29 August 2012

Keyword Suggestions tool for SEO and market research

Part of my role at Analytics SEO is doing research. It sounds like an excuse to goof off and spend time messing around with natural language processing techniques, search engines and the like. And to be fair it is!

One of the first pieces of research I did was looking into the keyword suggestions offered by search engines. You know when you type something in and a drop-down appears below offering suggestions as to what your search phrase might be?

I wrote a little tool in Python to get these things from Google and Bing and we've recently released a tool for customers to get suggestions. I've had a bash with Google's Webmaster Tools API and found the suggestions there to be, well, shall we say a little odd and irrelevant to the websites I was looking for. In contrast, this new tool is awesome and offers some great keywords that could really spark a campaign.

The best bit is that our keyword suggestions can also be good for market research; and being a suggestion implies that a keyphrase is searched for.

In case you're curious, the main tool for developing this research was Python. The final version is hardened PHP because my code was research-quality only and not made for enterprise-quality use.

1 comment:

Britney Palmer said...

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