Bird’s Eye View of Market Research vs. Keyword Research

Why You are Probably Missing The Big Picture

Most marketers online mistakenly confuse keyword marketing research with marketing research and no wonder why with all the keyword and marketing tools out today. In fact most internet marketing research until recently has focused on keyword research, and simplistically looked at which keywords have the most potential to be used to sell a product or service. The landscape is quickly changing and it is a good plan now not to just shoot at the first level of low hanging keywords or the long tail combination of some set of keywords without also getting a bird’s eye view on your market’s landscape. Whether you are doing Pay Per Click, SEO or Targeted advertising it has become seriously advantageous to know how keywords fit into your larger market geography.

Discovering the relationship between keywords and important market phrases and the various market segments which are relevant and best chance sellers for your USP is your end goal.  You must have a global or wider lens view your market so you can see alternate vantage points with which to enter your marketplace. This allows you to chart a strategy for all possible and best segments to enter within your market and capture on your website for the best return on your time and monetary investments. If you decide to go after the easy to rank sectors of your market then you can feel good knowing you passed on other areas because of difficulty to enter those areas. If you can see where the easier money might be made in your niche you can also get to it more rapidly rather than going after larger market sectors.

So where to start? When researching your market using all these keyword and marketing tools out there which can drive you mad at their sheer volume what do you need to know? It seems all of them have different functions and features making it so impossible to know if you are missing out on some gem of data you need. Well once you know what to look for you will realize that depending on what type of marketing you are doing there are only so many things you can know before entering. This is a problem for most marketers and they never get going because they feel they just don’t have enough data to enter a market.

The best thing you as a marketer can do is to find basic free tools which give you a large part of what you need to know to enter a market and then supplement that information with one to three paid tools. The very first place to begin is with the Google External Keyword tool and the Google Search based keyword tool. I actually stumbled across their search based keyword tool months ago and found some awesome functions that at the time no one I knew of was talking about. What I realized was that this tool along with another tool called Google Insights would allow me to pick up on new trending long tail keywords. These keywords were growing in popularity and could be used to add relevant articles to my sites.

The Google Search Based Keyword Tool would also allow me to garner valuable information about market themes or areas which were bigger to consider as site topics. Combine these three tools together and you have the ability to gather up relevant semantical areas to your main market topic, discover new niches and long tails within your marketplace, and build a siloed and themed website without the need for paid tools. I will get into some paid tools which make this process even more valuable and easy later, but for now let’s see what these tools can do.

Market Research Versus Keyword Research Can Make Sense
Author: Scott Holden TrafficEraBlog