“Keywords are like a compass for your SEO campaigns: they tell you where to go and whether or not you’re making progress.” – Backlinko.com
Creating a web presence is crucial to all businesses and is one of the most important things for your brand.
Gone are the days where relying on the Yellow Pages was enough to help customers find you. Today, creating a web presence is crucial to all businesses and is one of the most important things for your brand. Optimizing your site so the search engines can properly crawl and index it is extremely important to your organic visibility. When done properly, the visibility will lead to conversions, which is the goal for your business.
Doing keyword research before writing content for your business website or a blog post can be one of the most important things you can do. Ranking for the “right” keywords can also make or break your website.
So what does keyword research have an impact on?
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Social Media Activity
- Customer Discovery
- Branding
- Funneling the right people to your business website
These are all important factors when trying to get people to see your website. Keyword research will inform your strategic process by identifying exactly what your customers want, need and are concerned about. To start your keyword research, think about topics you want to rank highly. These can be things that are important to your business or topics that you feel might be important to your audience. For example, if you are a fashion company, you make choose phrases like ‘fashion accessories,’ ‘color trends’ or ‘runway looks.’ Also, think about how your consumers would ask for your products or services. For example, are starting phrases with things like “How to…” or “Where can I…” appropriate?
Once you have a list of about five to 10 keywords you want to focus on, you can continue the keyword research process by choosing a keyword tool. The most common tool is Google AdWords Planner, which has a Keyword Planner that is free, however, you need an AdWords account to access that feature. To learn more about it click here.
If you don’t want to go with Google, here are two alternatives:
- WordStream Keyword Tool – This tool has a huge database and enables you to customize searches by filtering adult keywords or “nichefying” results. It also offers options for identifying negative keywords, keyword grouping and find keyword niches.
- Wordtracker –You can find high-performing keywords in minutes via its easy-to-use interface. It shows you what people are searching for, gives you multitude of suggestions for keyword phrases and computes how much competition you might face for the terms selected. This tool is free, you just have to set up an account.
Once you have your keyword lists be sure to re-evaluate them every few months. Remember, the Internet is an ever growing place; just because you have a set list that has high ranking today doesn’t mean it will a couple of months from now.
What are your tips for keyword research? We want to hear from you!
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