Keyword research is the first and most critical step when starting any search engine optimization or pay-per-click advertising campaign. If you do not choose the best keywords for the focus of your campaigns, you will likely be wasting valuable time and money.
Proper keyword research helps assure that a web site will be focused on the exact search phrases that will drive the most effective targeted traffic. While some people feel that all traffic is good traffic, from my perspective, I would rather have 500 people visiting my web site per day who are interested in the services that I offer, than 50,000 visitors who are not. Traffic does not necessarily drive business, but targeted traffic–people who are specifically searching for your products or services–does drive business, and lots of it. The goal should be pull in as much highly targeted traffic as you can get.
Whether you are beginning a search engine optimization project to drive more free traffic to your site, or you are planning a Google AdWords pay-per-click advertising campaign, the key to success with both projects is to select and focus on the keyword phrases that people use most often when searching for your specific offerings.
Performing keyword research is not difficult, but it can be time-consuming. You cannot just take a guess when it comes to doing this critical research.
To begin a keyword research project, make a list of about 10 to 15 search phrases that you think people would use to find your products or services. These are not necessarily the phrases that your company CEO or engineer would use to describe your offerings. Put on your “potential customer’s hat” and pretend that you do not know anything about your company, and list the keyword search phrases you might use if you were searching for the products of services your company offers. This is where the speculation ends.
There are two good free keyword tools available for continuing the research. The first and most important is the AdWords Keyword Tool. With this online tool, you can enter a short list of related search phrases and Google will respond with sometimes hundreds of related search phrases, along with numbers that tell you how often users searched for each of those phrases in Google during the previous month. This information is a gold mine.
Record the number of times each of your initial keyword selections is searched for in Google. Next, add any of the related search phrases that have a significant number of searches to the list.
Another good freebie keyword tool is the WordTracker free keyword suggestion tool. This tool doesn’t use data from any of the major search engines, but rather uses data from meta search engines, such as Dogpile and MetaCrawler. It then extrapolates the number of searches into a prediction regarding how many times each phrase is searched for each month. This tool also includes a list of related search phrases, which can be very valuable. We take any new related search phrases and plug them into the AdWords Keyword Tool find out how often these phrases are searched for in Google.
A third place to find related phrases is the Related Searches found at the bottom of many Google search pages. When a search is performed in Google, Google will try to display a list of closely related search phrases. Almost all of these phrase will appear in the AdWords Keyword Tool, but is is a good way to become aware of related phrases every time you perform a search in Google.
At this point you should have a pretty good list of related search phrases and the number of times each is used in a search. If you are using the list for Google AdWords pay-per-click research, your list should be pretty complete. But if you are using the list for targeting keyword themes for a search engine optimization project, you need one more number for comparison purposes.
The chances for high rankings in Google are strongly related to the amount of competition for each search phrase in Google. The competition is the number of competing pages in Google’s index. To determine this number, enter each phrase into a Google search page and surround the phrase with double quotes. The resulting number of searches found in the upper right side of the page will be an estimate of the number of web pages in Google’s index that use that exact phrase somewhere on the web page.
Record the number of competing pages and place them next to the number of searches in your list. When you find phrases that are searched for very often and have a relatively small number of competing pages, these theoretically are the search phrases that will yield the highest rankings with the most targeted traffic.
