The content on your website is there for your visitors first and foremost – but they’re not the only intended audience. By using the right words placed naturally in your content, your site will be more easily able to attract the attention of people using search engines to find the type of product or service you offer.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is probably the most important first step you take in your overall internet marketing promotion. Whether it’s for your website copy, blog posts, or articles. It is key to your success. Even if you have a list of keywords and phrases you are sure that you want to use, how do you know if people are even searching on them in the search engines?  The quick answer is: you don’t. Not unless you do a bit of research first. Imagine how disappointed you’ll be if you’ve built your entire website around content that nobody is searching for. That’s a lot of your time and money wasted.

Running a business means continually educating yourself to stay up to date with new developments in your industry. When your business has a website (or if your business is one which is an entirely web-based operation), this educational process means keyword research.

Don’t be scared off by the word “research”. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds and anyone can learn to do keyword research. However, it can be very time-consuming. What you’re going to be doing is find keywords which are relevant to your site’s content; actually it’s just a little more complicated than that. These keywords also need to be ones which your site can actually achieve a high ranking for – keep reading to learn more about how this is done.

How Keyword Research Is Done

The following are all part of the research process:

1) Make a list of possible keywords
Think about how you’d go about finding a business like yours or the products and services you offer if you were a potential customer. Go ahead and write down as many as you can; you can always edit this list later on; typing them into a spreadsheet as you brainstorm may be a good idea. While you do this, write down keyword phrases as well as individual words. Look into the Google Wonder Wheel. It’s pretty darn cool to help with this part. Other important Google tools are the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and the Google Search-Based Keyword Tool.

2) Talk to your customers
Your current customers are a good source of information here. Ask them what search terms they used to find you online (if that’s where they found you, of course). It’s one of the easiest things to do – and the information is right there for the asking, but a great many businesses forget to ask these kinds of questions and lose out on this valuable information.

3) Keyword research software
There are both free and commercially available keyword research tools available which can be very useful once you’ve come up with a list of keywords which seem like good prospects. These research tools can dig up some useful data on these keywords and phrases, including how much competition you’ll face and how often these keywords are actually searched for. In combination with the suggestions your customers can offer, these programs can help you put together a truly effective SEO strategy within your internet marketing promotion.

My fav? Hands down: Market Samurai. They offer some great video tutorials. A must for all Market Samurai users, but also very helpful for those new to keyword research.

4) Crunch the numbers
Narrow down your list to only those words and phrases which seem likely to get results for your site, ranked in order of best to worst prospects. A top ten (or better yet, a top five) list is fine.

What you’re looking for is this:

Find 5-10 keywords/phrases that -

• Are highly relevant to your niche
• Have a reasonable level of traffic
• Have acceptable levels of competition
• Have commercial value

5) Testing
Now it’s time to see how your keywords perform in real life. It’s best to test these keywords and key phrases one at a time, carefully tracking how well each keyword performs. Use the website management tools provided by your webhosting company (or use third party tools if your webhost doesn’t offer these) to keep an eye on how much each of these keywords generates for your site and how using a given keyword affects your sales or any other action you want your visitors to take.

Once you’ve identified good keywords for your site, it’s time to put them into action. Use them in your website content intelligently. Use them as content ideas for blog posts. Test, fine tune and track your results carefully and your site will be on its way to more traffic and increased sales.

If you’re short on time and you’re looking to outsource your keyword research or any other part of your internet marketing promotion, feel free to contact me. I love this stuff!

Andrea Kalli
Certified Internet and Social Marketing VA

WishList – Wordpress Membership Sites and Retention Strategies

MATERIAL CONNECTION DISCLOSURE: You should assume that I, Andrea Kalli, have an affiliate relationship and/or another material connection to the providers of goods and services mentioned in this page and may be compensated when you purchase from a provider. You should always perform due diligence before buying goods or services from anyone via the Internet or offline.

Tags and Categories: google wonder wheel, internet marketing promotion, keyword research, market samurai, Online Business, Promotion and Marketing, outsource, targeted content, website seo

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