Keyword Research Using Yahoo Answers

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Finding the right and most relevant keyword phrases that users are going to enter in as search terms can be one of the hardest tasks when it comes to search engine optimization.

Keyword research using many of the keyword tools can provide you with a huge list of the terms used – but not how they are used. Knowing the relationship of a keyword and the search phrase used can help to fine tune your search engine optimization efforts.

Working hard on a keyword and getting it to number one in the SERP’s could be a total waste of your optimization efforts if the search phrase itself relates to a different area to your website. Here is a very broad example, but I am sure you will follow my rationale.

You have a football site and you work hard to get the term “football” to the top of the SERP’s. However you notice the traffic coming from organic search has a high bounce rate. The reason behind the high bounce rate and the keyword ‘football’ can be found in the actual search phrase entered by users.

Users may be looking for football results, how to play, where to watch, where to buy or where to place a bet. Your web site is obviously not providing the searcher with what they are looking for. Knowing the actual search phrase could be a huge advantage.

If you use a keyword search tool as part of your program then you may be able to determine some of the phrases used. In the above example a keyword tool may show high results for ‘play football’, ‘bet on football’ and other phrases. This is valuable information but it still doesn’t give us the whole story.

Sites such as Yahoo! Answers can help fine tune your research even further. Simply typing in football will return over 150,000 questions on the subject. By reviewing some of these questions you may get a feel for the kind of information being sort and perhaps the keywords that could be used in your SEO program to snare extra traffic.

Football is probably too broad an area to use in reality, however if you have a niche site then the information found in sites such as Yahoo! Answers could be invaluable to your search engine optimization strategies.