Review: The Professional’s Keyword Research Guide

[image no longer available] My initial reaction to SEOmoz’s The Professional’s Guide to Keyword Research was one of disappointment. I guess I was expecting something more strategic, along the lines of our own Keyword Research and Selection link. But the more I continued reading through the pages of SEOmoz’sKeyword Guide, the more I appreciated the detail and thoroughness of the information provided.

Keyword Guide takes you step by step though just about every keyword research resource available. The big (and obvious) research providers are discussed, such as Overture, WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, etc, but so are the less obvious resources such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Key Compete, Spyfu and more.

The real value here is in the step-by-step outlining of what each service can do, what kind of information you can glean from them, complete with accompanying screen shots. I have to admit, however, that I did get a bit confused while moving from page to page. On many pages there was only a single bullet point and screen capture, but these often did not correlate with each other. The bullet point would on one page and the screen capture on the next. A bit more consideration into the page formatting would have ensured that each screenshot would appear on the same page with the proper bullet point. No worries, though. Once I figured out what was going on it was clear sailing.

The final section “Best Practices for Keyword Targeting” felt out of place with the rest of the research report, but others may disagree. These pages were more about how to implement your keyword research into your SEO campaign, which is a departure from the documents core structure of being about keyword research and sources. That easily could have been a document by itself. But either way, the reader is not losing anything by it’s inclusion.

The SEOmoz Keyword Research document is a great companion to our own Definitive Guide to Gathering, Sorting, and Organizing your Keywords into a High Performance SEO Campaign. Our (free) document deliberately avoids the research resources that SEOmoz covers with such detail and depth, and provides a strategic format for performing the actual research in order to produce a solid and well organized result. Together these documents will provide you with just about everything you need to know for effective keyword research.

The SEOmoz Keyword Research document has already been put to use in our office as we look for extra keywords in those very niche markets. The plethora of research resources out there are all nicely encapsulated into this SEOmoz document, which makes it a great resource as we look for new avenues to dig up important keywords.