Keyword Research

So what do we mean by keywords? Keywords or keyword phrases are the words that people type into a search engine to find information or products. Without proper keyword research you are doomed from the start. If you create a site about something or a product no one searches for you won’t get any visitors and thus you won’t make any sales. You need to find keywords that are being searched a lot.

How do we find our keywords? Where on earth do you begin to start researching keywords or phrases that people are searching for? To find our keywords we have to look into various niches and I recommend in the beginning to focus on niches that interest you. A hobby, a pastime, something that you love doing. You’ll know from experience what phrases to search and when it comes to writing content later you’ll find it easier if you enjoy the subject you are writing about.

Let’s take ‘cross stitch’ as our niche. My mother’s favourite past time, not mine I hasten to add! Now we need to find out as many keywords that we can around the niche cross stitch. There are many online research tools you can use to do keyword research. The best free keyword research tool is Google’s own external keyword tool. You will need an Adwords account to access it. you can sign up for an account easily enough.

The tool allows you to search for keyword phrases in a number of countries. It is just a case of entering your word or phrase and clicking on search. Below you will see a screenshot of the results of searching the keyword ‘cross stitch’. I searched globally, rather than selecting a specific country.  When you search for a phrase you have three ways of searching – broad match, phrase match and exact. When we’re doing keyword research always search in exact mode. This will give you the results for you phrase in exactly the order you entered your phrase. Let’s take New York Car Insurance as our phrase. If you search using broad match the results will include all the words in any order. New York Insurance, York Car Insurance, New Car Insurance and results in 18000 searches a month. However as we are targeting the phrase New York Car Insurance we must use exact match – to get results for that exact phrase. The results are just 1900 searches a month. That is the true figure.  Substantially less huh? 16000 searches a month less.

When someone types in New York Car Insurance in Google, Google will give priority to sites matching that phrase and then the broad phrases which will have less relevancy. As the majority of searchers don’t go beyond the 1st page it’s highly unlikely any broad match results will be scene and clicked on. Now if you took the broad match results and built a site around that phrase and expected tons of visitors because you think 18,000 searches are made a month you’re going to be disappointed. If you got into the number one spot (nigh on impossible for an insurance niche!) you’d get less than 50 visits a day

Getting back to our screenshot below you can see the results of our keyword research phrase ‘cross stitch’. Remember, these are exact searches every month on Google globally. The phrase cross stitch gets 40500 searches a month, cross stitch patterns gets 33100 and cross stitch kits gets 18000 a month. Google will offer phrases around your niche that might be of interest. See the embroidery keyword gets 90000 searches a month. There’s another niche you could start to research!

Obviously you want to target phrases with the most matches but typically that means competition is much higher. The rewards are greater if you can get to the top of Google with a high searched phrase but it will take a fair bit of time and lots of hard work. Trust me, there’s no point and click solution, whatever it costs.

I normally wouldn’t advise targeting any keyword phrases under 5000 searches a month because the amount of traffic you’ll get even from a number one position will be low. There are a number of Internet marketers that target small niches with low numbers on purpose because they tend to be easier to rank because there’s much less competition. This is often referred to as Micro Niche.

The thought behind it is creating many micro niche sites making small profits adds up once you have a lot of sites. There are many Internet marketers with 100′s of sites making a few cents to a couple of dollars a day. This really can add up. And some people were making plenty of money for awhile. But Google got wise to these types of mini sites and many have been de-indexed (removed from Google’s search results) and the owners have been left to start over again!

One other important part of keyword research is domain availability. In an ideal world you need to find an available domain name that includes your phrase in some form. Ideally you would have the domain name matching the keyword phrase exactly. This is referred to as EMD – exact match domain. EMD’s are much harder to come across now. Most are taken. Always aim to find a .com first, .net or .org next or country specific if you are targetting traffic from a particular country (UK is .co.uk).

The keyword phrase ‘cross stitch patterns’ is unavailable in .com, .net and .org and with – hyphens splitting the phrase too! It has been considered for some time that Google gave a lot of weight to websites with EMD’s. However they have recently announced that this will no longer be the case and they will be giving preference to the content. So you could put a word in front of your phrase and it would not necessarily harm you – justcrossstitchpatterns.net is available!

Trends are changing all the time in the online world. But what is always successful are good quality sites, with good quality content. They take longer to build and involve a lot more work, but the rewards are far greater.

This is a brief guide to keyword research, there is more to it but this should give you a basis to work with. The Google Adwords tool is free to use to. There are better paid tools and I’ll be going over them in due course.

Keyword Research Tools:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/keyword-research