Keyword research plays a very crucial role in any internet marketing or search engine optimization campaign. Proper keyword research is a very important base of any internet-based marketing endeavor. This is because the results of your research are important in determining the actual content of your website and it will give you insights on what to target for your search engine optimization or pay per click (PPC) campaigns.
When doing your research, you can either seek the services of a dependable SEO company to do this task for you or you can take a chance and do it yourself with the use of free resources like the Google kwd research tool and others that you can find available online. If you are not that familiar about the processes involved in using these tools, it is better to let professionals handle it for you. There are many SEO companies or freelancers who are highly experienced in keyword research and can give you truly significant results while providing great value for money. Just make sure you look for reputable and reliable companies or individuals who know what they are doing if you do not want to risk your hard earned money and the future of your web site.
The importance of proper keyword research can never be underestimated. Keywords are what people use to find the websites they want. Moreover, search engines base their rankings on keywords. If you do keyword research, you improve the chances of your website getting ranked higher for your target keyword phrase. If you undertake keyword research tasks haphazardly or if you don’t do any keyword research at all, be prepared to have your website confined to the search engine cellars. I just thought up that phrase then. Most website owners rely on search engines and search engine rankings, aside from building links, to make the existence of their website known and to drive traffic there.
Doing keyword research is not easy nor is it a simple task. You will need to have patience. You will know that your painstaking and good keyword research has paid off if you enjoy improved search engine visibility, higher search engine ranking, and improved traffic to your website. In the internet marketing arena, these are some of the elements that most website owners hope and work for because this means more business and, therefore, more conversions. These conversions, in return, spell income for your website.
To make sure that you get the most out of your keyword research and increase the volume of targeted traffic to your website, there are certain criteria that need to be met. Perhaps the most important of these criteria are:
Relevance. When doing keyword research, focus your time and effort on identifying the keywords that are relevant or pertinent to your website or your chosen niche. This is because relevance is crucial if you want to improve your search engine rankings and if you want to keep your end-users or potential consumers satisfied and translate their satisfaction to conversions. If your site is about silk ties, for example, focus on keywords related to this and do not target irrelevant or impertinent keywords.
One tip here is for you to try to put yourself in the shoes of your target consumer to have an insight on the keywords that they will most probably use. Many of them usually use terms or phrases like “how can I”, “how to”, “how do I”, and “where can I find” so keep this in mind when determining what keywords to target.
Conversionability. If you want to have effective results for your keyword research, target keywords that are used by people who are motivated to take some form of action. You can try including terms like “subscribe to” and “download” in your keywords. You can also be more specific with your keywords. If you are selling something, you can include “buy *something* online”, “where to buy”, and “for sale” in your target keywords.
Research has found that long-tail keywords tend to lead to higher conversion rates. Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that consist of three or more keywords. Since these long-tail keywords are more specific compared to general or single-word keywords, they have a greater “probability to convert” element. For example, a long-tail keyword like “download free keyword research tool” is more likely to lead to conversion as compared to a related but shorter keyword phrase like “keyword research”. Even if long-tail keywords have lower search volume than most general keywords, people who use these keywords in their search engine queries are, more often than not, motivated to take action.
Search Volume And Competition. How you do your keyword research, especially in determining the satisfactory balance between search volume and competition for your targeted keywords, depends largely on your objectives and your concept of what is satisfactory.
To determine the volume of search queries every month related to your targeted keywords, you can use Google’s Keyword selection tool to give you an idea on this. Make sure to specify the territory or country you are targeting, especially if your target consumer base is limited to a certain country or territory, to know the search volume for your target keywords in that particular area. You can also generate keyword ideas using this tool. You can narrow down the keyword ideas by specifying “phrase match” instead of “broad match”. You can then eliminate the keyword ideas from your list that fall below your concept of satisfactory number of searches.
Also remember not to use high level keywords because they are too competitive. This means that although there are a high number of searches for those keywords, there is also a lot of competition. You can instead opt with using long tail keywords. For example, if you type in “computers” into Google, you will get around 1.78 billion results while a long tail keyword like “buy computers on sale” only returns 351,000 results. The rule of thumb here is the lower the number of competing pages and the higher the number of searches, the better.
Rankability. If you want your web pages to be found and ranked higher by search engines, your keyword research should look into the probability of your website to be ranked high for your target keywords. This is very important because you can attract search referral traffic if you rank high in the SERP. This is the reason why many web site owners want their sites to be on page one of Google results.
Highly trained and experienced SEO professionals have advanced ways of determining the rankability of your target keywords but there are simple ways to give you an idea on this matter. Just go to the Google homepage and type in one of the keywords you are researching and do not forget to enclose your keywords in quotes to do a phrase match search. Look for the total number of web pages as you are going to compete with that number of web pages if you use that particular keyword. Remember that the lower the number of web pages competing for that particular keyword, the better will be your chances of achieving a high, if not top, ranking for that keyword in the SERP.
I hope you can use this,
Ray Baker