Keyword research is vital if you want your website to be found on the search engines.
Surprisingly, most companies skip this step, most probably because they don’t know how. Luckily you have us to guide you on the right path.
In this article we’re going to take you step by step through the keyword research process. The whole idea behind keyword research is to help you discover which phrases people are entering into the search engines when they are looking for your product. Once you have this information you can create pages specifically targeting those terms.
It’s also worth finding out which phrases are searched most often, as these are obviously more important to optimise for. For example “football boots” may be searched for 500 times a day, whereas “red leather football boots” has only been searched for once this month, you would obviously want to optimise for the term “football boots”.
Step 1. Educated Guess Work
To start we need something to work from. If you know even a tiny bit about your niche, you should be able to come up with some terms you think people are searching for. Using the “football boots” example again, I would guess people might also search for “football trainers” and “football shoes.” Also think about variations of how people type your product in: “football boots” could easily become “boots for football”
Compile a list of ten terms.
Step 2. Ask Google
Google is (currently) the number one search engine in both the USA and UK. If anyone knows what people are searching for, it’s them. Luckily Google does share some of their information for free in two ways: Search Suggestions & Keyword tools. The search suggestion tool is the fastest method of keyword research to date. Just enter a keyword and it will tell you similar phrases people have searched for as well as how many competing pages there are. Unfortunately, what the search suggest doesn’t tell you is how many people before you have searched for the term. It could be just one or it could be millions!
To find out exactly how many people are searching for a term you will need to use Google’s more advanced keyword tool. Fortunately, it’s simple to use. Simply enter one or more keywords and it will present you with the traffic data for those keywords. Sometimes it will offer you alternative keywords as well.
Enter your keywords from Step 1 and compile a new bigger list using the terms Google presents to you.
Update: Some people have recommended keyword research tools such as MNF (Micro Niche Finder) that can speed up your research.
Step 3. Google it
By now you should have a list of atleast 20 keywords, each one relevant to your product. In the future you are going to want to rank on the search engines for these keywords, so we need to find out what the competition is like.
Unsurprinsingly Google will yet again be our source of data. When you are ranking for a search term you are going to want to rank in the first position, as it obviously reaps the lions share of clicks. Knowing this makes keyword research extremely simple, all you need to do is find out who is currently ranked number one, and see if you can beat them.
Presently, we don’t have enough knowledge of search engine optimisation to assess whether or not you will be able to compete with the number one page. So for now just write down the URL’s for later.
The keyword research stage is now complete, you should now know what terms people are searching for, how many times they are searchin, and who is ranking number one for those terms. This is going to be invaluable information going forward.
