Keyword Research: How to do Keyword Research for SEO

Keyword Research

Search Engine Optimization is becoming a more basic part to companies’ marketing strategies.  It is important to plan a well thought-out SEO strategy. There are many details that should be considered when developing an online strategy.  Keyword research plays a critical role in SEO plans. Many factors need to be considered when creating, gathering and analyzing keyword research.

Before beginning an SEO plan

Before creating an SEO plan, it is important to study the existing website.  It is also important to review what details need to be considered before jumping in to your SEO. The target audience needs to be known early on so that all plans work towards attracting the desired audience.  It is also important to look at messaging and make sure that all messages are relevant.

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research tools provide valuable insight into potential customers. It helps educate the company on how customers think.  When users go to search engines and type in their search query, they may use language that is entirely different from what the company would expect.  It is helpful to understand the competition.  Gaining additional information through an analysis of competitors’ websites is helpful.  Their targeted keywords can provide insight.  And observing media coverage on them will be beneficial.

When gathering keyword research there are many factors to consider.  It is critical to analyze the research tools available.  For example, related terms shows ideas of related words in groups.  It also provides insight into words that may not have been thought of in the brainstorming stage of generating keywords.  The keyword planner gives related terms and search volume estimates.  It also provides search trends and ad cost estimates for any keyword.  This helps when determining the strength of any given keyword.  A company can get forecasts of traffic on different keywords.  They can determine potential click-throughs and look at word popularity estimates.  Google trends also provides the popularity of keywords over a certain time.  Google can also give popularity by season and geography.  This helps companies narrow in on keyword analysis. Keyword density analysis shows the frequency keywords appear on URLs which is extremely helpful in competitive research.  There are so many more tools and reports to gain additional competitive intelligence and compare data.

Long Tail keywords

Long tail keywords are unique, infrequently searched words.  In combination they make up most of the world’s demand for information. These searches are about 70% of total searches made.  The head of the search demand curve shows the popular queries that are searched thousands of times each day.  Hummingbird is used to help avoid missing important information in these broad keywords as well as long tail keywords.  It gets at the heart of what users want to find our through their searches.  Hummingbird changes how Google interprets searches and gives data.  The results given are more meaningful because Google can better interpret what the searchers’ intents and match keywords searched.

Why is keyword research important?

According to Digital Marketing experts, “The emergence of effective Internet marketing tools make the business landscape of today a very exciting arena for brands, products and services wanting to make their mark and succeed online. More effective tools means more opportunities to reach a bigger and wider market that no brick and mortar business can reach using traditional marketing methods. At the top of these list of tools that bring in the most traffic is – search.

If people need information about anything like getting news updates or finding more details about a product before making a purchase, most rely on what the search engine results pages tell them. Many would not even go beyond the first page and click on the links to websites that ranked higher on these search results. As a business owner building your online presence, your chances of survival in the online marketplace is to rank as high as you can on the most popular search engines.” (http://digitalmarketingphilippines.com/understanding-the-basics-and-importance-of-keyword-research/)

Additional Resources on Doing Keyword Research

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-do-keyword-research-ht#sm.0001s8hqxk24yfkzslv2omowfk0bs