Keyword Research

What is Keyword Research

Taking business to the internet has always been an alluring obsession for both small and medium scale companies. The lucrative market of internet and aptitude to reach thousands of customers beyond their territorial and regional boundaries persuaded thousands of companies to launch their websites and explore new horizons of business, they named it ecommerce. But while following their dreams of development and expansion they were caught up in another dilemma. Making a website and representing yourself on it was not the only thing required. To earn money from those websites they needed vsitors, more visitors more opportunities and more revenue. The equation always proved its self right. There was another secondary factor, as important as the aforementioned but directly dependent on it, the ability of converting visitors to buyers, but it too required huge amounts of traffic or visitors. For generating more traffic many approaches, methodologies and techniques were used. Over the passage of time some of the proven and well tested techniques materialized themselves into a process known as search engine optimization. During all the transformations and processes the importance of keywords was never belittled or ignored.

What is Keyword Selection?

Keyword selection is a mission critical goal in any search engine optimization process and is extremely important in generating traffic.  The search engine, or more specifically speaking web crawlers access, index and rate the web pages depending on the keywords. Correct selection

and prioritizing of keywords play a critical goal in success of search engine optimization campaign.

Why is keyword research important?

In today’s competitive market keyword research plays an extremely vital role in success of your SEO campaign. Without targeting the right keywords no matter how much effort you put to your SEO campaign, you will end up in an exhaustive struggle with little or even no positive results. Targeting the correct keywords and making proper use of these keywords in your SEO campaign will make your website visible to your customers improve your search engine rating and will give you an edge over your competitors.

Where Do I start Keyword Research?

The first and most important thing while selecting keywords is that you must think about your website from the visitor’s or buyer’s perspective. You simply cannot guess which words your customers use to access the website or product they need. Always select keywords that are simple, common and memorable for the customers. Most of the ‘techies’ or industrialists use too complex or specific words as keywords. Try to think globally, delimit your boundaries of concepts while thinking about your website. But here it is also worth mentioning that you must no go too far away from the original purpose of your website or the content and products it contain. The more viable solution to this problem lies in conducting a proper and thorough research. Try to find out which words are normally used while searching the kind of products your website is selling. Am I making it too horrible and complex? Surely I won’t! The process is really simple and can be categorized in following basic steps.

1: First you have to create the list of keywords, this can be accomplished by a variety of techniques, the most important and effective of them is brainstorming. In this step think of as many keywords as possible. Think of the words a customer would use while searching for the product you have. You may ask your friends or partners for help. Don’t criticize anyone; include even the most bizarre and irrelevant ideas and words. Don’t limit your search to words, you may include phrases and even in some cases sentences.

You can also make use of a dictionary to find words or www.thesaurus.com is a very handy website that would show you words with similar meanings. Make a list of all of the words you can think of, but keep in mind that the word should relate to your website or business in some sense else it would just be a waste of time. For your convenience now I would demonstrate how thesaurus.com works.

Go to www.thesaurus.com. On the top you would find an input field, here you can enter the word of your choice. Lets assume we have the keyword string “search ipad applications”. In almost every case of a string, we would have one or two words that are standard and cannot be replaced like Ipad and Applications. But “search” can be replaced by a number of words that have a similar meaning. So to find those words we write the word “ search” into the input field.

Here you can see that we have entered the word search, and we press enter or click on the search button next to the field. The hint for finding such replaceable words is that they would show some kind of action being performed. So after pressing the search button we will get a list of similar words, now we can use the words with our static words in the string. Like we can use the word “find” instead of search. “look for” is another option that can be used. Similarly we can get numerous options. www.thesaurus.com also presents us with a visual thesaurus. The image of which is presented below.

Similarly if you want to look up a short and more handy word for the phrase “easy to use”, you will get many options. Images below would demonstrate that more effectively.

Then we scroll down to see the list of the words:

2: The second step includes a bit skimming and trimming. You have made a pretty long list of words, now it’s time to keep only the real ones. For this go through your list, just drop the words that seem irrelevant or misleading. In this phase also exclude the words for which you cannot produce good content. Your friends and partners would also be helpful in this phase, you can ask them to check the lists and make a few suggestions.  You can also make a list, have it photocopied and distribute it to people belonging to different professions and fields, ask them to select the words that they might use while searching for the specific product you are about to launch or you are selling on your website. Another innovative idea would be to use social media networks like facebook for this purpose. You can pick up a word, then create a poll to check how many people would likely use this word for searching about a specific product. There are many other websites that would help you a lot in this phase. Like www.spyfu.com offers you services. The main features include:

·         spyFu Combat

·         Keyword ad history

·         Keyword smart search

·         Domain ad history

·         spyFu Classic

spyFu also gives you a variety of top hundred’s list. All of these services are intended to refine your keywords search and keep them market oriented and well targeted. 

www.searchanalytics.compete.com is another website that provides its highly innovative and elaborate services to its users.

 This idea can really do wonders and you can get a diversified perspective of your website from different customers. After completing this step you would end with a short list of only relevant keywords.

3: Now that your list has been reduced to only couple of words, it’s time to use the technology, today internet had made our lives much easier in a number of ways by its different tools and keyword research tool is one of them.

Best free tools for keyword research

 You can find numerous keyword research tools, some of them are listed below:

·         Google Adword keyword tool

·         Google Search insight

·         Google Trends

·         Google Suggest

·         Wordtracker

·         Keyword spy

·         Word stream

Google Adword keyword Tool:

Combined with the power and reliability of search giant Google, this keyword tools gives you accurate results for your keywords. It has a very simple and adaptable user interface.

In the keywords input field you would enter your keyword, you can enter a specific website or you can leave it blank to keep the results generic. In the advanced options you can specify a geographic area, language and type of target device that can be a desktop or a smartphone etc.

Let us assume we entered the word “ipad”.

Based on our keyword we get the following results:

So this is how the Google adword keyword tool displays all the statistics for the entered keyword. You can clearly see the fields global monthly searches, local monthly searches and competition. Here we have to pick keywords or phrases with maximum search volume and minimum competition.

This takes us to our second major keyword searching tool, Google search insights. Google search insights works parallel with the Google adword keyword tools and sort of refines the result that have been obtained from Adword keyword tool and also give us more statistics and information. We will enter the same keyword “ipad” in Google search insight and see the results.

Initially we have got various options here to customize our results. We can specify the search type, options are Web search, image search, news search and product search. We can also specify a geographic location or keep the results generic by selecting the worldwide options. We also have the ability to give the specific time frame and a category filter .

Based on our filters we get the following results. First we get a graphical illustration of the search trend and can see it rising sharply. The regional interest tab shows us the search volume with respect to various geographic locations. The search terms table tells us words closely related with our keyword that with their search volume. The rising searches table shows the keywords that experienced a spike in search volume.

We can also search multiple keywords simultaneously and can compare the results at the same time. Let us have the keywords Ipad and Iphone. We keep the filters setting same  as above. The results are:

Here by comparison we see that iphone is a more dominate and heavily searched keyword as compared with the later-ipad.

The next tool Google trends give us similar options to analyze the keywords and compare them. I used Ipad, Iphone and free ipad as three keywords. The results found are:

Like Google search insight the Google trends also solidifies our conclusion about iphone being a high search volume keyword. The extra detail that we find here is that Google trends breaks down the geographic search data to city level and also gives us information about languages.

Our next tool is Keyword spy at www.keywordspy.com, this easy to use keyword tool gives us a much deeper and professional overview from a business perspective about our keyword. We used the same keyword, ipad and got the following results.

We clearly viewed a higher level of detail and relevant detail about the keyword. It gives search volume with respect to month, related keywords and cost per click that the advertiser would bear.

In this step you can use any of the above tool but it is strongly recommended that you use at least three of the above. While checking the keywords you have to focus on two things, search volume and competition. The rule is you have to pick words that have high search volume but low competition. A high competition rate means that many websites are using these words before you and your chances of success are limited. Don’t shy away too much from the competition or you will end up with words that are useless and have low search volume. The competition also tells you how much effort that word would require. If you think you have got really appealing content and are confident about winning the competition then just go for that word and forget about the competitors, sometimes it’s a good idea to go with the risk. In this stage note down all the statistics you have found about your words like search volume, search trends, in which parts of the world these words are being targeted more, competition etc.

 Now your listed is narrowed down to a few words and you have got all the statistics about the words you have selected. Once again think of your website and products it contains and remove all the words that are irrelevant or have no or little content to support. Prioritizing your keywords as primary keyword and secondary keywords is also a good idea. Try to take only targeted keywords, generic keywords may generate more traffic but they would do little to improve your ratings and bring you visitors who are prospective buyers. Targeted keywords bring you qualified traffic and make you a subject expert.

After the keywords have been finalized, write the best material you can for your keywords and place your keywords strategically and at places where they are most needed. Do not over stuff your content with keywords. After the initial launch, conduct a post mortem analysis after a few days to check which keywords are performing well and which ones have failed, drop those which failed and keep only the good ones.

How do I know if I have a good Keyword?

Different keyword tools or search engines may present you with different and even conflicting results about a specific keyword. So one might think how do I know if I have the right keywords or not? Well you cannot be totally sure about it until you have deployed them to your websites. A post mortem analysis of your SEO campaign would tell you whether you used the right keywords or not, however there are a few steps that you can go through and they would give you hindsight about your keyword selection. 

Always go for the keywords with little competition but high search volume. If you want to accurately check the search volume, the leading share holders in this market are Google, Bing and Yahoo. Check the search volume with these three, if its still highest then surely it is. Sometimes its just good to believe what the majority is saying!

Similarly the completion rankings can be checked from these leading three search engines.  If the results from different keyword tools are slightly different from each other, there is a good reason to believe both of them are correct.

And last and most important is experience! Nothing teaches you these skills like experiences do. Consult someone who is senior in this field and take his\her advice. Gather as much data as possible. Higher levels of targeted research often minimize the chances of mistakes.

Conclusion:

Giving it in a nutshell, we can say that keyword research and selection is tremendously important to increase visitors and hence equally significant in generating revenue. Keyword selection is a exasperating and grueling process, but by following the right strategy and using the right tools at the right time the whole process can be made exceptionally easy and accurate. Even after using all these tools and methods you may not get sufficient or satisfactory output, after a couple of days if you see your keywords are not working , it might be a good idea to evaluate the whole thing and make changes where they are necessary.