Doing Proper Keyword Research
Two of the most popular forms of internet marketing are pay per click advertising and search engine optimization. A major part of both of these is keyword research. Proper keyword research is crucial to doing any real internet marketing. Here are 4 tips to help you with your keyword research.
- Make a thorough list. Coming up with the right keywords can be easy to start to pick primary keywords, but choosing good long-tailed keywords can often be harder to do. Try to think as the customer thinks and put every example you can think of. It’s always good to have a full list, then go over it later and revise it to pick out ideal keywords, the ones that have the best chance of conversion. Fill out your list to have more than necessary, then afterwards go back through and revise this list to specifically target your market.
- Use a good keyword tool. There are several keyword tools available that can help expand your keyword list, both paid and free. Paid ones include services like NicheBot and AdWordAccelerator. Free ones can be just as good, and one of the most popular ones is straight from Google, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. There’s also the free version of WordTracker. Using these keyword tools can help expand on your keyword list nicely.
- Make all keyword adjustments as necessary. There are often some small details that can make a big difference in the popularity of the keyword phrase, such as synonyms or spelling. Depending on what country you’re targeting, a word such as “optimization” may be more frequently searched for spelled as “optimisation”. Other adjustments such as testing between synonymous words can work, such as “car” and “auto”, or “cash” and “money”. Having a full keyword list to test with is always better, so try to come up with every possible variation you can to get your list.
- Find out who searches for which keywords. In many cases you may have what you would imagine to be an ideal keyword, then realize too late that the keyword is commonly used in a completely different way. The word “dealer” could be intended to target a car dealership, but may end up drawing the majority of traffic from people looking for casino-based information. Proper keyword research will find out who is searching for the keywords used before spending money on these keywords to find out the hard way.
After doing proper keyword research and creating a full list, be sure to use methods to reduce your keywords to a very specific grouping of keywords that targets your customer specifically. You want to get keywords that convert, so being careful with your keyword research can make a large difference in your results. This can often save time and a lot of money in your internet marketing efforts.
Eric Gesinski runs Tulsa Marketing Online doing Tulsa website design and Tulsa SEO.
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13 Responses to “Doing Proper Keyword Research”
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Doing Proper Keyword Research | Daily SEO Tip http://dailyseotip.com/doing-proper-keyword-research/802/
Doing Proper Keyword Research | Daily SEO Tip http://dailyseotip.com/doing-proper-keyword-research/802/
Don’t forget about Google Insights. This is a great tool to identify which keywords are trending up (or down) in terms of search volume. In some cases, what you think may be a strong strategic keyword actually won’t be all that valuable in the long term.
Eric Reply:
May 3rd, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Nice point – there are a ton of extra tools that can be used to help keyword research, I tried including the major ones. Google Trends is also a big help for checking trending.
I would like to add few more points :
Keyword research is all about identifying potential keywords for optimizing your website.So while doing keyword research you need to keep three things in mind ie RELEVANCY,SEARCH VOLUME,& COMPETITION.
Please feel free to contact me if you need Free SEO Consultation
Samaresh Bisoi
CEO & Web Consultant
SamareshWebSolutions.com
Keep in mind google trends too.
But the main thing to look for is the level of competition for the exact match of each keyword.
See the number of backlinks/authority that the top 3-5 sites have to see if you have a chance of ranking well for a particular keyword.
Keep in mind google trends
A common mistake is people looking at broad volumes as when you look at exact it may show that it’s pointless to target. Long tails are so important in conversions.
Keyword research will help you decide what topics to target. Remember that using keywords in the blog post title is a must.
Proper keyword research will help make you money. Use the Google tool even if you are just trying to make money with Adsense. Pay close attention to the competition. The higher the competition the more money that will be paid for each person that clicks the ads.
Thanks for the tips. Its really a big help for doing proper keyword research..Nice one!
The important thing I can find on this article is, “How we know if we can rank that keywords or not”.. That’s happen to me (and maybe every noobs), I always failed to rank my keywords… Any tips for this?
I remember seeing something on You Tube about the client meeting an SEO consultant. The client wants to rank for ‘Fish’ or ‘Britney Spears’ as it gets lots of hits. It was taking the piss a little as you can imagine but this is what we come up against at times… zero understanding!
These are very nice tips when one is looking for the right key words to use. Just as you have put it you need to know what people are looking for and give it to them.