Almost all SEO begins with keyword research. Understanding what people are searching for and how many people are searching helps form a solid content strategy.
Beyond the basics, keyword research encompasses many more advanced considerations, including SERP features, keyword search intent, competitive analysis, and even internationalization.
Read the latest Moz posts on keyword research. We’ve also included links to our most popular keyword research resources to help your SEO journey.
Keyword Research : Everything you need to get started with keyword research.
Keyword Research Learning Center : Our free keyword research learning hub. Here, we’ve gathered our top resources in one place.
How To Find A Competitor's Keywords : Find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for with this easy workflow.
Keyword Explorer : Want to dive in? Try our top-rated keyword research tool, with over 500 million keyword suggestions.
Find Striking Distance Keywords With Moz Pro : How to quickly locate, track, and label these keyword opportunities in Moz Pro in this Whiteboard Friday video
I've spent this week putting the finishing touches on our keyword research guide (which will most likely be available--both to purchase and for Premium Members--on Monday). This afternoon I had the pleasure of speaking with Bill Tancer from Hitwise. Bill took me on a walkthrough of Hitwise's Competitive Intelligence tools, which he referred to as their "f...
In the stock market, analysts and traders buy, sell and trade shares in companies based on the speculation of future earnings or declines. Stock pickers attempt to determine which investments will rise and fall based on publicly available information. Slate magazine recently pointed out that even the best stock pickers, however, are generally terrible ...
...fury meaning me, of course :)Yesterday Rand and I were checking out KeyCompete, a fairly new keyword research site. What is KeyCompete? Well, in the site's own words:"KeyCompe...
I worked out a $20 discount with WordZe for SEOMoz readers. This is reduced from the normal price of $45. It only lasts two days, so take advantage of it quickly before the price goes up. Just to refresh your memory, if you're wondering what WordZe is, it's a new keyword research tool. ...
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For a long time, the SEO world has revolved around the idea that KW volume prediction tools could only give relative levels of accuracy, i.e. term X is more popular than term Y. These tools have never been good at fulfilling their true claim - predicting search volume. I set up a campaign to test the predictions of KW research tools like KeywordDiscovery, Overture, Wordtracker, MSN, etc...
One of the most consistent problems I see when conducting site reviews for clients is keyword self-cannibalization - the practice of heavily targeting the same keyword phrase on multiple pages of a site. In my opinion, sites are shooting themselves in the foot when they do this. Let's look at a few quick examples: ...
A year and a half ago, the major search engines got together and talked about the issue of blog spam. Ask didn't attend (although they received an invite), but Google, Microsoft & Yahoo! all sat down (with the creators of popular blog software packages) and found a way to help make links from anonymous sources on the web separa...
Since folks are angling a bit for some hardcore SEO knowledge, I thought I'd take a stab at the thorny and often unproductive process of researching keywords in the long tail. The tail of search queries in a given industry is typically not visible via any of the major KW research programs or search engine ad databases (Overture, Google, MSN). In these instances, there is a research method to fi...
One of the best forum threads I've read in a long time is in progress at Cre8asite. Started by Kim Krause Berg herself, innocently enough with a post about women equalling men online in pure numbers (though it would appear from the latest eMarketer numbers that ...
When it comes to the search engines and country-specific content or searches, there are several obvious variables the engines use to determine the geography of a particular site or company: TLD (.com or .co.uk or .ca for example) Hosting (Is the site hosted in the UK, the US, Canada?) Inbound links (Are they primarily from US sites, UK ...
Mike Schinkel has an older, but golden post on the beauty of URLs. There's nothing revolutionary here, but since I've been seeing so many ugly URLs in the SERPs lately (have hyphens and subdomains made a comeback with BigDaddy or is it just me?), I have to step in. A few of his rules include: Well De...
In my opinion, temporal based data is one of the most valuable kinds of information that feeds into a modern search engine's algorithm. With it, search engines know when terms are getting more popular, when new terms are being used by searchers a...
I am always running the logs on my websites seeing where the traffic is coming from. One of my websites has a blog and I post to that blog almost every day. My initial set-up for that blog had seven posts on the homepage and the archiving was done weekly. After I had been ...
Today has me thinking on the subject of measuring keyword performance. I'm about to begin a relatively large scale campaign on both the organic and PPC side for a client and have wrestled with the neccessary facts and figures to track in order to have reasonable metrics. Here's a sh...