Hello everyone, I work for a small web design firm in the United Kingdom and have started doing some basic SEO for our clients. I come from a completely non-technical background (History/Politics graduate) but I find it quite interesting and my boss seems keen for me to learn as much as I can to help out the business. At the moment I use the Google Adwords/Keywood Tool but am finding that it is taking me too much time calculating KEI ratings for various keywords. I do have a preformatted excel sheet to calculate KEI rating when I have searches and competition entered which saves time on calculations. I also export a list of keywords from Adwords into my spreadsheet. I am aware that there are key word tools such as Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery which could do alot of the leg work for me, but how good as these tools on local searches? For example 'plumber london' or 'wedding photography glasgow'. Many of our clients sites need optimising for local searches, rather than national or international so the ability to get accurate information on these searches is really. I have found that a couple of these tools do not handle searches like these very well, with them returning very low search volumes when compared with Google. Any advice appreciated - Hoping to learn as much as I can from these forums
I'm not 100% sure if this is what you are looking for, but I'm sure that even if it's not, you will get some value out of this post. Here is one of my favorite keyword research tools: Google Insights. http://www.google.com/insights/search (sorry, I don't have enough posts yet to turn that into a link for you) Google Insights has many great features, but one of its best features is the "regional interest" feature. It allows you to drill all the way down to results from specific cities and towns. Here is a quick rundown of how to use Insights to accomplish what you want to accomplish: - Type your keyword in the text box - wedding photography glasgow - To the right of the text box, you will see filter options. Click the combo box that says "WORLDWIDE", and select the region that you want to search. I selected the UK for this example. You could also break it down even further into sub regions right now, but I like to wait until later to do that. -Click search You will see results that looks like google trends, and then the regional interest results, top searches, and rising searches. (more keywords that you can target) - Now, in the regional interest section, you can click on those individual regions to get an even better idea of where most of the searches are coming from. (When I click on Scotland, it shows me that Edinburgh is the hot spot for this search term) *Note* If this helped you at all, GREAT! If not, at least I tried . Plus, there is so much more to the Google Insights tool, so even if your problem wasnt immediately solved, you may find Insights useful for other things in the future.
I already gave the URL to the tool sunfkz (http://www.google.com/insights/search). I just couldn't turn it into a click-able link because I don't meet the minimum requirements to post links. Here it is once more. Just copy and paste it... http://www.google.com/insights/search
Hi Infantry Vet, Thanks very much for your reply. I have never heard of Google Insights before but from what you've said, it should be really useful for researching local searches, much more so than the standard keyword tool I have used. Ant
No problem Ant. I'm glad I could be of some assistance. Hopefully, you use the tip and make thousands off of it! Good luck!