Keyword research in simple terms

Whew! I haven’t posted here for awhile, but at least it was for good reasons rather than bad. The end of the year is always a busy time for my web design business and I rarely have time for much else amongst the happy Christmas chaos and end of year concerts. I even managed to squeeze in a few weeks holiday over the Christmas break. We also have at least one family birthday every month from November, with 5 in January, and so it’s certainly a crazy time of year!

With many businesses looking at taking a fresh approach for the new year, I thought today I’d chat a little about keyword research. By spending a little time analysing the keywords you’re targeting on your website, you can find whole new markets, and also stop wasting time persuing ones that aren’t worth it.

How well do you know your ideal client? When deciding what keywords and phrases to target in your advertising and search engine marketing/optimisation, you need to use the words that your buyers are tuned in to, and you want to be at the top of the heap so they hear those words from you first.

What follows is a 2 part process for finding keywords to use on your site and in your broader marketing.

#1 Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This is the tool to use to explore different keyword phrases to find one that fits your parameters. I’ve mentioned it before, but it really is worth a second look.

Where it says “Enter one keyword or phrase per line”, enter all the phrases you can think of surrounding a keyword. For example;

stop dog barking
stop barking
stop barking dog
stopping a barking dog
how to stop dog barking
dog won’t stop barking
barking dog
dog obedience barking
barking dog obedience
training my dog not to bark
how to train my dog not to bark
train a dog not to bark

It will give you the results of those phrases plus any other related phrases it thinks you might be interested in.

Now look at the Global Monthly Search Volume column results for your keyword phrases. You’re not necessarily aiming for keywords that have the most number of searches, but instead consider lower searches because you have a better chance of landing on the first page of Google with those phrases. A good rule of thumb is to look for global monthly search volumes in the 1500-2500 range.  These phrases are called longtail keywords.

Click the “add” button for each phrase that fills the bill. You can continue searching if you come up with some more phrases and add them to your list. Next take your new list and save it to your computer as a txt file.

#2 Assess your competition for the keyword phrases.
Let me stress there is more to assessing your competition, such as looking at each of the websites on page 1 of Google using your targeted phrase and determining their page rank, number of backlinks, exact text anchors used, etc. But what we will focus on here  is the number of searches for your longtail keyword phrase. After finding good matches for #1 and #2, you can always explore further.

Now go to Google and type your phrase in quotes into the search engine. Look at the number of search results in the upper right hand of the page. You can certainly use whatever parameters you want, but I generally look for a competition lower than 10,000.

Check each of your keyword phrases that looked good in step #1 and cross them off the list if they don’t look good here in #2. Of course, the more searches there are and the fewer competing sites the better. Sometimes you’ll find a real winner – a huge number of searches and very low competition!

By following this two step process you’ll get a keyword or phrase that is popular enough to have several thousand searches a month, but has little competition for the top spots in Google. With a little work you can dominate the search engine results for these terms and reap hundreds of new visitors a month.