One of the very first steps of a successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is keyword research. Keywords are what people type into the search bar of Google and other search engines to obtain the information they need about a product, service, or topic. Hence, by conducting keyword research, you can know your market better. If you only focus on optimizing your website for a better ranking in search results, all your efforts will go down the drain if you don’t know what keywords your target audience is using to find you and your competitors. Even if you do well in search engine rankings, you won’t probably get any relevant traffic if you choose the wrong keywords.
For any type of marketing strategy to succeed, be it online or offline, the key is to study your audience and determine the right means to reach them. In your approach to keyword research, a certain focus is needed. It could be specific to location, country, industry, product, service, and so on. For instance, if you’re an optometrist in Arizona, the correct SEO strategy should target people living in your local. Just as a patient seeking optometric services would search for a practitioner in his/her own area. Here is a great article on keyword research at SEOMOZ – http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research
Keyword Research Doesn’t Involve Gut Feel
A common mistake of website owners is to rely on their gut feel when it comes to keyword targeting. They often come up with top-of-mind or “obvious” keyword phrases, which don’t actually match what their prospective and current clients’ search terms. In addition, business owners’ years of experience in their field narrows their vision so they automatically assume that their customers are familiar with industry jargon. This shouldn’t be the case for SEO. You have to widen your perspective and think out of the box.
To have an effective SEO campaign, you should let go of your gut feel and be more fact-dependent. Remember, facts will provide you with exact information about what your target market is searching for. So how will you get data about search terms? You may use one of the many keyword research tools available online. By relying on these tools, you will get a grip on your target market early on in your SEO project.
Keyword Research Process
There are four main steps when conducting keyword research:
- Discovery - Keyword research tools will require you input a set of keywords. Tools such as the Google Keyword Tool would be quite useful. Choose those which are tightly focused around your niche. You may brainstorm with your co-workers and even with your clients, if possible, to identify the search terms which will most likely drive quality traffic to your website. For a wider coverage, list down one or two-word search terms rather than long-tails. Try to cover all aspects of your products/services. For instance, it wouldn’t be enough to optimize and optometrist’s website only for “optometrist” or “eye doctor”, as people will probably make more specific searches such as “LASIK”, “glaucoma”, and “ortho-K.”
- Analysis - This step involves collecting information about your competition. Online keyword analysis tools will help you identify how many pages are indexed in major search engines for your keywords. To make this complex task easier for you, you may use spreadsheets so you can compare the different search terms that you have and disregard all the junk terms that aren’t relevant to your website.
- Selection - The two previous steps would help you collect roughly 50 to 100 specific and high-yield keyword phrases that accurately describe your industry, company, and products/services. Even though people usually use generic search terms, a high ranking on such key phrases has been found to return mediocre traffic. Again, focused keywords will give your site better rankings plus highly targeted web traffic, resulting in better sales conversion rates. When narrowing down your choice of search terms, consider your site’s PageRank (discussed in another article) and keywords’ competitiveness. The rule of thumb is that if your keywords are unique and rare (i.e. “HP mobile printer h470”), PageRank won’t matter that much. If your keywords are common (i.e. “photography classes New York”), then PageRank starts to matter. Determine how difficult it would be to get your site at the top of search results for each of your keywords. Eliminate the “hopeless cases” – those for which competition is too keen – and the low popularity key phrases. Only select those with an acceptable rate of competition.
- Deployment - After you’ve made your final cut of 15 to 20 search terms, you have to place them in different areas of your website. But take care not to scatter them in one single web page. A good tip is to divide them into five to seven groups, each with a common theme.
A word of caution: Take care not to do keyword stuffing. Ideally, you should repeat your keywords only two to four times per page. Otherwise, search engines might see it as spam and as a result, pull you down the rankings.
