KeywordSpy Tracking—Keywords Hold The Key To Your Success

People have often asked why for the KeywordSpy Tracking feature, the first thing entered into the system is keywords, and not domains. If you count yourself among those lost individuals, consider yourself lucky at this very moment, as you shall get enlightenment as to how keywords form the basis of this tracking tool.

Let us start you off with this thought: It is easy to pinpoint competitors just by the mere basis of their merchandise. The question is, are they really your competitors when it comes to the keywords they input into their site?

To go head to head with people jostling for a good position on the search engines, you need to cover them all by using the keywords you yourself would use. Most likely, you have entered keywords in your site already.

So on that thought, we now list the reasons why the KeywordSpy Tracking Tool would ask you to put in keywords first, before you discover the competitor domains:

• It lets you narrow down from general to specific.

Think of keywords as pieces to forming a puzzle. Once the puzzle is complete, then you get the big picture.

The same principle applies to the KeywordSpy Tracking Tool. You pinpoint the competitors for the same keywords that you are real time, so it erases doubts that such companies may hardly be your competitors.

For example, you have a diet help website. You’re almost certain about a particular list of competitors. The ones you have been monitoring for the longest time; pre- Tracking, are the following:

Healthy eating
Six pack abs
Metabolism
Low carb diet
Cortislim
Weight loss tips
Weight loss surgery

But since KeywordSpy Tracking requires that you put in keywords first, you heed that call. From your own experience in building the site, you enter the keywords you yourself used for it in the Create Campaign tab:

You then activate the campaign, and wait for a few hours. It is in this time that the system tracks the keywords down among the countries and search engines you specified through the Create Campaign tab. In doing so, it unlocks the domains using these keywords:

• It sets the pace for unlocking more keywords.

Using KeywordSpy to track keywords will trigger a ripple effect in the site; as it will also index the keywords these domains use. These keywords will be shown in the Keyword Suggestion Tool tab—whose main function is showing keywords your competitors use and you are not currently using--and you have the option whether to ad these new keywords or not.

For our diet website case, we are offered the following options:

Amazing, isn’t it? So how do we describe the above picture? As one great poet used to say, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

One more thing: While not obviously stated, it matters that you have a knowledge of keyword optimality before placing in your keywords in the KeywordSpy Tracking module. If a keyword may be too expensive to bid on, you may think twice before adding it in your own campaign. The KeywordSpy Research tool can help you with that, by giving you metrics such as the cost of bidding on the keyword, the ROI, etc.

By using keywords as a starting point for the Tracking module, KeywordSpy becomes wonderful and user-friendly as a keyword tool. With KeywordSpy Tracking, keywords will be the keys to your success.

Concerns With Keyword Research

In doing keyword research - or even keyword tracking - for your SEM, PPC and SEO campaigns, there are numerous concerns that need to be looked at. Here are just some of them:

1. The keyword you’re bidding on may be too broad.
Your keywords may not be hitting the mark. Maybe what you are putting in your site or your ad may not be the words your competitors are typing in. On that, you should be cautioned.

For example, you bid for term such as “video games” That alone as a search may be too broad, considering that we’re way past the ‘80s and games are just more than Pong or Qubert. You’ve now got RPG games, combat games and so on, and you have to specifiy which of these games you want to be searched for.

Another factor is that broad/general keywords have too much competition. “Bags”, example, could still compete with “accessories” when customers do their search.

2. Different words used by business-owner and customer
The keywords you think are ranking highly in search engines may not be the ones they are looking for. You may be thinking that whenever people are looking for outdoor gear, they’ll be typing in “hiking gear”. Then you find out later on that they’re actually searching for “camping gear”. Not only do they miss your website, they troop to your more knowledgeable competitor more.

3. It’s not in the quantity, it’s in the quality
Remember the time when you’d search for a topic and you’d actually go to pages that barely have anything in common with the term you searched for?

Say, while doing a search on Ab Machines, you’d see this site called “AbMachines.com” that claimed to be “the comprehensive guide to Ab Machines”. But then when you click on it, you’d get an intro copy—in big bold letters—that runs: “Find Ab machines in your area. Discounts on Ab machines right at your fingertips! We have the most ab machine information about every machine ever invented.” And right below it, are links to obscure pay sites that don’t really give you what you’re looking for.

By stringing together words that didn’t make sense, yet since they made heavy use of keywords, such sites made themselves irritatingly visible on the front pages of searches. Well, Google, Yahoo and Bing have made controls on that now and it’s not just easy anymore to rank high for a keyword, even if SEO is still a primary basis for research.

That is why it is important that you have to keep a lid on the SEM, PPC and SEO competition. You should know their every move, and allocate a good part of your money for market research. The money you put out will give you better returns. But just as important is what you will be spending it for.

Again, with web-based keyword research and tracking tools at your disposal, you have the information right at your tips. You get information on not just a keyword, but also the basic results that come with it. More than the rankings, you’ll have to have a deeper analysis on the PPC returns it could give you, why they get the number of clicks the get, how much they fare at that current time, and how the rates of search for it fares with your competitors.

In doing so, you’ll be able to hit more targets and have less blanks in your SEM, PPC and SEO campaigns.