What is an organic keyword research tool? Maybe you have heard of it before you to know a little bit about these tools or may be you know nothing and have just heard it mentioned as being important. But what the heck are these things?
Well… That is what I’m going to explain to you here today.
If you are an online marketer or an inspiring online marketer then you are really going to want to read and digest this information because it is important. Organic keywords can be incredibly helpful for attracting new and targeted traffic to your website, landing page, or whatever it is that you might be promoting.
But why are organic keyword research tools so important. You will realize their importance at the end of this, but for starters they can…
- Help increase traffic
- Have nothing to do with paid traffic, which means they save money
- They can be a “set and forget” type of deal
- And so on
But before I get into what the research tool actually is, you first have to understand what the heck an organic keyword is.
But First… What Is an Organic Keyword?
An organic keyword is nothing more than a keyword that people type into search engines, such as Google, to look up stuff, which online marketers target to help attract free search traffic. This it’s very different from a paid keyword, such as those used in PPC campaigns like Google AdWords or Bing Advertising, but I will get more into that in a second.
An organic keyword can be just about anything… Literally anything that people are typing into search engines, whether it be Google, Yahoo, Bing, or even sites like YouTube since people are using it very much like a search engine nowadays.
Example:
So one stupid example I have for you could be this… The organic keyword “how to ask for a raise”. People are searching for this on Google and other search engines, just as they are searching for millions of other things by typing in keywords.
And as you see, when I type in “how to ask for a raise” into Google there are relevant search results that come up that also have this same exact keyword in their titles…
Now some websites get lucky and are ranked for keywords that they don’t even try to target, but many of the websites out there specifically target keywords like this.
Take a look at the second result in the search I performed above from the website thecut.com. As you can see the keyword How to Ask for a Raise is clearly displayed in the title and also in the first sentence of the article that you can see in the search engine results. From my knowledge and years of experience targeting organic keywords online as an online marketer, I’m fairly certain that the person who wrote this article specifically targeted this keyword.
And this is just one of billions of examples out there. You could target all sorts of keywords. If you have a website about dogs you could target “best dog collars”; if you run a blog about fashion you could target “top designer women’s shoes”; if you write for a website about baseball you could target “best Little League baseball bats”… And so on. The possibilities are endless and with any of these possibilities you can bring in targeted traffic that already took the first step and is searching for what you’re going to give them.
The area of targeting specific keywords is known as SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. This is when you optimize your content for search engines, targeting specific keywords being at the forefront. I acually make a living coupling SEO with affiliate marketing online.
Why Organic Is So Great…
Organic is usually the better choice to go by when you have a few options. And I’m not just talking about picking the organic bananas next time you go to the store. Just like bananas, organic keywords are awesome.
Just think about it… If you target the right keywords you can bring in laser targeted traffic to your website, landing page, whatever, without having to pay a thing. That’s right… It doesn’t cost anything to get ranked in Google like this. This is different between PPC advertising on search engines like Google and Bing where you are basically bidding against other advertisers to use certain keywords and get your ads displayed at the top or bottom of the search results.
Another reason why organic is so darn great is because, as I stated earlier, you can set it and forget about it… Well for the most part.
What I mean by this is that you can write an article targeting a specific organic keyword, get ranked, hopefully get loads of traffic, and then your article (or blog post or YouTube video or whatever) can potentially stay there for years to come and continually get loads of traffic… Without you doing anything else.
Now of course this is the perfect scenario and most of the time this doesn’t happen, but it does happen and when it does it is awesome.
But a Problem Exists..
The the problem is that you can’t just go out there and start targeting organic keywords thinking that you were going to bring in loads of free traffic. If you go out there with this approach then you are surely going to fail.
Not all organic keywords are created equally. Some are crap and are not worth targeting at all while others can be holy grails that will bring you in traffic beyond your wildest dreams. But how do you differentiate between the two? How you sift out the hidden gems of keywords from all the crap that is going to be a waste of time?
The answer to this is a keyword research tool…
So What Is an Organic Keyword Research Tool?
You probably get the point and can guess what it is if you didn’t already know. An organic keyword research tool is a tool (application) that you can use on your computer to perform the necessary research needed to find good keywords that are going to bring you good amount of traffic.
There are a lot of things you have to consider when doing keyword research. First off, it is pretty obvious that you have to target keywords that are actually getting searched for. You can probably imagine that there are a lot of people searching for “funny cat tricks” but probably little to no people searching for “how to turn water into fire” (which is something stupid I just made up). So if you target “how to turn water into fire” you may rank high in Google for that keyword, but what is the point?… There is no one looking for it and you will get any traffic from it.
Not only do you have to target keywords that people are actually looking for, but you also have to be aware of the competition out there. The Internet is not like it once was. It is increasingly crowded with other online marketers and there are tons of people out there that are doing the same thing you will be doing… Fighting to rank higher in the search engines so that they can get free traffic.
There or loads of good keywords out there they get tons of traffic, but many of them are not worth anyone’s time to target and try to rank for, because there’s just too much darn competition.
Traffic and competition are the two most important factors that you need to consider when targeting keywords and a good keyword research tool will provide statistics on each of these factors to give you a good idea of what you are looking at.
What I Use?
Now I first want to make it clear that there are a lot of different keyword research tools out there that you can use, some free and some that you have to pay for. But what I’m going over here is what I use… Which is called Jaaxy.
Jaaxy is a personal favorite of mine for many reasons. Besides the fact that it provides great statistics on traffic and competition, it also provides additional statistics, related keywords, it allows you to save lists of good keywords, and so on… Oh yeah, and it is cloud-based so there is nothing to download on your computer and you can access it from anywhere.
Below is a simple example of me using Jaaxy. You can see that I searched for “how to ask for a raise”. On the left in the first line it will display the keyword you searched for, and then it will display a bunch of statistics.
- Avg – This is the average traffic that the particular keyword receives on a monthly basis through Google
- Traffic – This is the amount of traffic that you can expect to get if you rank on the first page of Google
- QSR – This is your competition… The amount of competitors out there trying to rank for the same keyword
- KQI – This is just a basic measure of how good the keyword is
- SEO – This statistic takes all the other statistics and mashes them up into one overall score, the higher the better
You can see that I searched for “how to ask for a raise”, which may have seemed like a good keyword at first, but it turns out that it actually is not. There’s just too much competition and the overall score is low. A much better keyword would be “how to ask for salary raise” or even “how to ask for a pay raise”, which are both suggested by Jaaxy.
The Power of Related Keywords
Jaaxy is an absolute master at providing you with similar, but different, keywords and related keywords that you might want to use. Just about every time I use it I end up using a different variation of the keyword that I originally wanted to target because I find something with better statistics.
This way I still write the same exact blog post about the same exact thing, just using a slight variation of the keyword or something along these lines.
But It’s Only One Part of The Equation
But of course this is only one part of the equation. Using an organic keyword research tool and targeting the greatest keywords known to mankind is the first step, the second step is that you MUST create good quality and relevant content.
If you run a website and are constantly putting out a bunch of crap posts that people start to read and then leave right away, then it is not going to work out so well for you. The search engines might originally rank you for the keyword, but there are a lot of things that go into getting ranked and after they see that many visitors are leaving right away, they will likely remove your high ranking.
I’m not going to act like I know everything there is to ranking in search engines, but I do know that the search engine algorithms are getting better and better at displaying good quality search results. We are no longer in the days where you could simply target a keyword and get ranked for some post that took you about 10 minutes to write.
A good organic keyword research tool is absolutely essential if you are looking to drive in laser targeted organic traffic, for 100% free. And this is something that I think pretty much every online marketer should be doing. However, you must also create quality content.
But anyways… I hope you now understand exactly what all this stuff about organic traffic and organic keyword tools are. If you have any questions or comments, or even concerns, please leave them down below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can 🙂