The Internet is an open place, and there are companies out there that have the ability to track keywords and keyword phrases of virtually every site on the net. This includes your competitors! This is good news for you because now you can research the keywords that are working for them, allowing you to copy and paste their most successful keywords into your own marketing campaigns.
Starting with the basics, Keyword research is the process of discovering the actual search terms users are typing into search engines when surfing online. People generally do one of two things online; look for information about something or seeking to buy something. As Internet marketers, we want to connect with the people looking to buy services or goods.
Keywords that raise a high level of interest in buying are called keywords with high commercial intent. A free keyword tool by Microsoft allows you to discover these keywords and phrases.
Type in the word, “Corvette” into this Microsoft keyword tool and it will tell you the related searches for, “Sale, Club, Wheels, Clubs, C5” This is good if you have a product or service you are trying to sell or promote because it gives you related searches for that term. There are a bunch of other tools on the Microsoft AdLab website, but this is only one tool we are going to talk about in this article.
Long tail-keywords are great for turning a generic keyword into a very specific keyword phrase. The term, “how to eliminate credit card debt” is a good example of a long-tail keyword. Because there are more words in this phrase, there will be fewer bids on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which makes it cheaper to rank at the top.
Long-tail keywords only make up a small portion of Internet searches. But when you think of them as a whole, and use variations of them, they can add a significant amount of traffic to your website. They also add domain authority when it comes to search engines, since long-tail keywords strengthen the theme created by broader phrases. Be sure to add long-tail keywords into your website and Internet marketing campaign when developing your strategy.
Geographic Targeting:
Depending on what services you provide, the audience you are trying to target and what you are selling, it is important to include geographic locations into your keyword research. Keyword phrases like, “Tampa Website Design”, “Sarasota Terrazzo Restoration” and “Entertainment Booking Miami” are important qualifiers for local products and services.
Considering the ratio of keyword supply to keyword demand is also an important factor. Keyword demand is basically the number of times a keyword is searched on the Internet in each month. When looking at Keyword supply, it is basically the number of Web pages that contain that specific keyword or phrase.
Keyword research tools allow you to see your competitors PPC ads and some show how long they have been running. You may even discover a few competitors you didn’t know you had. Some keyword research providers offer free trials to test out their services, and with their paid feature, you also get SEO data of your competitor.
3 Stages of Keyword Research
Keyword research can be broken down into three stages.
The first stage is “Creating Your List” – by doing this it gives you a visualization of what keywords you will be using, and from there you can easily create long-tail and geographic keyword phrases.
The second state, “Finalizing Your List” – usually involves researching your keywords again, or against any previous months data to ensure your list is solid.
The third stage, “Taking Action” – this is where you put your list into action, updating your Google Adwords or other PPC campaign to implement your newly created list.
A full service SEO Company will do this for you automatically each month. When you combine your SEO and Website Design Company together, the first step is to modify your HTML code to reflect the new list of keywords, and then modify any PPC campaigns you are running so that both your HTML and PPC are tethered together. Adding social media marketing to the mix and you have a perfect trifecta for getting more web traffic.
So when you are ready to hire a full service website design & SEO company to manage your website and SEO campaigns, contact us and we will show you everything we are capable of. Keyword research is a very small part of implementing SEO into your website to generate leads that eventually turn into revenue.
