Choosing your Keywords: The Initial Research Keyword research is one of the most important starting points of any internet marketing strategy. This has been stressed over and over again, yet it is either ignored completely or carried out illogically resulting in misleading results! In most cases we make flying guesses as to what keywords are popular in various business niches, yet time and time again after carrying out a properly thought through bit of research you’ll find you where in fact horribly wrong – let your competitors fall in to this trap, but don’t be foolish enough to land there yourself.
I’ve laid out a decent step-by-step approach to deciding what keywords to chase. This entry only entails the initial research; it does not go into estimating exact search densities as can be calculated via a carefully constructed AdWords campaign.
Note: For every step don’t forget to think in the dimensions of time and place!
Step 1: Prospective Keywords To kick this research off you need to assemble a decent list of prospective keywords, before you do this give some careful thought to the following:
- What service or product are you selling?
- What level of knowledge does your end user have? Can you use detailed jargon or are you selling to the layman? Words that you use every day, might be totally foreign to the end user.
- Consider tenses and plurality such as hunt, hunting and hunts
Once you’ve got a few of your own words written down expand on them using:
- A thesaurus.
- Use Google’s Related Searches function - merely plug the keyphrase into Google and have a look at the related searches which can be found by clicking the “Show options” under the Google logo on any search.
- Use Google’s Keyword Tool
- Use Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool
Obviously chose only those that are relevant.
Time: Old-school terms vs new-school. Old end users vs young. Hot topics? Place: Local is lekker... Local slang or terminology.
Step 2: Estimating Search Volumes You’ll have to estimate and the search volumes of every prospective keyword. The easiest way of doing this is by utilising some of the Google tools above, I would suggest the Keyword Tool. If you have an existing AdWords account you may use the internal keyword tool. To get to this you attempt to add a keyword to an existing ad group and follow the link. You can sort the list according to the search volume by clicking the column title. These figures are very basic, ball-park figures, but a decent starting point.
Time & place: Run the words through
Google’s Insight for Search Tool. This will allow you to look at the keyword use over the last few days, weeks, months and even years in different locations down to provincial level. Compare keywords at the same time by adding a search term... Very nice!
Step 3: Evaluating Your Competition This is where it gets particularly intelligent – it’s no use chasing after a keyword just because it’s the most common if you’ll never achieve it. You need to look at how tough the competition is.
Set Google to your target location and search the term. Have a look at the top 5 or 6 pages, analyse the following:
- Domain age
- PR
- Incoming Links
- Alexa Rank
You can do all of this super easily by using the
SeoQuake Mozilla add-on.
Also look at the number of indexed pages for each term.
Step 4: Evaluate Your Site Have a look at the same aspects as highlighted above.
Step 5: Decide the Winner! Once you’ve collated all the data have a good look over the numbers and weigh up the differences. To re-iterate – the keyword most in demand is often not the ideal target due to impenetrable competition. Catching a guaranteed 5% of a less searched term is far more worthwhile than catching nothing of an extremely popular search term.
