In the field of search marketing, key word research is one of the most valuable return activities that are used by search engine optimization professionals to get to know what are the actual popular words people enter into the search engines.
By conducting keywords research, you not only learn which terms or phrases to target with SEO for a better ranking in the delivered search results, but also you know more about your customers overall.
Not just for the purpose of ranking, knowing how to do key words research will also help you to better respond to the changing market demands, content that web users are already frequently searched and so on… which is not an overstatement of its usefulness.
So let’s get started by following the 3 steps:
1. Generate Ideas
– Brainstorm: ask yourself what are the keywords that may relevant to your website and generate a list for your keywords. This includes technical terms or branded keywords that people might use to discover your website.
– Reviewing your competitors’ website so that you know what what other business are targeting and profiting from.
– Use Google keywords tool. This is a quite useful tool as it gives key words search volumes and PPC (pay per click) competition.
Another beauty of this is that you can export the results to Excel! Just check adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. Gather data
We can use the following tool to assist you in gathering data and looking at your data metrics from different perspectives.
– Volumes (Google Keyword Tool): By looking at the volumes you can see if there are already enough people actually searching for the particular product or service you are trying to sell.
If not, it’s might worth re-evaluating the target market you are aiming to enter. There is not a strict number for the definition of ‘enough volume’; but I would suggest to go after the words with at least 1,000 exact match searches per month.
– Competition: Use Google Keyword Tool or SEOmoz to test how competitive your keywords are. There are types of keywords that are too competitive to go after. Those keywords are dominated by big names with considerable advertising expense that you may not have.
You can check the back link profile of the top 5 ranking websites in Google for the words you are considering. If the websites listed at the top of the search engine results page with a high domain authority with thousands of unique linking domains; then this definitely alerts you to think twice about your key words.
The recommended strategy is to go after the longtail search phrases first or consider a less competitive market.
3. Make decisions
With all the data on hand, now you can filter you data, use your experience and focus on what you want to target.
The following key words research tools really are handy and practical. I would recommend to use them for your keywords research.
– Google Adwords Keyword Tool It’s the most accurate tool in my opinion.
– OpenSiteExplorer.org: This is a back-link analysis tool that helps you identify how many inbound links your competitor’s website has so that you know how many links need to develop to compete with top domains in your market.
– SEMRush: It looks at the organic and paid search keywords of your competition so that you will have an idea of what the lucrative keywords are in your target market.
– Excel Spreadsheet: Of course this old tool is too classic not to mention.
Image Credit: Cristain P Cardenas
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