The basics:
When creating keyword lists for your American, German or French sites, you turn to Google for keyword suggestions. But what do you do in Russia?
Google is not very good with Russian semantics, besides the amount of searchers in Google.ru is not that high. Is Google.ru keyword data reliable? Who is using Google? Can it help to find good keywords to get traffic from Yandex? Well well.. Google keyword suggestion tool is good, however I recommend to use Yandex Keyword tool as a primary source of ideas.
Yandex keyword tool, also known as Wordstat, gives related to your term keywords and monthly search volumes (I presume it is what we know as “broad match” in Google). Unfortunately you cannot enter several keyword phrases at once, so the process of generating keyword list will take a while.
Wordstat – keyword tool of Yandex
Another nice feature of Wordstat is trended search volume data. Yandex shows search trends for specific keywords on weekly and monthly basis.
Wordstat search trends
Speaking about trends I would like to mention another search trend visualization tool “Yandex Interests”. It is a somewhat simplified copy of Google Insights. It shows search trends only for 50 most searched terms in a given months. Kind of useless, but can be fun to play with.
Alternative sources of keyword data:
I really love the SEO Rate service, developed by one of the Russian companies. SEO Rate analyzes visibility of websites across 5 Russian search engines (Yandex, Google, Rambler, Aport and Live) and popularity of search queries.
All sites and queries are divided into 50+ categories. Pick the one you are interested in, look at the top 20 sites related to your topic, analyze their keywords!
Sites with best visibility in “SEO” category
The most searched queries are also interesting to look at, however the categories are quite broad so you will have to filter the keywords extracted from there.
How to switch to “Keyword” mode in SEO Rate
Yandex search suggest:
Yandex search suggestions
Yandex search suggestions are used by approximately 50% of searchers, therefore it is important to monitor those. However, do not rush to optimize your pages for keywords, which you find in search suggestions. The suggestions tend to change rather often.
Now go and try out the tools!
[…] Selection in linked to Yandex’s keyword tool also known as Yandex Wordstat. The tool provides keyword ideas and monthly search volumes for […]