Keyword Research

To succeed in any Web-business keyword reserach and proper keyword choice for your SEO campaign is vitally important. If you go straight for the most searched keywords, you are soon likely to face the problem of extremely high competition. This, in turn, can make you think that ranking well on such keywords is not worthy of your time and investments. In the worst case, you may even conclude that achieving top positions on Google for those terms is virtually impossible.

If you want your SEO campaign to be efficient, you have to act smart and start it from competitive analysis and keyword research. The purpose of these is to discover keywords and phrases, which are both quite popular and, at the same time, underused by your competitors.

This article will give you a detailed guide on how to discover keywords that should turn your SEO campaign and, consequently, your e-business into a success.

The program of actions is summarised below:

  • 1. Find out keywords employed by your top-5 competitors by doing search on Google. Compile a list of about 50 most often used keywords on which the competitors of yours achieved top ranking.

  • 2. Expand your list to a few hundred by using synonyms from a thesaurus and combining the nouns with suitable adjectives.

  • 3. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, type your keywords into the search box and get keyword ideas. Remember to tick the box "Use synonyms".

  • 4. On the result page display the following columns: "Approx Search Volume", "Approx Avg Search Volume" and "Estimated Avg CPC".

  • 5. Export data to a csv-file and open it in Microsoft Excel. Sort the data in the "Avg Search Volume" column in descending order.

  • 6. Cut anything that shows fewer than 300 searches per month. In addition, disregard all keywords and phrases with search volume trends progressively decreasing through the year.

  • 7. Analyse the remaining phrases and keep only those that are reasonable and applicable to your website content. For a site containing less than 20-30 pages, cut the list down to about 300 keywords and phrases that have the highest searches volumes. If your site is bigger, leave a longer list.

  • 8. Add 7 extra columns. Name them as follows: "Monthly Searches", "Overall", "In anchor", "In title", "Opportunity", "Effectiveness" and "Feasibility". Save the document as an Excel file. These are the names that you assign to each column for convenience. In addition, every column also has a title, i.e. a letter automatically assigned to it by Excel.

  • 9. Now, using Google, search for the following combinations: a) "key phrase N"; b) allinanchor:"key phrase N" and c) allintitle:"key phrase N", where "key phrase N? is one of the key phrases from your list. Repeat this for every keyword.

  • 10. For each key phrase you will get 3 numbers displayed in the top right corner. Copy those and paste into the "Overall", "In anchor", and "In title" columns, correspondingly.

  • 11. In the top second cell (just below the column name) of the "Opportunity", "Effectiveness" and "Feasibility" columns type in theses formulas: "=MS^2/T1", "=MS^2/T2", and "=MS^2/T3", where T1, T2 and T3 are the titles of the "Overall", "In anchor", and "In title" columns, respectively; MS - monthly searches.

  • 12. With the above formula fill in the last 3 columns (highlight the cell with the formula and drag it down to the bottom).

  • 13. Highlight the keywords with the largest numbers for "Approx Avg Search Volume", "Effectiveness" and "Feasibility", and the smallest value for the "Overall".

  • 14. If you are now left with less than ~150 phrases, come back to step 7 and retain more keywords. As an alternative, by using a thesaurus, you can also expand your list of key phrases by finding more synonyms and combining them with suitable adjectives.

  • 15. In the end, you should get about 150-200 keywords and phrases to deploy in your SEO campaign. 

If you carefully followed the steps described above, you should now end up with a list of highly efficient key phrases that both display sufficiently high search volumes and are relatively underused by your competitors. Such a list will give you much better chances to outdo your competitors and develop a successful e-business!

Now it is time to start your SEO campaign and perform the on-page and off-page optimisation.
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