective starting point for your keyword research that offers some really unique functionality that a lot of the software I have tried in the past simply doesn’t.

We’re always looking for ways to improve our SEO processes, so if you know of any other great tools out there then let us know by leaving a comment at the bottom of this post.