If you want to take your business to the next level, the first step is to understand how your customers describes your products and services online. Understanding this concept enables to get an idea on how they search online to find you. This words or phrases is called Keyword and the process of getting to know these phrases is called the keyword research process.
A typical search process normally follows this step
- Users’ opens up the favorite search engine e.g Google, yahoo.
- User types in a word/phrase or a combination of phrases
- The search engine returns a set of results it “feels” best answer the query.
This is a simple example of how a keyword would look on a web page.
Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
Auto Loan | Cheap Car Loans | Brand Name
If you don’t know what those terms means learn some seo glossary and come back when you done .
Why do you need to do a keyword research?
It is important to carry out a keyword research process because :
- It helps you identify phrases that people use. Sometimes the way people search online might be different from what they use offline so you need to know this phrase.
- It gives you an idea of how many people “really” uses these phrases to search therefore you get to know if it’s worth expending your energy on.
- It helps you determine the structure of your web pages if you are just developing your website
- It gives you an idea of what your competitors are targeting.
- It helps search engines understand the focus of your website
These are among the greatest reasons and why you should research your keyword before designing your website. But if you already have your website running and you want to make it more visible, keyword research is the first step to online success .
How to conduct a keyword research
There are many great tools for conducting a keyword research. Some of these tools are free while others are at a premium price. You will have to test various ones and pick the one you understand best.
The Google keyword Planner:
The Google keyword planner is one of the best free available keyword tool. In this post, I am going to show you how to use the Google Keyword planner to show you how to conduct a simple keyword research. For the purpose of this post, we will conduct a research based on Auto Loans because we want to create a web page that talks about car loans.
Step 1.
You need a Gmail account to access the Google Keyword planner tool. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up here (insert link) and its free.
Step 2.
Go to https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/ and log in using your Gmail account
The screen shot is the first page you are shown.
Using our example of “auto loan”
Now enter the phrase Auto loan in the search box with a default value of “what would you like to do” and click the Get Ideas.
Normally , when researching keyword that you use, there are some parameters that you might need to set depending on your purpose and target market. Filter Options like “location”, “language” etc are some variable that can be changed but if you targeting your local territory, just leave the default setting and click the “Get Idea” button.
Step 3:
Google search result automatically defaults to “Ad group ideas”. The results in this tab is great when you planning on running a Pay per Click campaign
but for running organic search campaign,simply click the “Keyword ideas”
The screen shot shows the result, you are likely to get . The result will be based on your location and any other parameters you changed in the setting in step 2.
There are 5 header tabs we need to pay attention to
- Search Terms: This is your initial keyword phrase that you entered
- Avg. Monthly Searches : This gives you the average monthly amount of times the said keyword was used.
- Competition: This result is calculated based on how many advertisers are bidding for the same keyword. The results can be of three types. High, Middle,Low
- Suggest bid: If you are planning on running a ppc campaign. It tells you how much your keyword is worth.
How to select your keyword
Now , this is where the manual part of the job has to be done by you. You will have to download the file into a .csv file so that you can take it offline and analyse it but right from the Google tool, you can sort based on :
A. Competition : Shown below
Or
B. Search Volume :
Now that you have learnt how to sort, you will do the same to the excel sheet you downloaded. You want to target keyword that are based on this the following criteria. Basically your keyword must have enough traffic and the competition must be relatively low.
How to Pick The Right Keyword For Your Website
Consider the following factors when considering which keyword to pick :
1. Relevancy:
This is the first and most important step. In trying to come up with a good keyword, you must consider how relevant it is to your web content. To get a good keyword, try to come up with about 4-5 phrases that people use when describing your business. This is very important. Now streamline this list to about two or three that best describe the content on your web page.
2. Traffic:
This is the second step. Now take the keyword you finally choose in the first step and find out how much traffic it is able to get using Google keyword tool. The keyword must have a large number of targetted traffic. This is because not everyone who sees your web page on Google Search Engine will click on it. In fact only about 42% of traffic gets to click the #1 ranked website on organic list while the remaining traffic is distributed throughout the remaining list. So ensure that whatever keyword you picking have the ability to give you targetted traffic.
3. Competition:
Competition refers to the total number of people who are bidding or advertising for your keyword. This is the number of people who already are ranking for that keyword both in organic search and pay-per-click advertisements. To ensure your success online especially for new entries into the online marketing business, you want to look for a keyword that is sufficiently low. This will give you a higher chance of ranking for that keyword.
4. Commerciality:
This is a measure of the potential of a keyword. This is simply the amount of money you can make from optimizing that keyword. Going for a good commercial keyword will get a good return on your investment in optimizing your website.
After sorting them based on this criteria, you will now need to actually pick the keyword you want to use from your list. Here is where experience and gut feeling comes in. To help you in choosing, you can quickly spy on your competitors if they have optimized their website. Simply go to Google Search Bar, Enter the keyword you targeting and check the website that
Here is where experience and gut feeling comes in. To help you in choosing, you can quickly spy on your competitors if they have optimized their website. Simply go to Google Search Bar, Enter the keyword you targeting and check the website that
Simply go to Google Search Bar, Enter the keyword you targeting and check the website that is thrown back at you. If they offer similar product to your own, then you are on your are targeting the right keyword.
That is it. You have learnt how to conduct a basic keyword research using the Google keyword Planner Tool. Almost all the keyword tools available are based this methodology of selecting keyword. If you are going to use any keyword tools it is highly recommended that you start your research with the Google tools before using any other tool.
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