As you may already be aware, keyword research is one of the most important aspect of your SEO campaign as your goal is to get the most traffic out of those keyword searches. Using proper research methods, you can learn valuable information on your customers. With active keyword research, you can follow market trends, shifts in demand and other useful industry information.Why The Need For Keyword Research ?
As you may already know, the search engines track everything that goes into that little search box. That information is a gold mine they are holding on to and release only a bit of that information to the end user for research purposes. So we have to take advantage of every single bit of information that is available to us. If you want to succeed with your website SEO, you have no choice but to go through a proper keyword research to determine exactly what niche, industry, keywords etc… you will be targeting.First Step – Initial Research
1. Search for the keyword or keyword phrase on major search engines.Once your search is made, look at the top and right-hand side… Do you see sponsored (advertisers) listings. Normally if you see many sponsored listings, it usually means it is a targeted keyword and is prone to bringing in sales. When you see multiple advertisements on top (since they do not always appear), it means the keyword is highly targeted and can probably bring in a very good conversion rate. Screen shot below is an example of a highly popular keyword search.
Those 10 keywords should be ones you researched above and came up with many advertisers. Of course, those have to be relevant to what you do or sell on your website.
Once you have those, it’s time to put them to the test and see if you were really right about choosing those keywords.
3. Let’s not forget the long tail keywords.
One of the things we can’t control is how a web surfer will search on search engines. People use many different combination of words to form their search. In fact, all those popular search keywords represent usually only 35% of the traffic of all the keywords combined in that industry. That is due to the “long tail keyword” searches. If you sell “shirts” and you are targeting that keyword, then “shirts” will be a primary and popular keyword and “short sleeve shirts” will be a long tail keyword. So all those combined make up for 65% of the traffic.
Now of course, optimizing for all of them is a big job, so people generally will choose between 8 to 10 biggest keywords to work on. Keep in mind as well that if you are properly optimized for major keywords, then long tail keywords containing your major ones should improve in rankings as well. You will need proper landing pages as well in order for it to be optimized. You can find more information about on-page optimization and content optimization on our blog.
Second Step – Bring in Those Tools
Now it’s time to juice all the tools we can find on the internet to help us with our keyword research. I will show you how to combine information to get the most out of your research.Online Tools for Keyword Research
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Use this tool to check the popularity of your keywords that you have gathered up in Step 2. It gives you information such as Competition, Global Monthly Searches, Local Monthly Searches and Search Trend.
It will also suggest other keywords that might be more popular that might have slipped your mind. So this is a good tool to make sure you get popular targeted keywords for your website. Once you have conducted that research, edit your list of keywords to be once again 8 to 10 keywords maximum but remove the ones less popular and less relevant from the list.
When using this tool, you would normally want to use the option: “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”. If not, it might show some very irrelevant results to your suggestions.
Important: If you are doing SEO for a specific market, make sure you use the “Advanced Options” and you select the Location and Language so your Local Monthly Searches will show Country specific information.
As the name suggests, use this tool to estimate how much traffic specific keywords can bring in. This tool is meant for Adwords, so it will give you estimates based on bids and percentages of people clicking on the sponsored listings. This should give you a pretty good idea of which keywords can bring in quality traffic which can then convert to sales on your website.
Google Search Trends
This tool will show you how users search over time. The different trend graphs and data for your keywords. This tool is great to follow up with your seo campaigns and discover new keywords and new trends online to target your audience.
Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
This is a very powerful tool providing you with keyword data along with numbers and stats for them. It helps you find money-making keywords with high conversion rates.
I hope you enjoyed this post. There is much more to keyword research but we will leave some for other interesting posts to come.
Feel free to comment on this article if you have questions relevant to keyword research or just to tell me you like it
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