One of the biggest mistakes I see when it comes to analyzing keyword research is the singular focus on keyword traffic.  Don’t get me wrong, traffic is very important.  However, we sometimes get overzealous when looking at the projected traffic metrics when it comes to keyword research.  Clients see high traffic numbers in your keyword research reports and start drooling.  “We want the traffic, get us that traffic,” they clamor!  Just focusing on traffic, however, overlooks higher-level analysis points of keyword research.

Generally speaking, there are three major phases of analyzing keyword research:

1. Traffic
2. Competition
3. Conversion Rate

Traffic

Once you have a pretty good list of possible SEO keywords, you are going to want to look at the traffic projections for each keyword.  There are many tools out there to help you find these projections.  My favorite is the Google Keyword Tool.  Even though this is an AdWords tool, I still like to use it for SEO keywords.  I’m not really looking at absolute traffic numbers when I use this tool (or any tool, for that matter).  I’m really just looking at relative traffic estimates to compare each individual word against the larger list.

Competition

The next factor to look at after you get traffic estimates is to try to get a feel for each keyword’s competitiveness.  You can do this a number of different ways.  At a very basic level, you can look at the total number of results Google returns for a given query.

The query widget has 129,000,000 results.

This method, however, is a rather basic way to look and competition.  A more effective way to judge the competitiveness of a keyword is to look at how many results are returned when you use some of the advanced search operators such as intitle and inanchor.  When we combine these operators together, we can see how many results contain our keyword in both the title tag of the web page and the anchor text point to the page.  This is our direct SEO traffic.

Ideally you will want to target keywords that have higher levels of traffic and lower levels of competition.  Of course, higher trafficked terms tend to have higher competition levels, so you will have to make a decision as to whether or not you will be able to rank highly for words with high levels of traffic and competition.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the most overlooked point of analysis when it comes to search engine optimization keyword research.  Too many times, SEO consultants look at traffic and competition and then make their decision on which keywords to target.  Missing the critical step of analyzing conversion rates means that you may be choosing keywords that will send a high volume of visitors, but that may not convert when they get to the site.

Sometimes, you will be able to look into your analytics package to see historical conversion rates for keywords that you are thinking about targeting.  However,  many times you may find yourself in situations where your goals were not set up properly in your analytics package (or your goals have changed), or you were not getting much traffic to these target phrases so you do not have a statistically significant sample to pull conversion data from.

In scenarios where you do not have reliable conversion data to draw conclusions from, it is best to test your keywords in PPC.  Testing your keywords in PPC allows you to see what keywords drive the most traffic, have high or low levels of competition, and convert at the highest rates.  You can even test different landing pages to determine which keyword should be targeted to a specific page.

It is easy to get caught in the trap of simply looking at traffic and competition levels when doing SEO keyword research.  Adding conversion rate metrics into the analysis process adds an additional level of confidence that the keywords you decide to target not only generate traffic, but generate the right traffic that converts on your site.