Strategizing with Google's Keyword Tool | Hacker News Reader

Strategizing with Google's Keyword Tool

mattmazur.com

17 pointsmatt110 comments

This is a really useful article when it comes to actually applying SEO to your startup/product. SEO has gotten an insanely sleezy reputation over the years, and rightfully so with a lot of the practices people pull. At the end of the day try to ignore the bad rep it's gotten, because it's something you can't overlook when planning out your growth strategy. It can bring you a substantial amount of customers and a leg up over your competition (your competitors (the bigger ones) will spend a lot of money to outdo you in SEO.

As sleezy as it seems to craft your site in a way to increase its pagerank, that's the system we've got and to ignore it is to miss out on a major traffic source.

We had a phrase in college... "Shut up and color" :)

Be careful basing decisions off the keyword tool, it's far from accurate. Comparing sites at #1 on the search results for different phrases there's often little correlation between traffic from those keywords and what the keyword tool predicts. It's a good starting point for experimenting, say to get ideas for A/B testing, but I wouldn't put a lot of money towards something based solely on its results.

Yes, good points -- thank you.

"Free domain"?

His own data shows people are searching for "free domain" and "free domain name" far more often than his declared winner of "available domain".. right?

Maybe he overlooked it because his mind only translated "free" to mean "no money"?

Nah, not overlooked.

Domain Pigeon lists domain names, but it doesn't let you register them for free, which is what I think "free domain" refers to. That's why I didn't consider them much.

Also, I'm afraid of the competition for those terms... "Available domain names" seems like a better fight.

Have you also checked:

available URLs

available websites

available website names?

Just now, yes. For volume:

available URLs - 320 available website - 2600 available websites - 1000 available website names - 1000

So, not bad (a lot better than unregistered), but not as good as the ones that contain the word "domain" too.

Did you try to insert some of the actual free domain names into your ads?

No ads yet; the purpose of this exercise was to find out what to focus the copy on the site. Ads will follow... maybe...

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