Keyword Research and Market Research Are Not the Same Thing

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the difference between Keyword Research and Market Research. How much time, money and significance you place on them is very important.

When the bulk of your research is devoted to “low hanging fruit” keywords rather than “top level online keyword themes” your website keyword strategy will almost certainly be less than optimal.

Some keyword tools can return hundreds even thousands of keywords. But a keyword tool that doesn’t help you uncover which themes are most vital to your campaign is useless. Not knowing this is more than just a hassle; it is downright painful. I am speaking from personal experience.

Once I wrapped my head around vertical market research, I was amazed to discover how entrenched I was in the wrong way of doing keyword research. This realization prompted our Theme Zoom team to create Krakken with its flagship module known as VOMA (vertical online market analysis).

To successfully conduct Market Research a basic understanding of the term Vertical Market is very important.

A “vertical market” is a particular industry or group of enterprises in which similar products or services are developed and marketed using similar methods.

Broad examples of vertical markets are: insurance, real estate, banking, heavy manufacturing, retail, transportation, hospitals, and government.

Generally speaking, thinking about your more competitive “short tail” keywords in terms of verticals makes sense when your goal is to build a Website Silo Architecture that engages dozens (if not hundreds) of mid to short tail keywords that are less vertical than your top-level competitive themes.

For example “car insurance” has over 1 hundred million competing pages over all search engines whereas “car insurance companies Arizona” has just over 1 million and is a locational “niche” rather than a broad vertical keyword.

In this example, both keywords are in the same vertical market however “car insurance” would be higher up in the vertical market because it is a much broader keyword.

In other words, the results pages for “car insurance” would include most of the same results pages as “car insurance companies Arizona” but also a considerable amount more.

Learning about online vertical market research as it connects to the technical aspects of ranking for “broad” keyword phrases provided me early on with a global strategy on how to perform keyword research, but I needed more than just a working theory.

Before the existence of Theme Zoom Krakken there was still a problem when it came to applying knowledge of broad keyword phrases and vertical market research in order to serve clients.

As I said before, with traditional keyword tools, it was almost impossible to know the difference between a “high level theme” keyword and a “low hanging fruit” keyword (sometimes called “high KEI” keywords).

Low Hanging Keyword Fruit Gets a Cold Shower

High level theme keywords are keywords that are worth spending the time and money on to own. Low hanging fruit keywords are often times not even worth a meta-tag and description. They are still very useful to have on your website, but it is important to put them into perspective within the overall structure of your website, blog network, or inbound link campaign. You can often times rank for these keywords with a simple blog post or an article located lower (or deeper) in your website.

You need a way to SYSTEMATICALLY PRIORITIZE the value and location of a keyword within the hierarchy of your online vertical keyword market. You need to give attention to “first things first” and everything else will fall into place with much greater ease.

This is what VOMA (vertical online market analysis) is all about.

With fragmented keyword tools, there is usually no way to understand the relationships between these two species of keywords: (low hanging fruit and high hanging fruit). And worse yet, you will not know how to prioritize the amount of time you spend with each type as you build your online business.

The “big picture” (online vertical market analysis) includes knowing where (on your website) a keyword should live in relationship to another keyword within a similar Market Category

There have been almost no keyword research tools on the market that really took this sort of “big picture thinking” into account. Although there are a few knock-offs trying to follow in Krakken’s footsteps, very few of them have the technical integration and programming staff to integrate authentic co-occurrence or basic latent semantic analysis.

There are some services available that have tried to deliver a global online market view, but they are incredibly expensive and do not really focus on the technical aspects of keyword research, but more on where your current traffic comes from and where the traffic goes when it leaves your website. They are also unable to tell you how to develop a Vertical Online Market Architecture.

Traditional keyword research only reveals the Tip of the Iceberg when it comes to Market Research. Krakken’s VOMA module dives to the depths of the Iceberg conducting vertical online market analysis, allowing users to “Swallow an Entire Keyword Market” whole.

Once you are able to show your client how much money and traffic is in a Vertical Market and/or synonymic set, you can begin the process of building a Silo Website Blueprint integrating the most profitable and important theme clusters and keyword synonyms.

And remember, most of your client’s competitors are still light years behind this kind of research methodology.

Overkill? maybe. Profitable? Absolutely.