Keyword research is the process of finding out which keywords are going to be the easiest to compete for and still have enough traffic value to make them work using. Keyword research is an integral part of search engine optimization. One of the strategies the Internet marketers have at their disposal is keyword research. Although many people do not use keyword research, the most successful Internet marketers always do. That’s because while you can get a certain amount of traffic by writing content without being concerned with search volume, the monthly search numbers on most long tail keywords are so low that they are not worth pursuing.
If you want to be ranked high in the search results, then you have to find keywords that are going to be easy to compete with but also have a certain amount of traffic. Writing blog posts takes work, and if you are optimizing around a list of keywords, then you want to be sure that there are enough people typing those keywords into the search engines to make it worth writing the content in the first place.
How to do Keyword Research
There are a lot of ways out there that you can do keyword research. Most people use a keyword tool. There are a number of keyword research tools out there such as the Google keyword planner, which tells you the volume of search traffic and gives you ideas for new search queries. The Google AdWords keyword tool is a free tool provided by Google, intended for use in AdWords campaigns but extremely useful for finding keywords to optimize around as well.
Expert Tips: The Step-by-Step Process of Researching Keywords
Let’s look at some expert tips for doing keyword research in a step-by-step format that will make it very easy to understand the process and start your own keyword research; even if you have never done it before.
- Figure out what kind of keywords the customers that you are trying to target will type into the search engines in order to find products like yours. For example, someone looking to buy a part for their car online will usually enter things like the make and model of their vehicle combined with a search term like ‘car parts’ or the name of the specific part that they are looking for. The best way to figure out some general search terms to start with is by typing in partial keywords such as ‘car parts’ into Google and seeing what sort of longtail keywords come up. Remember, these are just supposed to give you a list of general ideas. These are not the keywords that you will be using.
- The next step in the process is generating a list of keywords to research. Take some of your ideas and plug them into the Google AdWords keyword tool or another online tool that allows you to do keyword research. If you type in short keywords, then you’re going to mostly get short keywords back which are difficult to compete with. If you type in longtail keywords as your base keyword, then you will get more results among longtail keywords. Create a list of keywords that you think buyers will use and put them into an Excel worksheet.
- The next step in the process is to determine whether those keywords have too much competition for you to optimize your content around. There are a number of ways that you can go about this. There are lots of experts out there that will tell you their own method, but the truth is, many different methods can be used to determine a keyword’s viability. For example, you can use a browser add-on that will tell you the page rank of sites on the first page of results for that keyword phrase, you can look for the number of sites that have that keyword in their HTML title, you can check the number of back links that a website has and there are various other ways as well.
- The fourth step is to compile a list of keywords that have at least some traffic and very little competition. The more competition that a keyword has, the more you’re going to have to use search engine optimization techniques like back linking to rank high for that keyword. But if you optimize around keyword that someone searches for only five or six times a year, then you are wasting your time completely.
Long-Term Benefits of Keyword Research
What most people do not realize is that keyword research is more than just the here and now proposition. While it is true that you will get traffic for optimizing around a keyword, you also get more authority in the eyes of the search engines for each keyword that you optimize around that has to do with your main topic. For example, if your site is about car parts, the more longtail keywords that you have optimized for in that particular category – and especially the number of keyword phrases that you are ranking high for – the more authority you will have with Google and the other search engines.
It is all about building traffic. You can start off small, optimizing around just a few keyword phrases, and then continue to add content to your site with different keyword phrases optimized and you will slowly grow your traffic and get ranked higher and higher in the search engines for most or all of your keyword phrases if you follow good SEO practices. Good search engine optimization is more than just optimizing for keyword phrases that your site should be using.
- Search engine optimization involves
- creating the right subheadings,
- publishing content often,
- making sure that your website loads quickly
- and several hundred other details.
Why People Don’t Do Keyword Research
There are more than a few websites out there that are commercial in nature that do no keyword research whatsoever. Most of the time, this is because keyword research seems extremely complicated. To someone that is never done it before, it can be intimidating. But keyword research can be learned quickly and you can turn the amount of traffic that you get with no keyword research into ten times or a hundred times more traffic when you begin optimizing for keyword phrases. People also don’t do keyword research because they have heard the organic site growth is best. While that is true for back linking, it is not true when it comes to doing proper keyword research and search engine optimization.
