Basics of Keyword Research
Selecting the proper keywords to target can be considered the most important step in getting your site to rank in all major search engines. Without targeting the proper keywords to match your intended target you could easily lose great amounts of traffic or rank in unrelated areas that people would rarely see that would hurt your website and possibly your business as well. To that end, there are a few basic steps you should go through when determining the proper keywords to focus on in your website development:
- Idea Generation
- Visitor/Customer Research
- Keyword Research
- Performance Tracking
1. Idea Generation
Consider all possibilities of what your site’s visitors or potential visitors will be looking for when searching online for information. This is a general brainstorming time and not one to rule out items. These could be single words, short phrases, or even longer, more specific phrases that would have strong relevance to your site and what you are offering.
2. Visitor/Customer Research
If your site has been up for some time research into what the visitors like. Do they tend to go to one particular area on your website? Do they generally come to your site by using particular search terms? Even a free program for tracking visitor’s like Google’s Analytics can be of help in this.
Haven’t had a site for long but you’ve have had a business operating for quite some time? Do the same research you would conduct online into your customers by reviewing purchase logs, conducting surveys, reviewing historical records…any records you may have for your customers that you have been using over the years to adjust your business should be considered targets you should look at.
Once you have gathered information from your customer research you can then begin eliminating some of the words or phrases you generated in your Idea Generation stage and move to the next stage in your research.
3. Keyword Research
Now that you have a few basic keywords to look for, do some research into each and find out its benefit to you. Using some easily accessible tools such as Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool you can find out how often internet users search for particular terms and see what may be most relevant to you. If you are an online dog toy company, for example, people regularly search for the term “dog toys” according to Google’s tool roughly 301,000 times a month, while a focus on “buy dog toys” gets roughly 590 searches a month. The number of searches for the second term may be less, however at the same time the searches for this term would most likely generate better leads to your site and would increase your sales revenues over someone looking for a more general term.
You also need to research into what your customer’s intent is when searching for a particular search term. In my previous example, if I search for the term “dog toys” my goal may not be to buy dog toys but to simple see what dog toys are out there. Maybe I am even looking for examples of ways to design my own dog toys at home. The phrase “buy dog toys”, however, is much more specific and it is reasonable to assume that if I were to search for these terms I would be a potential customer.
As you research into the various keywords always bear in mind “what is the searcher’s intent in looking for these words?” and “how will my site satisfy that need?”
4. Performance Tracking
Once you have established your key terms and begin working them into your website continue tracking your site’s traffic for those terms. Regularly check your traffic sources and terms being searched for and adjust your site accordingly. This can focus your site to meet visitor demands, increase your ranking and conversions, and ultimately increase your site’s profitability overall.
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