Doing Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization

Keyword research is one of the most important steps in search engine optimization (SEO), the art of bringing a website to the top of search engine results. Ranking high in search results for profitable keywords could mean great success in your business.

Keyword research is all about bringing high quality traffic to your website. The visitors you get through proper keyword research will be highly interested in your products and services. In this article, you will get a detailed understanding of how keyword research is done for SEO.

The Value of a Keyword

Imagine you own an online smartphone store. You may know which keywords the customers are typing in Google to find your website. It may be something like ‘purchase an iPhone’ or ‘best Android phone’. You can get the information about such keywords from good keyword research tools out there, such as Google Keyword Tool.

The keywords you think would bring quality visitors may be quite different from the keywords that actually bring quality visitors. Hence, only a keyword research tool can tell you whether a keyword is good or not.

In order to understand the value of a keyword, you should ask yourself if the particular keyword has anything to do with your website. If a person searching for ‘best Android phone’ gets information about a number of highly acclaimed Android devices on your website, then you can assume the website is well targeted. On the other hand, if the page contains an article about the technology used in Android devices, then the page is not targeted for the mentioned keyword. This information gives you a better understanding of your website as well as your customers.

Short Tail & Long Tail Keywords

About 30 per cent of the searches done on the web are for highly popular, short keywords, such as ‘iPhone’, ‘apple store’, etc. The rest of the searches are for long keywords. It has been found that the long tail of search keywords bring in more business to website owners.

For instance, a person searching for the short keyword ‘iPhone’ is probably only looking for detailed information about the iPhone and not going to purchase one. However, if a person is looking for the long keyword ‘iPhone price in Manhattan’ is probably going to buy the phone if the price is right. Hence, a potential seller would want to rank high for that keyword.

Tools for Keyword Research

A number of tools are there that can help you generate highly profitable keywords related to your niche. Here is a list of the services:

1.     Google Keyword Tool: This is a part of Google’s advertising platform, Adwords. You can get a comprehensive list of keywords based on your input. You can get keyword suggestions based on various languages and geographical locations.

2.     Google Trends: This service gives you a list of highly searched terms in a particular region at a particular time.

3.     Bing Ads Intelligence Tool: This is a product from Microsoft. It helps you build a list of keywords as an Excel spreadsheet based on Bing and Yahoo! search data.

These keyword research tools can help you compile a list of the necessary keywords for your business and find out how much money you need to invest in order to rank high for those keywords. If you are doing natural SEO, these tools can predict how much money you can make by ranking high for these keywords.

Conclusion

Keyword research is not very easy. It takes time and effort from your part to rank high for a keyword without using costly advertisements. The difficulty to rank for a keyword also depends on the competition the particular keyword has from other advertisers. The tools mentioned above can also give you the details of competition of each keyword. The higher the competition the more difficult it is to rank for the keyword. – By The Cleveland Seo Guy