If you want your website found on the web, keyword research is the first step. Well, actually, the first step is deciding what products and services your website will sell and then actually building a website, but in between those two, keyword research has to be conducted. It means finding out what your potential clients are searching for online.
It’s the myriad of terms people use to search that will allow you to better target any search marketing you do, as well as start building content and links to help your organic rankings in the search engines (also known as search engine optimization). The wider your subject, the more in-depth your keyword research will be - sometimes ending in a list of keywords in the tens of thousands. For example, if you sell ONLY 3 brands of fishing rods, your keyword list will be noticeably shorter than if you sold fishing rods, line, bait, tackle, the whole nine.
Much of keyword research is just old-fashioned brainstorming. You sit down, think about your target audience and get in their frame of mind. Think about the types of things they might type in to find your service, and get yourself a general list of several terms. Once you have that together there are one of two ways to conduct keyword research - this is where the ’secret’ comes in.
The more traditional way to generate keyword lists and conduct keyword research is to use online tools and software. Google’s keyword tool will give you a list of keywords related to the terms you entered as well as related terms you may want to consider. There is also software you can purchase that will search several keyword tools on the Net, including Google’s, Yahoo’s, WordTracker and even find common misspellings of your keywords so you can target those with your search marketing as well.
If you’re doing keyword research in order to target your pay per click campaigns, there is a way to save yourself some time. You may even wind up saving money in the long run. It’s just a matter of experimenting a bit with your search-marketing program of choice.
Most pay per click programs allows you to choose a ‘broad’ match or ‘exact’ match option regarding your keywords as your build ad campaigns. Spend a bit of cash to build a general campaign around your original keyword research - the list of several general terms you created. Add them as broad matches, which will allow your ads to pop up anytime at least one of those words is in a search inquiry.
After letting the campaign run for a while, you can check to see which EXACT keywords send the most traffic to your website. This allows you to tell which keyword terms attract the most business for the least money. You can begin building a more detailed campaign and eventually phase out the broad keywords for exact matches, saving you many man-hours of keyword research.
It’s really that simple - a great way to better-target your keywords to your audience and save a ton of time and energy on keyword research. (Not to mention your eyesight - if you’ve ever had to go through a spreadsheet 1000 words long to clean it up, you know what I mean!) This should help you have higher conversion rates as well, leading to more sales generated. Go ahead, give it a shot, and see if it works for you!
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