Keyword Research

Keyword research needs to be done before getting too far into building a website so your website can be optimized for your lucrative keyword phrases. Without a doubt, it is the most important part of any successful SEO (search engine optimization) campaign.

One of the biggest question that you should think about is whether or not the keyword is actually being used to find your website or product. You might be able to think of a lot of great keyword phrases for your niche, but if no one is using them, then they turn out to be not so great, because it will not bring you traffic. That is the very reason we need to do keyword research before we start optimizing our website and creating an SEO campaign for it. It’s very important that your website is optimized with right keyword phrases that are actually being used to find your niche or product.

One of the first things to do is ask yourself: “What keywords and keyword phrases do I want people to find my site using?”

You might start by creating a list of some of the things you think people will be using to find your website.

We will use an actual client of ours for this next part. We have a client that is in the RV rental business, and we asked them to give us their list of what they thought their website should be found under. What we asked them is, “List all of the words or phrases that you think someone would find your website when searching on Google.”

They came back with the following list:

• Diesel Pusher
• Motorcoaches
• Class A
• Coach
• Class A Diesel coaches
• Motorhomes

Not only will you need to identify which keyword or keyword phrases are getting good searches, you will need to identify which one are too general and that might bring you irrelevant traffic. The list above shows a couple of problems, the keywords are too general and some do not get enough searches to even add them to a keyword phrase. I believe our clients missed the mark and had they been building their own website and SEO campaign they would have been greatly disappointed with the results.

After doing our keyword research we decided to optimize their website and SEO campaign for the following:

• RV rental
• RV rentals
• Rent an RV
• Rent RV
• Motorhome rental

Keep in mind; if you are doing your keyword research for a local business, you will want to target your keyword phrases for your geographical area. So they might look something like this:

• RV rental in Las Vegas
• Las Vegas RV rentals
• Rent an RV in Las Vegas
• Rent RV Las Vegas
• Las Vegas Motorhome rental

If you just cannot come up with enough keyword phrases to have enough searches for your niche, then you will have to use some other tactics to find them. Try looking at some of the following for ideas:

• Client (if you have one)
• Competitor sites
• Offline Advertising
• News Paper ads
• Yellowbook

The best and easiest Keyword tool we have found is Google Keyword Tool. It is pretty self-explanatory when you go there for the first time. Put in your keyword or keyword phrase and hit search. It will bring back 100 of the top related keyword phrases with specifics such as competition, Global searches, local searches and if you are logged into you adsense account, and the amount of money you can expect to pay if used for your PPC (pay per click) campaign. To figure out how much each phrase would pay for adsense ads on your sight you would figure about 50% of the amount shown.

We have found that when doing the keyword research to do it in the Exact mode. Look on the left of the Google Keyword Tool and you will find Match Types, tick the box Exact and un-tick the others. What this will do is bring back only the searches that are exactly like the ones stated, no other variations.

Look down through your list and you will begin to recognize which keyword phrases are getting the most searches. Understand that keywords that are getting tens of thousands of searches every month are probably going to be very competitive and much harder to rank for, therefore we would suggest you stay with keywords that range for about 1000 to around 5,000 Global searches a month. This is not a hard rule, but, it’s what seem to work for us.

The next thing you will want to do when you have found a keyword phrase that looks right with the searches is to do a quick Google search for that phrase and see how many competing pages come back. The more pages that come back, the harder it will be for you to get your website ranked for that keyword phrase. 20,000 search results would be much easier to rank for then say 1 Million.

Continue this through all of the keyword phrases that you think will work for your website until you have 3 or 4 solid keyword phrases that you would like for your website to rank for and that have all the number right.

Now you have your Lucrative Keyword Phrases and you will be able to optimize your website for these and create an SEO campaign for them also.

By nature, as you start ranking in the search engines for your chosen keyword phrases, you will start to rank for other keyword phrases that are related.

If you are too busy to do your keyword research or maybe you might think you are just to new to pull this off, contact us and we can do keyword research for you.