Should I Buy a Keyword Research Tool or Service?

This is a perennial question - and with the recent changes at Google, with upwards of 87% of incoming search traffic now encrypted - people are starting to ask my opinion on this subject yet again.

Allow me to quickly recap this for you : in the past, we saw incoming data in services like Analytics and StatCounter, as well as Squidoo, Blogger and HubPages stats that let us see where the traffic came from. We got the exact URL (address) which meant that for search engines, we got the actual query.

The aforementioned services needed to do a bit of URL bashing to get them out, but they were (and for Yahoo!, some local Google's and other search engines, they still are) available to turn into business intelligence.

That business intelligence was which keywords brought which visitors to what page. Tracking their paths afterwards through the site allowed us to make logical links between the keywords and eventual sales.

That was the foundation of keyword research for many, many tools. Remove the search terms, and they are left with... nothing.

Almost.

They still get query data from the 20% of searches (in some markets!) that aren't done on Google, but that's little help in many cases.

What's more help is that Google still lets us have some keyword data via AdWords - and in particular the Adwords Keyword Planner - which has now been taken advantage of by many tools.

Which brings us to the answer : Yes. Buy a tool. Invest in a service. Pay for keyword research.

However, be aware that there are no tools that have a special relationship with Google, there are no shortcuts, no silver bullets. You are paying for a tool to perform the same tasks that you could, using freely available tools, but much, much more quickly.

Some have the ability to link certain bits of data together and make recommendations, and allow calculations to be done that draw logical conclusions, but the basic data can be replicated with a bit of hard work.

Personally, I only use one tool (Market Samurai, feel free to do a Google search for it) alongside the free stats services, as well as some techniques that I explain in the Keyword Cracker Inner Circle material, but in the end it all boils down to what you do with them.

So, tools are good, but applied keyword intelligence is better!

Keyword Competition and Making Money from AdSense

I've been playing around with Market Samurai a lot recently, trying to get my head around the effect that Google's policy to not reporting keywords used by logged in users is having on my ability to turn a profit using AdSense.

(If you missed out on what actually happened, check my blog post on The Death of Keyword Research.)

One thing I'm pretty sure of is that Google themselves know what keywords are being used. After all, their AdWords, and AdSense programs both rely, to a certain extent, on that knowledge.

Google is also passing that information along, not via Analytics, but via products like Market Samurai, which aggregates a lot of data from search providers, and AdSense to enable us to find profitable niches. Not to hundreds of keywords to go with them, content to promote them, and something called the Competition index.

Now, a simple competition index might be the number of search results returned by Google for a keyword phrase. This is fair, and workable, but a bit artificial. After all, 90% of those search results might be complete rubbish!

Market Samurai goes one step further, and provides another layer of competition information based on the top domains and their comparative reliability, influence, and authority.

This is all good, but is competition really important when making money from AdSense?

The answer may well be no. Or possibly just maybe.

A lot of content creators make money from sites that have installed AdSense, and pass those earnings along. Suite101, for example, and Squidoo, HubPages, and many blogs with authoritative top level domains.

So, just because there are a lot of entries in a search engine result database for a keyword phrase, the weighting of the individual domains may well mean that the competition index can be ignored. 

Comparing a new domain with a single article on it with an established and regularly indexed site like Suite101 isn't comparing like with like. Google sees these two things very differently - and will probably give more weight (higher ranking) to Suite101 articles.

Added to which, there are other traffic acquisition strategies that can bring traffic. Analytics reports that for some of my most popular articles, the majority of the traffic is by referral and social media.

The kicker is that the social media traffic has more traction, with visitors spending more time on the site, and with much lower bounce rates. My guess would also be that, were AdSense to be installed, they'd bring the biggest profits!

(Disclaimer : I am an affiliate for Market Samurai, as well as being a user. By clicking on any of the links, I will potentially earn an affiliate payment. If you do not wish this to be the case, please use this link.)

Keyword Research is Dead. Long Live Keyword Research.

So, the number of (not provided) and (not set) keywords in my Google Analytics reports has now eclipsed the actual keywords reported.


The reason? People being logged into Google (and therefore using https) when they do queries, and therefore not giving away their keyword information.


Does it matter? To me, yes. If only because I like to know them in some special cases, such as if the Bounce Rate is consistently 100% for a keyword, it indicates that the keyword phrase is mis-matched with the content.


Does it matter for keyword research in general? That's a question that it might be a bit early to ask. However, it will skew the results that some suggestion services provide, as there is the possibility that Google users use different keyword types to other people, and are therefore removed from the database.


Arguably, if we assume that logged-in Google users are (a) more internet savvy, and (b) more technical, then if they are removed from the keyword database, a lot of technical traffic goes with them.


Whether that's a good or bad thing, is anyone's guess right now, but I suspect that, in the long term, these things will even out.


I've long suspected that keyword research is a dying beast - to be overtaken by tagging, social media, and various other traffic acquisition strategies that have little to do with search engines in the traditional sense.


However, keywords will remain important for evaluating on-page performance, and for tools such as the AdWords traffic and value estimators built into tools like Market Samurai.


Long live Keyword Research!