What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of discovering which words and phrases will be most profitable for you, learning what words and phrases people are searching for and turning that knowledge to your advantage.

The idea being that you will use popular keywords for whatever it is that you want of yours to appear in the search engines results page like an article for example which you want to drive traffic to your web page by ranking highly.

This is really a two step process, you use a keyword tool to discover how many searches there are for a particular keyword and then you discover how much competition there is for that particular keyword.

There are two types of keywords, long and short tail.

If you were to search in Google for ‘Holidays in Italy’, that would be short tail. A keyword isn’t just one word, everything typed into the search box is a keyword.

The problem with short tail keywords is that the competition is high whereas for example if you were to search for ‘cheap camping holidays for families in Italy’ you will find that the competition is lower.

Basically, the more words you type into the search engine (long tail keyword), the easier it will be to rank highly.

The Golden Rule!

Begin by discovering keywords that have high search volume but low competition.

High Searches  – Low Competition!

So, have a brainstorm and think of some keywords that are related to your niche. A good tip is to look for keywords that are either action or buying related, for example:

How                                       Build                                 Learn              Secrets                       Teaching

How to                                 create                               mastering        help                             instructions

Step by step                      learn                                  learning           course                        tutorial

Incorporate some of those with something relevant to your niche eg learn how to bake a cake, mastering dog training or step by step to loosing weight.

Then do a search using the Google keyword tool, look for anything which has a search volume of over 2000.

Now you want to check out how much competition there is for that particular keyword and here’s a handy tip for doing just that;

Go back to the Google search engine and, in speech marks (otherwise known as quotation marks), type in the keyword you are researching. So, if you are looking at mastering dog training as the keyword, type it into the search box like this “mastering dog training”.

Doing this will show you only the EXACT matches found for that keyword.

Look for results of less than 60 – 70,000.  Play around with it and come up with a list of high search low competition keywords which are relevant to your niche and write them all down.

Just to recap then, in the keyword tool look for searches of more than 2000 or so and take the keyword and type in the search engine in speech marks looking for competition of less than about 70,000.

Well done, your basic keyword research lesson has now been learnt!

Onwards and upwards armed with some quality keywords!!!!!

 

Filed under: SEO for beginners

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