Key Phrase Research
I have always said that this step in the SEO process is the most important that there is. If you do this on a Whim or you mess this part up, none of the rest of your SEO efforts will matter. Choosing the right key phrases to optimize for is very, very important.
What does it mean to choose the right key phrases? Key phrases are the words that people actually type into Google when they are searching for what you offer.
So let's say you sell a how-to guide on starting and running a dry cleaners. Some
of your key phrases might include "dry cleaning business", "starting a
dry cleaning business", "how to start a dry cleaning business" etc.
How do you know roomates key phrases to use? This is where the research comes in. There are several online tools available to use that will literally tell you what key phrases people are searching for. Here are a few keyword tools that I think are very useful
:
Google Keyword Tool
- this tool is free and just started to give you the actual number of
searches per month although I question the accuracy of the numbers. This one is my favorite to use.
SEO Book Keyword Tool - This is another free option that I use a lot. I'm not sure how they get their the data but it is somewhat accurate.
Keyword Discovery - There is a fee to use their tool INVOLVED keyword tool roomates I have never paid for.
Word Tracker - this one is not free either but again provides valuable information.
I have used all of these tools and have found all of them
to be useful at one point or another although you can get along just
fine with the top 2 free keyword tools.
Now that you have the tools Necessary to find what phrases you should optimize, I will show you the best way to use them.
Let's revert back to my original example of selling a how-to guide on running a dry cleaning business.
When you start your research you need to pick the term
that is relevant to your site that is the most broad term you can think
of. In this case I would say that the term "dry cleaning" is the most broad. So you type in the term dry cleaning into the search bar of one of the above keyword tools. It should return a long list of terms that looks something like this:
dry cleaning,
dry cleaning supplies
dry carpet cleaning
delivery service laundry and dry cleaning minnesota
dry cleaning franchises
chem dry carpet cleaning,
dry cleaning fluid
dry cleaning machine
dry cleaning laundry
dry cleaning equipment
dry cleaning hair brush how to
dry cleaning shirts wet versus
dry cleaning wet versus
dry cleaning business
monticello + lou dry cleaning
business dry cleaning drop off
dry cleaning home
dry cleaning is safe
dry cleaning marketing
how to start a dry cleaning business
dry cleaning coupons
pub songs themes
Fantasy maid service dry cleaning delivery service
dry cleaning businesses and statistics
I have only included the top 25 results for this example
but you should really see at least 100 key phrases if you search for dry
cleaning. The first thing you should do is open an Excel spreadsheet and import this list in to the spreadsheet. It will be much Easier for you to work with this list that way.
Now, these are the top 25 key phrases that people actually type into Google, Yahoo and MSN that have to do with dry cleaning.
Now as you look down this list you can use common sense
to deduce that many of these key phrases are not relevant to what we are
actually looking for. For example, you can remove the
third option (dry carpet cleaning) immediately Clearly Because that has
nothing to do with the product we are trying to sell. Having
said that, many of these key phrases may Appear to be irrelevant but
you need to be careful as you select roomates ones you keep.
Because your actual list is going to be so long, your
time will be much better spent first going through and picking out the
key phrases that you know are relevant to the product your selling. In
this case, we can see that "dry cleaning business" is on that list as
well as "how to start a dry cleaning business" just as we suspected.
Now if you look at the 5th key phrases on that list we see "dry cleaning franchises". This
is not a phrase we had originally thought of but it actually gets more
searches than the other monthly terms we did think of. If
you get into the mind of a person searching for dry cleaning franchises
you should deduce that they could be looking to start their own dry
cleaning franchise and thus would be a very targeted visitors to your
site if you could rank for that term.
You should go through the entire list of key phrases and
then create a second list on your excel file pulling out the ones that
make the most sense to use and these will be the terms you will try to
target.
So far the top key phrases are :
dry cleaning business
how to start a dry cleaning business
start a dry cleaning business
dry cleaning franchise
Now, the work is not yet finished. We have a good start on some of the key phrases we should targets but we need to find the rest. Our research would be incomplete if we stopped there.
Before we used dry cleaning as our most generic term we could think of that relates to our dry cleaning business site. We also need to look at derivatives of that term play. The best example is "dry cleaners". So
you should start the process over again by using one of the keyword
tools I Mentioned and type in the term "dry cleaners" into the search
bar.
You will again get a big list of terms roomates you need
to filter through and find the phrases that will bring you targeted
visitors. Add those terms to the second list you created of terms you want to use.
Follow this same process starting with all of the generic key phrases you can think that are relevant to your business.
IMPORTANT:
The more specific a phrase that someone searches, the more targeted the
visitor they are and they are more Likely to buy what you sell.
So Because these terms are what people are actually
searching for on the search engines and they are relevant to your
website, these are the terms you want to rank for with your website. These are your key phrases.
When you are starting a new website you should choose less competitive terms to be your game terms in the beginning. For
example, even though dry cleaning business is the term that ultimately
you want to rank for, in the short term you should choose key phrases
like "starting a dry cleaning business" which does not get as many
searches but will be much Easier for you to rank for initially. You'll also find these more specific terms that convert higher than the generic terms as well.
Once your site has gained popularity age and then you can link the target the more competitive terms.
You really need to be thorough key phrase during the entire selection process. Again, this is the most important step in the SEO process. If you targeted the wrong terms all of your efforts will be in vain.
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