Can You Increase Site Traffic With Keyword Research

Targeted Web Traffic Video

Would you be interested in understanding what keywords Google think are the most related to your search query?  Would you like this list of results to be kept updated all the time?  How about being able to access the information for free?

And in addition what about if I told you that you could retrieve all the information using nothing but a browser  and a standard Google search?

Interested?  Good, lets get into the detail….

Firstly lets take a step back and discuss relevance, as this term a very important part of Googles results returned from your searches.

Google wants to provide the person searching with the most accurate and relevant results that it can.  Google know that if they do not provide this info, it’s likely that users will stop using their search engine altogether, and no users means no ad revenues which is their main source of income!

For a classic example of a search engine losing market share, spend a second for AltaVista?  Back in the day it was the most used search engine, and almost overnight (not quite) was displaced from 1st position 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 non Internet Marketing search engine person).  If a better alternative comes along, the average user will just start using that service.

Trust me when I say Google are very conscious of this, and put enormous thought and manpower into making sure that when you search for something, the results returned are highly related to your the search term you used.

Google have to keep the everyday user happy so that they use Google again and again.

Shred Internet Marketers have, of course found methods to “game” Google in the past, so that their own web pages come up instead of what should be the most relevant results, and such tricks are still used today.

Mostly these tricks are picked up by Google who is getting cleverer at finding 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 now returning the most relevant results and has the largest user base compared to any other search engine, and that its clear that their primary goal is info relevance to their users, does it not make sense to go to their 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 a list of current pages that Google tell us 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 words are displayed, but no matter what you think I think it’s certainly worth investigating further, isn’t 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 I got back 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 clicked increase web traffic and obtained a list of related search terms that relate to that term.

This is getting interesting.   Before you discount this method compared to using your favorite keyword tool, I would ask that you consider the following.

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

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

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

I am not suggesting that you get rid of all other keyword tools in favor of this technique, but I do recommend 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 2 favorite keyword research tools currently are Nichebot and Market Samurai (google them).

I find the best use of this technique is when searching new niches, or when trying to establish the viability of entering a particular market.

One last thing to remember is that unfortunately not all keywords are supported.  Sometimes there are no related searches come back for a given keyword, but given that it’s free I’m happy to not be too worried about that oversight.

And occasionally I have to say the terms returned seem a little bizarre.  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 search terms returned might end up being very useful.

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