Almost all SEO begins with keyword research. Understanding what people are searching for and how many people are searching helps form a solid content strategy.
Beyond the basics, keyword research encompasses many more advanced considerations, including SERP features, keyword search intent, competitive analysis, and even internationalization.
Read the latest Moz posts on keyword research. We’ve also included links to our most popular keyword research resources to help your SEO journey.
Keyword Research : Everything you need to get started with keyword research.
Keyword Research Learning Center : Our free keyword research learning hub. Here, we’ve gathered our top resources in one place.
What is search intent and why does it matter? : Learn more about the power of search intent and how to use it in your keyword research strategy.
Keyword Explorer : Want to dive in? Try our top-rated keyword research tool, with over 500 million keyword suggestions.
There is a lot of information on the web on how to do the basics of SEO yet it took me years to figure out the right way to analyze Keyword Difficulty. I think there are a few reasons for this. One being that it’s a difficult subject to explain and it’s a lot more complicated than it looks. I know there is a keyword difficulty tool from SEOMoz (htt...
(Authors: Andres Torrubia, Antonio Parraga and Hector Rodes) The Problem with Classic Keyword Research When tasked with defining a keyword strategy for a given site, most SEOs will likely choose just a handful of keywords based on keyword research. If you are in a niche market, this approach may be perfectly fine but when you have a site that plays in m...
I have been witness to many instances wherein people have judged the competitiveness of a keyphrase by simply searching it in Google, and then checking the total number of search results. For them the total number of results is a measure of the competitiveness of a given keyphrase. I could have understood if they were people who are new to SEO, but I have also seen many SEO practitioners do exactly the same. This post will attempt to clear this misconception.
This post was written by James Svoboda of Realicity Search Marketing in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Google recently added a new “Local Search Volume” metric to their Keyword Tool that provides a...
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If you're like me, you use the SEOmoz Tools on a regular basis. An old favorite of mine is the Keyword Difficulty tool. If you've used this tool, you know that it requires input from the Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool. WordTracker has been around since the early days of search marketing.
Instinctively, without thinking, earlier on this evening I clicked a 'thumbs down' against Rand's video post about buckets of keywords. Of course, it means I have to write a post to explain my dastardly act of down thumbing, and having listened again to see if I was just being mean, my view is now that actually I probably don't know. Maybe.
Google provides monthly traffic estimates by KW in both its original Adwords Keyword tool (ADKWT) and its newer Search-Based Keyword Tool (SBKWT). In some cases the numbers reported are similar, but in most cases the monthly traffic numbers appear to very different, with the SBWKT numbers being only a fraction of the ADKWT. Here are some examples taken from a "business intelligence" search with each tool.
In mid-June 2008, I met my friend who has a canvas painted shoes boutique. She requested me to make a blog that promotes her painted shoes boutique. One of the challenges I came across when building the blog was the keyword research, as none of the online keyword research tools I used were able to return good results of searches for our local language (Indonesia). The tools always showed "0" or "not available." The experience made me doubt that there was a market share available for her product over the internet.
Don't get too excited here... this is neither a how-to nor a success story. It's merely a hypothetical, and any research or insight you've got is more than welcome in the comments.In commenting on a recent SEOmoz post, I recalled querying Google for a result that began "why did...", ...
Lately, the search engines seem to have become more intelligent. I say this because the suggestions they make seem to be more accurate. Now, this obviously goes back to a human decision to leverage data that had already been collected, rather than a vast improvement in the suggestion engine.
<p>After <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-top-10-reasons-blogging-will-be-light-on-seomoz-for-the-next-week">reading about</a> how posting in the main blog would be a bit flaccid this week, I figured I would give YOUmoz blog a test run with something that I noticed a few months back. This might be of interest to you and get the blood rushing to your head or it mi...
SEOmoz member, Michael Janik wrote to me last week and asked about how to optimize for multiple word order search phrases. I think it's an excellent topic, and one that we haven't covered well in the past. The issue arises from keyword phrases that receive search queries in different formats, for example: Restaurant Reviews Seattle...
We all do it, take shortcuts I mean, keyword research is such a pain in the ass that any way to short circuit the process is welcomed with open arms. The obvious short cut is to ask the client, he knows what he wants; he is an expert on market research, he has analysed all the sites that compete in his search space, he has sat down and analysed his AdWords campaign and culled the dodo’s, ...
We've all heard the buzz about Emerging Markets for a few years now, and while it's started to really crank with SMO and alternate language versions of websites, I have yet to hear anyone yet talk about KW research specifically for EM.This begs the question, is there anything worth talking about? As an SEO, my intuition tells me to start researching and securing great placem...