What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the key to any marketing campaign. You need to know what people are searching for. You need to know what terms they use when they are searching and when they are buying. Furthermore, you need to know how competitive each term is. If you pick the wrong terms your marketing efforts will be doomed.
The first thing is you have to know where your website fits on the spectrum from people gaining information, to researching, to buying. Once you know this, you can start brainstorming for keywords that people might use. Some people will use online tools to get competitor intelligence, and others will visit competitors and see what keywords they are using. Just remember that competitors who have been around for years will find it easier to get keywords that you can’t compete for.
Types of keywords
There are two types of keywords that we’re about to deal with, and those two are:
1. Short-tailed keywords – these types of keywords are composed of not more than 3 words in one keyword. This will give you lots of conversions as most of the searchers are typing one to three keywords for searching. Some of the examples are “make money online”, “affiliate marketing“, “join a group” and others which depends on your combination.
2. Long-tailed keywords – these types of keywords are composed of more than 3 words in one keyword. These keywords might give you low conversions on a specific niche or interest that a user is searching on search engines. Some of the examples are “make money online with Facebook”, “how to use rubbing alcohol” and many others.
Google Keyword Planner will give you a huge list of possible keywords base on the keywords you have listed in the keyword box. Choose only those who are low in competition and at least 1,000 to 2,000 in global monthly searches which is tough to match.
Once you have some keywords or phrases, you need to find out how many searches there are for that month and how many other sites there are for that phrase. You might want to start a spreadsheet for this. You could have terms, sites, searches.
The first thing to do is to take your phrases and put them in quotes. Then place these one at a time in the Google search box. See how many sites come up for that term. If you got tens of millions or more you might want to look for something else. To get a better idea of how many sites are targeting those phrases use the operator Allintitle or Allinurl. The first operator tells you how many pages have that in the title of a page. The second in the URL of the page.
While you are looking at the results, you might want to see how many links the top site has. This will tell you how many links you will need to get on the front page. Sites that have a lot of links may take a very long time or be almost impossible to catch. To get a better idea of how many links there are, you can use Yahoo site explorer.
Next, we want to see how many searches there are for those phrases that are not overloaded with sites. For this, we use the Google keyword tool. All you have to do is to place a list of phrases or keywords, one on a line. You will get back a list of phrases, the searches for that phrase both locally and globally. You can also get other information like cost per click and competition.
You want to be looking for terms that have a good deal of traffic without having too much competition.
This tool is used to give you the keywords searches for the last 12 months, but not anymore. Or that kind of stuff you need another tool. Google trends will give you historical information going back several years if you like. Using this tool you can see if that term is seasonal or steady all year, rising or falling in popularity.
Once you have all this information you can start deciding on which keywords you want to target. Some people will take the remaining phrases and do a Keyword Effectiveness on them and see which words come up on top. All you have to do is take the number of searches and raise it to the power and divide that by the number of websites. The larger the resulting number, the less competitive it should be.
In the end, you want to pick words that have good traffic, match the mission of your website, and are not too competitive, and the leaders in the results do not have millions of links.