Keyword Research-Factors to consider

When doing a keyword research, there are quite a few factors that need particular attention and that are often underestimated. Below are some examples:

Seasonality

If you base your keywords research only from local search from the previous month, you may be risking basing your research on misleading sets of data. The reason behind this is that search patterns naturally change throughout the year and there a broad range of keywords that might be affected by seasonality factors. Imagine you are a company that sells sports merchandise and that wants to identify which Australian sport is the most popular and searched. If the company decides to run a search in May, it will probably think that rugby is the most searched term – see below.

A good way to evaluate seasonality factors is to use Google Insights (as shown in the example above) and the new Google Keyword tool. This tool is only available through your Google Adwords account. The difference between this and the keyword tool available to public search results, is that this(logged in version) gives you the ability to see traffic data month by month. The representation of the above data in the keyword tool will be as follows:

This shows you in details how the distribution of searches varies throughout the year.

Search volumes predictions

Search volume predictions can affect your keyword research. For example, in the information technology industry, new terminologies are constantly being created and others becoming obsolete. Volume predictions can sometimes be identified by global search volumes and global search trends. An indication of how search volumes may vary can be obtained with the tools mentioned above (Google Insights and keyword tool).

See below some example of terms that show increase in Google trends, and have high search volumes worldwide but not yet in Australia:

Google Insights worldwide results for “cloud computing”

Google traffic results for “cloud computing” in Australia

Google Insights results for “mobile seo” worldwide

Google Traffic results Australia for the keyword “mobile seo”

Keep in consideration the global trends especially in similar markets; this might give you an indication on how search trends will develop in the near feature.

British and American spelling dilemma

In the English language, there are a variety of terms that vary according to the British or American spelling. Surprisingly enough there are quite a lot of words that have American spelling but that are highly searched in the Australian market.

See some of the example below:

It is important to not underestimate search volumes around the spelling variation of search terms as they may be commonly used in other markets. Similarly other words belonging to other languages such as French or Spanish might suffer from the same dilemma.

See rbronzi's author page for links to connect on social media.