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Key-Word; To get true understanding of how important this is for your website’s optimization, lets reverse it and say “words that are key to what people are searching for.” Because this is what keyword research is all about. Search engines are the place people go to the most when looking for something, and it’s a fact that your website has to be on the first page to be found. In this article we will explore how to effectively perform keyword research.
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Why Do Keywords Matter?
Google holds all the cards when it comes to search engines. The whole purpose of Google (besides making a lot of money) is to match up websites with customer needs. The customer in this case is the searcher. There are millions and millions of keywords, and everyday there are thousands of new keywords being created. It’s your job to research which keywords are relevant to your website and rank for them – that’s the bottom line. If you’re successful, then you will capture a portion of that coveted “free traffic.”
Step 1 – Keyword Research: Where to Start
The market you’re appealing to uses certain terms, these terms are the beginning of your keyword research. The rule of thumb with keywords is “the longer the word, the less searches it gets.” As an example: if you search for “cat food,” you’ll find 315,000,000 results. If you search for “cat food for older cats,” then the results drop to 3,490,000 – quite a difference. Now, as logic dictates, the more search traffic a keyword gets, the more competitive it will be to rank for. To Do List: Write down several keywords relevant to the customers you want to attract to your website.
Step 2 – Keyword Tools
There’s software that will save you loads of time finding keywords. The following are fairly popular tools used today. We are not making any particular recommendations, but we would suggest you take a look and get familiar with these tools: 1. Micro Niche Finder 2. Market Samurai 3. Long Tail Pro 4. Wordstream The purpose of this software is to organize and analyze a ton of random keyword data. This will be the data you use to determine which keywords you’ll go after. So your question is, where does this data come from? Most of the data comes from Google. Google’s Keyword Tool: You can go to the source and use Google’s keyword tool for Free! You can use the tool without opening an Adwords account, but some features are omitted and it’s kind of a hassle to log-in. To Do List: Check-out the Google tool first. Get familiar with both the free and paid tools; now lets do some research.
Step 3 – Doing the Research
You’ll start with your major keyword, lets continue with the keyword “cat food.” You enter this in the keyword tool and it will spit out hundreds of related keywords. There will be columns to the right – a lot of the numbers that won’t make any sense to you in the beginning.
Filtering: Depending on the software used, you can select only the columns of importance. What we suggest is: local monthly search, competition, and approximate cpc.
Local Monthly Search: The results in this category are for the US only. There is an option for “global search,” but the local seems to be more accurate for your purposes.
Competition: Paid tools will generally analyze this data for you, and the results will readout in colors – green (low competition, you have a good chance to rank for this term), yellow (medium competition), red (highly competitive, you need to be highly skilled at search engine optimization to rank for these terms).
Approximate CPC: This column is the high end price advertisers pay for adword ads. If you plan to use adsense to monetize your site, then this information is important. It also give you and idea of the keywords value.
The best advice we can offer is – build a list of relevant keywords, then start building pages with the less competitive keywords and learn SEO (search engine optimization) – this is the process used for getting your website ranked (1st page of Google). This is an entirely different process, but once you have success ranking the less competitive keywords, then it’s time to move up – you will be successful if you are diligent in doing the process.
Ben Sawyer is an SEO consultant for Paramold, ecommerce website. Here he explained the importance of a keyword research for every SEO based campaign.
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