Keyword research is an extremely important part of SEO. Keyword research is also the first step in any SEO campaign. It is through keyword research that we will determine many things about out campaign and the challenges ahead. First, we’ll learn the exact keyword phrases that people tend to use to find a given type of product. We’ll also learn about how often each term is searched and also how much competition we have. Once we know these three things, we’ll have a better idea of what we’re up against before we can start seeing traffic from keyword phrases important to our business.
While there are many free and paid services that can help you with keyword research, I’ll focus on one of my favorite free keyword research tools today.
How do people search for my product?
I’m often approached by clients who express the importance of their website ranking for a couple of specific keywords. I usually ask them, “how often those keywords are searched for?” They often looked puzzled and are usually, “not sure.” The point is that, while we all related certain terms with our products and services, we need to research to find out what terms people are actually using. We are surprised by the results of this part of our research because our intuitions aren’t always correct.
How often do people search for my product?
While it may be logical to you or I that someone searching for a hotel in Las Vegas would go to Google and type Las Vegas hotel. Through research, we may actually find that more people type hotels in Las Vagas than Las Vegas hotel. It’s important to have an estimate as to how often a keyword is searched because it will give us an idea of the potential traffic that we’ll have a shot at attracting to our website.
To get begin your research, go here and type in a phrase that you think is related to your product. You’ll notice that many results are returned with estimates of search volume. At the bottom, you’ll also see links to various online thesauruses which may help you think of different options. This tool will help you with steps 1 and 2 of your research.
How many competitors do I have?
The third part of preliminary keyword research is competition. We use competition estimates to determine, at a high level, how difficult it will be to achieve a top rankings for out desired keyword phrases. Competition is a simple estimate of how many many other websites use the exact term in question. We basically run a search on each search engine that we’re optimizing for. It’s important to remember that this estimate is very general. Just because a website uses a given keyword phrase, doesn’t mean that they are optimized for the phrase. We use the competition estimate to compare the difficulty of different keyword phrases. For example, if we find two keywords that t
To estimate competition, go to Google.com and type your search term using parenthesis. For example, you can type “dog leashes” . Next, look at the number of results returned in the search.
As you can see, Google returns 574,000 results for the term dog leashes. Again, this number should only be used as a comparision. So, if we found that dog leashes and dog leash were searched the same number of times we may want to see which would be easier to rank for. So, for dog leash:
There are 1,180,000 results for dog leash. We can probably assume then, that dog leash would be much harder to obtain a high ranking for than dog leashes.
I hope this brief tutorial has helped explain the fundamentals of keyword research. Expect more posts on this topic in the future.
Comment By: Steakums
December 19th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
General keywords are really hard to rank for lately, I’ve found using longtail keywords are easier to rank for.