Keyword Research
One of the first things you should do when you start to promote your business on the Internet is keyword research. Some SEO experts say you should do this before you even start to design your web site, but in reality most people jump in and build a website then think about keyword research and SEO. If you are thinking about re-designing your site then doing keyword research would be a good idea before you start.
The point of doing keyword research is to find suitable phrases that are relevant to your business and are getting a reasonable number of searches per month on the major search engines. You keyword research should also include some competitor analysis so you know how competitive each phrase is as well as the search volume.
There are many keyword tools available, some are free and some you will need to pay for once or by subscription. One of the most popular keyword tools is supplied by Google and it,s free.
Before you start using these keyword tools you should first think about your business and website and write down a short list of keywords you think your customers would search for to find you on the Internet. You can then use this initial list to create a longer, more comprehensive list using keyword tools.
Most keyword tools will give you more suggestions for key phrases and provide you with the search volume per month or per day. Some tools will attempt to show you how competitive each key phrase is. For example, the Google keyword tool will show you an “advertisers competition” bar which is a general guide to the number of advertisers bidding on Google Adwords. I prefer to look at the “estimated CPC” figure. As a general rule, the higher advertisers are bidding for a keyword on PPC the more valuable it is and probably harder to achieve top rankings in the organic listings.
Other tools provide different metrics for competition analysis, such as WordTracker’s KEI. (Keyword Effective Index) This formula uses search volume and the number of results found by the search engines to create a figure. The high the number supposedly the easier it will be to achieve top rankings. There are various opinions about KEI but my view is, ‘I am only interested in the competitors that have page one rankings which is where I want to be’. So I will analyse the top ten sites for each key phrase looking at the on page optimization, i.e. title tags etc and their off page optimization, number of incoming links, link anchor text etc. From this I will assess how competitive the key phrase actually is.
This can be a very time consuming exercise but it is time will spent. By choose the right keywords you will be able to achieve top 10 rankings and receive a stream of traffic from the search engines. Choose the wrong keywords and your website will not be found and your traffic will be minimal.
When you have your keyword list ready it is time to plan which pages to optimise.
