Look how old this is!
I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 19 years 5 months 10 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.

If you manage a website and are trying to get visitors through organinc SERPS, then it may seem like a constant battle between what the search engines want, and what your customers actually want. But actually, these two aren’t so different, and they don’t change much from month to month. They both want information that’s highly relevant to the search term used.

However, if you don’t know exactly what your customers are looking for, then how can you deliver? Knowing what keyword phrases people are searching for is the key to knowing what to target with your SEO campaign. Wordtracker is an excellent source for that initially, and I like it better than the Google or Overture free research tools.

The Google and Overture tools are designed to get you to spend money, whereas Wordtracker is merely reporting to you the facts. That’s why I always start with Wordtracker when beginning work with a new business, or when researching words for a potential venture of my own.

However, there may not be many suggestions from Wordtracker by using just “oregon lawyer” as my seed phrase. Using just the words “lawyer” and “attorney” though, bring back get 100’s of ideas. Then I just add the geographic locators I want to each phrase, assuming that logically, the same searches will filter down to city and state level.

Taking that list, I then establish a Google Pay Per Click account to do some real time testing and see what the top phrases really are. In Google Ad Words, there’s already a visible “impressions” column showing exactly how many times each phrase has been searched for. To get the same info in Overture (Yahoo) you have to go into your list of keywords, just as you would manage your bids, but then go to “Personalize This Page” and check the box to get the impressions column.

These are indisputable facts about who’s actually looking for what over any given time frame. Once you know that more people are searching for some phrases than others, and exactly what those phrases are, you can target your Organic SEO efforts accordingly.

Finally, anyone that’s serious about search engine optimization, especially on a world or national level, should invest in a professional keyword research report before starting to work on a website.

I used to spend hours using Wordtracker for large projects, but now I outsource the report to Search Engine guru Dan Theis and his SEO Research labs. For $99, their comprehensive report gives you more information than you could possibly gather yourself in 10 hours of grueling research.

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