The Secret of Keyword Research
March 16th, 2008When you’re trying to generate money and business with your website, keyword research is one of the most important steps you’ll take in building your website. Figure out what your website will be about - what product or service you’re selling. Then you can start to brainstorm on what words people might search for to find your services.
The thousands of terms people use to search for things related to your industry online will help you target your pay per click advertising and other web marketing, as well as help your SEO efforts (especially so you know what anchor text to use when link building). The wider your subject and more services or products your provide, the more in-depth your keyword research will get, sometimes resulting in lists tens of thousands of words long.
To start your keyword research, just brainstorm a bit and get into your target audience’s head. What might they search for in the search engines to find your service? From there you can generate short list of broad terms. From there you can take your research in one of two directions.
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 the purpose of your keyword research is for your pay per click ads in Google or Yahoo, there’s a better way to conduct your research. How is that you ask? Just a bit of experimentation involving your pay per click program.
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 not rocket-science, it just means putting a little money up front. While more traditional keyword research works and definitely has value, for companies with less manpower and time, this method should help lead to higher conversion rates at lower costs. It can’t hurt to try!