Keyword research is the process of finding the words or phrases that visitors would use to find your site. You want to find words or phrases that are relevant to your site and that you can RANK WELL on the search engines. Some words are too generic or competitive and millions of sites would come up. You need to find more specific words and phrases that would help a user find you. Some ways to do this are to combine words into a phrase that is commonly searched and include such things as your geographic location.
Where do I find good keywords?
Finding good keywords is a process.
- Brainstorming: It starts out with brainstorming for a full set of words that describe what you are about.
- What services or goods do you offer?
- Is there a niche area you can write about?
- What search strings are your competitors using? (You can view their source code)
- What words do your customers use to find you? Look at google keyword research results, look in your emails from them and ask them.
- Evaluating Your Keyword List: Your list will most likely be quite large. Now you have to focus on which are good keywords. You want to evaluate both the search volume (how many people are searching) and the competition. To evaluate the search volume you can use the Adwords Keyword Tool provided by Google. You want to find keywords with 50 or more searched a day. Google will also provide you with some other suggestions of related keywords. Make sure to put in the correct local location. You will be given both locacl (your country) and global results.
- Evaluating Level of Competition: Enter your top keywords into Google and see how many competing pages there are. Check the page rank for the top sites. You should check how many links the top sites have- this will tell you if it will be hard or easy to beat them. You will also find over time that new words come up. You can either go back and change your pages or create new optimized pages that meet your new strategy. Successful sites are content rich (with good quality, interesting content) and have many pages that are optimized for different search strings. These pages bring in new visitors who hopefully are encouraged to sign up for your newsletter, purchase, contact you, return or share.
Good FREE Keyword Research Tools
- Google Keyword Research Tool – Shows search data, helps you identify related keyphrases, generates a list of negative keywords.
- Google Sets – Enter your keyphrase and receive a “set” of related terms.
- Google Trends – Provides charts that show traffic volume, regional popularity.
- Thesauri – Early research can use a thesaurus to discover more related keywords.
- Google Suggest (Google’s Thesaurus) – Suggestion made as you type in an search word.
- Google Analytics – You need this on your site! Ask us to set it up 🙂 Besides traffic statistics, it can show which keyphrases are the most successful. Start monitoring what works!
