How To Do Effective Keyword Research

Hi folks,

Keyword research is the most crucial part of the entire search engine optimisation process in bulding a well optimised website. It is the same as laying a strong foundation for a beautiful mansion. What amazes me most is that many sites are built with swish designs and coolest scripts doing funkly things. When it comes to choice of keywords used to target the audience for the industry in which the business operates, it turns out to be an absolute disaster.In the offline world, when a potential businesswoman looks at opening a business in a certain suburb, she does a thorough market research of the suburb on factors like the centrality of its location, buying power of its residents, decent neighbourhood etc, demographics in general.

Before building a website, the site owner must do a thorough keyword research for the industry in which the business operates. The broadest keywords form the categories and the more specific keywords are moved into the respective categories.

If you come across keywords that are standalone and cannot be grouped, then they are either not relevant to the business or they deserve attention and separate categories are created to accommodate them.

There are countless tools in the market which help you do keyword research. I would still recommend the Google Keyword Tool for two reasons - it is free and the data is from Google. The integrity of the data is very high and of good quality.

First and foremost, you have to change the location of the search to suit the country in which the business is located. Here in New Zealand, the default location is United Kingdom as in the screenshot

Google Keyword Tool

I would click on the Edit button and change it to New Zealand so that I get results specific to New Zealand. The keyword I have chosen is auckland seo I leave the Use Synonyms checkbox selected. Then click on Get Keyword Ideas.

Keyword Research

The results are split into two categories, Keywords related to term(s) entered and Additional keywords to be considered. You can get related keywords from the second list. These results can be exported to an Excel file. I am more interested in the local search volume than the global search volume as my target audience is within New Zealand, especially in Auckland.

For the term auckland seo, my local search volume says Not Enough Data which translates to the value -1 in the exported CSV for Excel file. There isLow Advertiser Competition for the term on Adwords network. By pointing your mouse on the green bar, the alt text displays the right level of competition.

The keyword I have chosen is not a short tail keyword like seo for which the demand and supply is pretty strong as in

Keyword Research seo

By adding the geographical location auckland to seo, I am looking at a  keyword that is definitely not short tail but is not exactly a long tail in the strictest sense. It is a good targeted keyword phrase.

When you want to come out on top of the SERPs for a short tail keyword and if you have a domain that is not powerful, you will be better off concentrating on optmising your site for the long tail keywords (2 or more terms making up a keyword phrase) than single term keywords. Gradually you will find that buidling up on the long tail phrases will have a cumulative effect and finally rank your site high for the term seo as in this example.

When starting keyword research, as in this case, start with the broadest term in your industry. It could be technical jargon but it is still valid because your product or service is based around that term. In my example, I will start off with the keyword seo

Keyword Research For SEO

I have selected a sample of results for the term seo. The advertiser competition is heavy and so is the competition. I am more interested in the Local Search Volume. I now click on the column heading Local Search Volume to sort the results in descending order.

The incredible thing here is that the demand is clearly visible. It shows what the market is asking for. All you have to do is suppply what is demanded. It cannot get easier than this. This is obvious Adams at his best laying out the truth in black and white.

Going through the list, I can see some keywords (more general and less specific) that will become the various categories. Examples here are seo services, website seo, seo software and seo optimisation to name a few. I would then group more specific and less general terms under each of these categories. At the end of this strenuous but highly rewarding exercise, I would have well grouped categories of keywords, with each category representing a silo.

The menu items in your website will be these silos or categories. Sub menus will focus on the specific terms within each silo. Your money pages will be focused on these specific keywords and they should ideally be not more than three clicks away from the home page.

It has been observed that about 75% of the traffic to well trafficked websites in specific industries are comprised of long tail keywords. Some of these search terms are lengthy and so specific that even keyword tools cannot register them. Only the raw data log files on your web server records such searches.

You would be well off looking at the data files on your own server if your site has been around for a while and has not made much progress when it comes to receiving good quality traffic. This is so similar to the concept - Tiny drops of water make a mighty ocean. All the long tail keywords combined can be such a huge source of traffic in themselves.

The information architecture and the site architecture should be born out of effective keyword research. The more you delve into your industry, be it a niche or a highly competitive one, the success is clearly defined by the exhaustive nature of your keyword research. Add more keywords to your lists from various sources and pore over them for hours till you arrive at a level of categorisation you are happy with.

Another important factor to be borne in mind is that trends keep shifting in many industries, fashion and jewellery to name a few. This is reflected by the change in keywords being used by searchers. This scenario requires that you continue doing keyword research at regular intervals to keep in tune with the shifting trends and create new content on your site to attract searchers using latest terms in your industry.

Netconcepts is a well established Auckland search marketing company that endeavours to provide its clients with the best bang for their buck by increasing their ROI (return on investment) and delivering top notch results in both the Australian and New Zealand search space.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 11:01 am and is filed under Blogging, Consultants, Ravi Venkatesan, Research, SEO-Search Engine Optimisation, keyword research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.