It all begins with words typed into a search box. Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the "right" keywords can make or break your website. Through the detective work of puzzling out your market's keyword demand, you not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole.
It's not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated - with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are already actively seeking. In the history of marketing, there has never been such a low barrier to entry in understanding the motivations of consumers in virtually every niche.
Keyword research is a fundamental part of online marketing of all kinds, and is especially relevant for freelance writers, online publishers, and bloggers. Compelling content is favored by search engines, but if you don’t use the words people are actually interested in and actively searching for, you’re missing a lot of traffic. Keyword research, at its essence, is market research. It tells you what people are interested in, and in what relative numbers. Better yet, it reveals the actual language people are using when they think about those topics, which provides you with insight on how to converse with them via your blog.
The objective of a business website is to attract visitors and convert them into paying customers. Keywords can help. Use appropriate keywords on your site and you'll attract visitors who want to buy the products you offer. The more relevant keywords that you rank well for, the more traffic you'll attract and the more business you'll do.
How to Find New Keywords Through Keyword Research?
In order to successfully market through search you need learn how to research keywords and:
- Continuously discover quality, targeted new keyword opportunities to gain a competitive advantage.
- Effectively and continuously turn your keyword research into action.
- Make keyword research a supporting piece of your overall search marketing efforts so that your researched keywords actually lead to profits for your business.
Hoe to judge the value of a Keyword?
How much is a keyword worth to your website? If you own an online shoe store, do you make more sales from visitors searching for "brown shoes" or "black boots?" The keywords visitors type into search engines are often available to webmasters, and keyword research tools allow us to find this information. However, those tools cannot show us directly how valuable it is to receive traffic from those searches. To understand the value of a keyword, we need to understand our own websites, make some hypotheses, test, and repeat - the classic web marketing formula.
A basic process for assessing a keyword’s value :
Ask yourself...
Is the keyword relevant to your website's content? Will searchers find what they are looking on your site when they search using these keywords? Will they be happy with what they find? Will this traffic result in financial rewards or other organizational goals? If the answer to all of these questions is a clear "Yes!", proceed...
Search for the term/phrase in the major engines...
Understanding which websites already rank for your keyword gives you valuable insight into the competition, and also how hard it will be to rank for the given term. Are there search advertisements running along the top and right-hand side of the organic results? Typically, many search ads means a high value keyword, and multiple search ads above the organic results often means a highly lucrative and directly conversion-prone keyword.
Buy a sample campaign for the keyword at Google AdWords and/or Bing Adcenter...
If your website doesn't rank for the keyword, you can nonetheless buy "test" traffic to see how well it converts. In Google Adwords, choose "exact match" and point the traffic to the relevant page on your website. Track impressions and conversion rate over the course of at least 2-300 clicks.
Using the data you’ve collected, determine the exact value of each keyword...
For example, if your search ad generated 5,000 impressions, of which 100 visitors have come to your site and 3 have converted for total profit (not revenue!) of $300, then a single visitor for that keyword is worth $3 to your business. Those 5,000 impressions in 24 hours could generate a click-through rate of between 18-36% with a #1 ranking (see the Slingshot SEO study for more on potential click-through rates), which would mean 900-1800 visits per day, at $3 each, or between 1-2 million dollars per year. No wonder businesses love search marketing!
The long tail of keyword research :
In one month, a small website about management and leadership received 95,036 visits from search engines via 44,655 thousand different keywords. That’s a lot of keywords for a little site; and it’s a glimpse into the long tail of keyword research. For most websites, how to make a profit from the long tail is the same as how to make a profit.
It's wonderful to deal with keywords that have 5,000 searches a day, or even 500 searches a day, but in reality, these "popular" search terms actually make up less than 30% of the searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lie in what's called the "long tail" of search. The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day, but, when taken together, they comprise the majority of the world's demand for information through search engines.
Another lesson search marketers have learned is that long tail keywords often convert better, because they catch people later in the buying/conversion cycle. A person searching for "shoes" is probably browsing, and not ready to buy. On the other hand, someone searching for "best price on Air Jordan size 12" practically has their wallet out!
Keywords Difficulty :
In order to know which keywords to target, it's essential to not only understand the demand for a given term or phrase, but also the work required to achieve those rankings. If big brands take the top 10 results and you're just starting out on the web, the uphill battle for rankings can take years of effort. This is why it's essential to understand keyword difficulty.
Keyword Research Tips :
1) Create a keyword list.
Start by thinking about the 3-5 words that you think people will search on to find your business or businesses like yours. Then use keyword tools to understand how often people search on the terms related to your business. I used the keywords marketing, lead, and small business for this example.
2) Combine and analyze the results.
As you search, cut and paste the results into a spreadsheet. (I have found that in Excel it works best to copy the results from the Overture Keyword Tool and then using paste special and then paste as text.) Once you have done this for 2-3 key terms, you should have a spreadsheet with 200 or 300 rows. To analyze the results and make them useful for your business, you need to figure out which terms are the best ones for your company to focus on. To do this, try the following steps:
- Score each term on relevance to your business. Go through each row of the spreadsheet and score each search term on how relevant to your business it is in a new column called Relevance. I like to use a 1 to 5 scale, with 5 being the most relevant for my business. For example, I would give the term small business internet marketing a score of 5, while just the term marketing would probably get a 3 score, and the terms lead crystal, lead singer and lead acid should all get scored as a 1. These are all related to the word spelled l-e-a-d, but are not related to the word lead as I mean it, which is as a sales or marketing lead. The way I like to think about this is for the people searching on that term you are scoring, how likely is it that they will convert to a customer when they visit your website. A score of 1 means your business is not relevant to the person searching, a score of 5 means it is the perfect business for them.
- Score the terms by the number of searches. Create another column called Volume. In this column, we will score each term by the number of searches. Use the sorting functionality in Excel to sort the search terms from the largest number of searches at the top to the lowest number. Create another column called Volume. Now, in this volume column, we will score each term by the number of searches. For example, if your list contains 300 search terms, the top 60 in terms of number of searches would get a score of 5. The next 60 terms get a score of 4, continuing until the last 60 terms get a score of 1.
- Find the best search keywords. What we are looking for are terms that get a lot of searches and are very relevant to your business. For instance, small business online marketing is a very targeted term for our business, but it gets fewer searches than just marketing. Using the two scores we now have, we can create a column that gives a total of the relevance score and the volume score. Create a final column called Total Score and have it be equal to the sum of twice the relevance score plus the volume score. (You want to double the relevance score since it is more important than the volume score because there is usually a lot of competition for the high volume keywords and it is not worth going after unless they are very relevant to your business.) Now sort by this column to give you the terms at the top of your list that have the highest combination of search volume and relevance. In the image below you can see what terms became the ones I should focus on for my example. Often the most relevant terms have the highest volume, but there are usually some interesting findings as well. For instance, for me the terms contemporary marketing, search engine marketing company and sale lead all got a 3 for a volume score, but because of their high relevance, they are in my top 30 search phrases to focus on.
Preeti Bagad [BE(CS)]
SW Engineer Cum Blogger
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