Keyword Research - 5 Simple Steps
Keyword research is a process of understanding your target market and attracting your target market to you and your business. Done properly, keyword research will enable you to attract massive amounts of traffic to your website or blog. Being on the 1st page of Google for a popular keyword (s) is the best marketing/advertising you could do for your business!
If you are writing a press release, case study, building a web page, landing page, writing a newsletter, or doing a blog post keyword research is important. Essentially, any content that is going to be put on the internet should be written for the search engines and your target market.
Below are 5 steps on how to get started doing keyword research and how to write for search engines. The process of keyword research is a continuous process that evolves as you generate content, the market changes, and your customer base evolves.
STEP 1. Develop a short list. Select keywords (Keyword Phrases) that are the substance for your product or service. Study carefully the content of your website/blog to find the substantive phrases. Look at your competitors’ website and any other organizations that promotes or sell your product/service to find these substantive phrases. If YOU were YOUR customer, what would you search on Google to find your business?
STEP 2. Use a tool. Use several of the FREE Keyword Research tools such as; Word Tracker, Google’s Keyword Research, KeywordSpy.com, or Keyword Discovery to expand the short list from step 1 to a larger list that contains many variations of the Keyword Phrases. An important component, use several different tools to expand your short list so that you will find ALL variations of keyword phrases that are relevant. Also, you want to take the relevant Keyword Phrases and tweak the words slightly in a way that favors your content.
STEP 3. Select the best keyword. You want to select ONE or TWO keywords (phrases). Use the keyword research tools to determine the number of searches per month done for each of your target Keyword Phrase. This way you can see whether potential customers are searching for that particular keyword and how many monthly searches are done for that phrase. Ideally, you want to select a target keyword that has over 100 monthly searches in the major search engines. The second part of selecting a great target keyword is making sure you can compete. If there are too many competitors using the same keyword phrase, it is NOT a good target keyword. You can get an estimate on the number of competitors that are using the same keyword phrase by entering the phrase in the Google and seeing the number of search results. Ideally, you are looking for a target keyword that has less than one million search results. In summary, your target keyword should have over 100 searches per month and less than 1,000,000 competitors.
STEP 4. Write content with keyword density. Now you have a GREAT target keyword! Write compelling content (400-600 words) using that target keyword that you have identified from step 3. The target keyword should have 3-8% density, meaning, every 100 words the target keyword should be in the content 3-8 times.
STEP 5. Track and measure results. By using analytics, you can monitor the traffic, page click through, conversions, etc. from that keyword. Also, it is fun watching your website rise above the competition and rank high on the 1st page of Google. You can’t beat getting free traffic to your website of blog.