I don’t often blog about Microsoft but they’re really pulling out all of the stops lately when it comes to handing you free keyword research tools.
In my book, Plain & Simple SEO - Simple SEO Tactics that Anyone Can Use and Learn Today, I show you how to use a tool that Microsoft provides that will help you determine if one of your site visitors is actually there to spend money or simply do research.
In this post, I’m going to show you a way to find out what people search on after they’ve searched for a keyword and needed to refine that term.
Not only will this help you refine your search terms for your own site, but you’ll get a look into the psyche of a web searcher to find out how they refine their own search terms in order to get a more relevant search result.
The tool is called “Search Funnels” and here’s how it works:
You enter in a search term, in our case, we used the term “candy”.
Once you click “Go”, it will show you what words web searchers used to refine their initial search.
In our case, people used phrases such as candystand, halloween candy, chocolate, m, and candystand.com.
It also gives you percentages to work with as well. For instance, if you hover over each individual box, this tool will tell you that out of 2,853 searches on “candy”, 3.15% of them, or 90 of those 2,853 searches then searched on “candystand” after first searching on “candy”.
As is usually the case with Microsoft, in order to view the hover correctly so that you can get more details, you must be using Internet Explorer. I’ve tried using Firefox and cannot get the hover to work correctly.
Furthermore, you can refine the keywords to help drill down into more details. For example, if we take the phrase “halloween candy” from above and then enter it into the tool, it will then tell us that of those who searched for that phrase also went on to search for:
* candy
* halloween
* halloween costumes
* halloween trivia
* candy.com
This is a great tool to help determine what your site visitors may be searching for and could very well help you determine where a site visitor may have gone upon visiting your site for a certain keyword.
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