More Web Traffic Starts With Decent Keyword Research

Would you be interested in find out what keyword phrases Google think are the most related to your search query? Would you like results returned to be kept updated all the time? How about accessing the information anytime you need it?

And furthermore what about if I told you that you could get all this info using nothing but Firefox (or any other browser) and a regular Google search?

Interested? Then continue reading....

Firstly lets take a step back and spend a moment discussing relevance, as this term is at the very core of Googles results returned from your searches.

Google wants to provide the person searching with extremely accurate and relevant results that it can. Google know that if they do not provide this information, its likely that users will no longer use their services altogether, and no users means no advertising revenues which is their main source of income!

For a prime example of a search engine losing market share, spend a second for AltaVista? In its time it was the most popular search engine, and very quickly lost the crown to Google because they dropped the ball with relevance.

I doubt there is such a thing as search engine loyalty (at least not for the average search engine person). If a better solution comes along, the everyday people will just start using that service.

Trust me when I say The Powers To Be At Google are very aware of this, and put a heap of thought and manpower into making sure that when you search for something, the results that come back are very related to your search term.

Google need to keep the everyday searcher happy so that they come back to Google again and again.

Shred Internet Marketers have, of course found ways to "game" Google in the past, so that their own sites come up instead of what should be the most relevant results, and such techniques are still used in modern times.

Usually these black hat techniques are located by Google who is getting cleverer at locating these types of hacks.

Google seems to get it right most of the time, and certainly more than the other major search engines at this point in time.

Ok so given that Google is currently providing the most relevant information and has the largest user base when compared to any other search engine, and that its clear that their primary mission is info relevance to their searchers, does it not make sense to use Googles search results and be using this information more when conducting keyword research?

For example lets say your searching for the keyword phrase web traffic

When I entered that keyword phrase into google, I got back list of current pages that Google believe are the most relevance to that search term (along with a host of ads).

But in additional to these results at the bottom of the page they also provide (and here is the key)....

Searches RELATED to: web traffic (Their words).

Hmm interesting a list of keywords that Google think are relevant to my search.

Google actually show you the keywords that they believe are the most relevant to your search phrase.

Now if you do some research about this, there is lots of speculation on how google decide on what search terms are displayed, but no matter what you think I believe it's certainly worth investigating further, isnt it?

In my testing I found the keywords it came up with seemed to be phrases heavily searched on.

In the case of web traffic, the keyword phrases returned to me were

increase web traffic
free web traffic
buy web traffic
google web traffic
web traffic report
web traffic generator
web traffic monitoring
measure web traffic

They all seem pretty related to my original search.

And you can drill down by clicking on a search term to get relevant keywords to that keyword. For example I could have selected increase web traffic and obtained a list of related search terms that relate to that term.

This is getting interesting. Before you pass on this method compared to using your favorite keyword research program, I would ask that you consider the following.

1) The information from these searches are directly from Google, so the data has not been corrupted in any way.

Many keyword research tools do not use information from Google at all (Wordtracker) or combine information from multiple sources. Here we have information direct from the source!

2) The information returned from Google is of course very up to date, unlike a lot of other keyword research data that can be months out of date.

I am not suggesting that you abandon all other keyword tools in favor of this technique, but I do suggest you check it out. With all the latest whiz bang all conquering, overly hyped software tools that seemingly gets released everyday, sometimes it pays to take a step back and go back to just using a very simple method like searching in Google!

In my case, I actually use this method in conjunction with other keyword tools, and get the best out of both worlds. My two favorite keyword research tools currently are Nichebot and Market Samurai (google them).

I find the best use of this method is when searching new niches, or when establishing the viability of getting into a particular market.

One final thing to remember is that unfortunately not all keywords are supported. Sometimes no related search terms come back for a given keyword, but given that its free Im happy to not be too worried about that oversight.

And sometimes I have to say the terms returned seem a little weird. But this seems to be in more unusual niches that perhaps Google have not collected enough information for (my speculation).

Get out there and take a look at the related search function in Google. The keyword phrases that come back might end up being very useful.