Keyword Research Basics

Keyword research is a process of determining a list of terms your website audience is like to use to arrive at your site and search on it.

Despite all the transformations and new trends in search engine marketing (such as increasing importance of link building and social media promotion), keyword research is still an extremely important part of SEO. Here you can split keyword research into two major approaches – ‘manual’ keyword research and research using keyword research tools.

No matter what technique you decide to use, there are a number of essential step steps involved:

  • Create a seed list of keywords – i.e. list of terms your readers are likely to use

  • Estimate number of searches for each keyword

  • Evaluate competition – how strong SEO-wise are the websites competing for them?

  • Create a short list – pick out the keywords with the high traffic volume and low competition 

Build Keyword List - Manual Approach

Brainstorm – create as comprehensive a list as possible:

  • Who are you? - You company and/or your personal name

  • What products /services you offer? – generic and specific terms and products for your industry

  • Your location? – local optimization is a must for break-and mortar companies

  • Issues you solve? – what specific problems your sites solves?

  • Put yourself in your readers’ shoes – what terms would you be looking for?

  • Keyword variation – use synonyms, as well singular and plural forms for your keywords;

Expand Keyword List

Expand the original keyword list using both laymen and industry-specific terms by using:

  • Team Work – get together with your team members and brainstorm collectively

  • Audience Poll – create a poll for your audience to inquire what terms they use at your site?

  • Attendance Stats – use you website stats to track what keywords your visitors use to arrive at or perform a search on your site
  • Spy on Competitors -  analyze your strongest competitors who occupy the top 5 spots on Google page #1 for your primary keywords

Build Keyword List - Keyword Tool Approach

To enhance your keyword research you should use keyword research tools, and you can find both free and paid keyword suggestion tools on the web.

Enter your main keyword and get a list of relevant keyword ideas to expand your list. Then use the manual approach above to tailor the keywords list to target your specific audience. To get keyword ideas for your product or category pages – enter the seed keywords for these categories and drill down to find a list of related terms. Use keyword popularity (the number of monthly searches) to sort them in the order of importance.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a free keyword research tool provided by Google. Despite being free, it’s also extremely useful tool that offers you a lot of valuable info:

•      Monthly search volumes – offering broad, exact and phrase match

•      Advertiser competition – CPC rate advertiser are paying for the searched keywords;

•      The largest keyword database on the web

Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool

This is another free keyword research tool that uses both Overture and free WordTracker databases and gives you quick estimate of keyword popularity. The databases are smaller than that of Google keyword tool, but the advantage is that you can compare results from 2 independent databases side by side.

Paid  Keyword Tools

There is also a number of paid keyword research tools out there like WordTracker and Keyword Discovery, but their review is outside the scope of this article.

 Evaluate Keywords

After compiling the fullest possible list of keywords you need to evaluate which of them are most valuable to you and for this you can use the following 3 criteria:

•      Relevance – does your website offers information relevant to the keyword in question?
•      Competition – how many sites are competing for your keywords and how strong those sites are?
•      Demand – what’s the monthly search volume for the selected keyword(s)?
 

Evaluating Relevance

The idea of evaluating keyword relevance is to establish how strong the connection (if any) is between the keyword and what your site has to offer. Relevant keyword should also tie-in nicely with your website goals. If keyword is irrelevant, than trying ranking for it would be a waste of time, money and resources as this traffic will have negligible conversion.

Estimating Competition

There a number of search operators in Google that allow you to estimate strength of competition for any keyword, and the following approaches and operators are sufficient to do the job:
 
Simple Search – just enter your keyword in Google search box and find out the number of web pages featuring those terms. This is more an estimate of keyword popularity rather than the competition.
Search in quotes – just enter your key phrase in quotes and see how many pages target the keywords. The number of searches thus found would be reflecting both keyword popularity and, in part, the competition.
 allintitle: – this search operator reflects the number of pages that have your keyword in page titles and is a very sensitive indicator of the competition.
allinanchor: – this search operator gives you the number of web pages that have backlinks with your keywords in anchor – which is usually an accurate indicator of the websites actively building/getting links and also extremely sensitive sing of competition.
 
After compiling all of the above data for your keywords rate the competition strength on the scale of 1 to 5 (lowest to highest) referring to the search results mentioned above. Read the article “Discover keywords that pay” if you wish to know details of in-depth keyword research.

Estimating Demand

To estimate demand for your keywords use any of the above free keyword research tools (e.g., Google Adwords keyword tool) to get the number of exact-match monthly searches. Bear in mind though that none of the keyword tool databases are complete and hence you should not rely on getting absolute number of searches but only a rough estimate. On the other hand, relative keyword popularity can be estimated quite accurately with the help of such tools.

Shortlist Keywords

Now it’s time to scour your keyword list to pin down the terms worth targeting for your SEO campaign based on keyword popularity, relevance and competition. In general, you would be looking for 3 types of keywords:

Brand Keywords

Keywords with your company name or personal name will not that important when you just launched your business, but with time, when your brand gets known, may become good sources of traffic-getters for your website.

 High-Relevance and High-Demand Keywords

These are your best bets to get high traffic and great conversion, but the result will of course depend on your SEO effort and the competition.

 High Relevance and Low Competition Keywords

Some highly relevant terms may have low keyword popularity ( search volume), but if the completion for them is low and the search volume is non-zero, you may still want to target those keywords as they have a strong potential to offer great conversion.
 
In general, there are a couple guidelines you can use to short-list your keywords: avoid including either irrelevant or low search volume keywords (unless they are extremely relevant) into your final list.
 
 Depending on your site size, you should end with anything between 20 to 50 keywords in your list, and if you sites is really large – this number extends to over 100.

Now that you have created a tentative short-list of keywords, it’s time for competition analysis.

Tagged with: • •

Filed under: SEO Basics

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!