Why Do Keyword Research ?
Doing keyword research will determines which keywords you should be targeting with your SEO campaign. Most people presume they know which keywords they should use. Instinct can be great, but it can also be misleading. For example, “search engine optimization” gets an roughly 16,000 searches a day while “search engine marketing” gets an roughly 8,800 searches a day. Now your gut may tell you to target “search engine marketing”, you may rank well, but it would only get you half the traffic you might have got targeting and ranking well for “search engine optimization”. There are certain keywords that you may have trouble ranking well for without a lot of time and effort and a lot of link building no matter how well you optimize your site. Also there are keywords that others will use to search for that your would never think of. So, your research will let you know which keywords are popular and suggest new ones to target.
What Do I Research?
There are two main types of keyword research. Firstly popularity, how often are keywords actually searched for. Unfortunately, Google and Yahoo don’t actually let you know the number of searches for specific keywords; but, you can find a few useful tools online which are generally pretty accurate and Google does offer it’s own free tool that gives the “approximate” number of searches for some keywords. The keyword popularity tools (except Google’s) use the search data from smaller search engines and also a few algorithms to predict how many searches are made for specific keywords. It’s not spot on, but it gives you a rough idea of which keywords are most popular. Google’s figures come from…well…Google, you would think they are accurate, but even their figures are only estimates, many keywords return a “Not enough data” result. You may choose to use both Google and another keyword popularity tool.
The second aspect to your keyword research should be competition research. This starts with analysing your web pages to determine the competitiveness your site has in general also for specific keywords. Sometimes referred to as page strength. There are really only two aspects to page strength, the general strength of a site and the specific strength of a page within the site. For the sake of simplicity, in this article I will use “web page” for both. The next step is to examine the keywords themselves to see how competitive they are. This is sometimes called keyword difficulty. Determining keyword difficulty is done partially by examining how competitive the pages are that rank well for that keyword, though other methods can be useful as well. This can be tricky for a couple of reasons.
1. No one other than the search engine designers know how there search engine determines how competitive a site is, and the search engine people aren’t talking.
2. Each search engine has a different way of working out how competitive a site is. So, even if you could figure it one, it wouldn’t necessarily work with the other search engines.
Despite these difficulties the search engines do give us some general information about what makes web pages competitive ( page strength).
Without good keyword research, your optimization efforts could be wasted . You may hit something, you may not. You may choose keywords that are not searched for or keywords that are too competitive for your site at that time. It’s better to know to be target.
Comments are closed.