Keyword research: a comprehensive SEO guideline

If you actually want your website to work for you then the first thing you require to know is: no keyword research means any SEO! Why? Because keywords are the cornerstones of SEO and, trying to promote a website without having the right keywords brings no results.

Keyword research is your first and most significant step in the SEO Services. Even though this step won’t appear interesting to do, I’ll try and make it simple and easy to understand. And, take my word: this task is your first and biggest chance to launch a 100% winning SEO campaign.

The simple truth about keywords

It’s about the length and composition of keyword phrases. When people conduct searches in Google or other search engines, most often they type in a one-keyword phrase (e.g. cars), and when they can’t find what they looking for, they change their search query to a two-keyword phrase (e.g. red car), and if they still can’t find what they looking for they use a three-keyword phrase (e.g. blue BMW X5), until they find exactly what they looking for.

Search engine users are becoming more accustomed to searching for precisely what they want and with the implementation of Search engine optimizationtechniques, they will find what they looking for much faster.

One-keyword phrases gets the most number of searches while the two-keyword phrases gets a bit less and three-keyword phrases even fewer. Two-keyword and three-keyword phrases are the most rewarding to the visitor as they are able to find exactly what they are looking for i.e. these keywords are more specific to the users request. Three-keyword and four-keyword phrases are also called long tail keywords.

Targeted traffic

Targeted traffic is visitors who come to your website because they are looking for what you have to offer. Long tail keywords convert the best as these are more specific to the users search. Let’s use an example: if you are looking for a BMW X5, would you search for cars or BMW X5? Obviously, you would search BMW X5 as this search query is more specific to what you are looking for. Similarly if one is thinking about purchasing a BMW X5, they would most probably search for BMW X5 for sale (four-keyword phrase) or BMW X5 prices (three-keyword phrase) or BMW X5 for sale Johannesburg (five-keyword phrase). These long tail keywords are searched for less frequently as opposed to the generic keywords like BMW X5 or one-keyword phrases like cars, but enough to still get tons of traffic.

The user behavior shows that visitors use generic keywords to gain more information about a product or service – this is more for educational / research purposes. When they are satisfied with their research and ready to purchase, they amend their search to a more specific one i.e. Long tail keywords, such as ‘BMW X5 for sale Johannesburg’.

If they type in a search term, find your site, come to it and buy – this means that the search term they used converts. If they come to your site after their search query, look it through and leave, the keyword does not convert. You only get a visit, but not a sale. This is not necessarily bad as one can still use a generic keyword to get them to your site and using your site content you can convert them there. (More about this in another article though.)

Choosing keywords

I’m going to share with you what I often tell clients / stakeholders etc. about choosing their keywords. This process can be divided into two steps:

• First, make a huge list of words to choose from.
• Then, sort them out by grouping them and make a short list of the most profitable keywords.

Make your first list of keywords

Make a list of every word or phrase you can think of that people might use to find what your site offers. Ask anyone you can to give you ideas – you’ll never guess what alternatives your colleagues can offer. Use an Excel spreadsheet to put each keyword as a separate record.

After you have a list of single words, think of keyword phrases. Try to combine the words you have on your list, or add other relevant words that better describe your product or service. Again, ask your friends and colleagues for input and try to find people that are within your site’s target audience to get an idea of how they would search.

Also, take into consideration variations in terminology as determined by one’s age, profession, what part of the world they are from, and so on. Remember that there are often several ways of saying the same thing. The simple example I recall is headphones. My dad rather calls them headsets; a work colleague often calls them earphones – just use your imagination!

Spying on your competitors

like any other marketer, we SEO’s tending to keep an eye on our competitors to get more ideas and a chance to ‘borrow’ some nice keywords. One of the ways is to use the free Google Keyword Tool again. Choose some keyword phrase you’d like to use and enter it in Google’s search field. That’s a way to find the top websites you would have to compete with.

Say you sell cars, first type in cars in Google to see who your main competitors are. Now copy that URL and go to Google Keyword Tool. Choose the option to generate keyword ideas using the website’s content, and paste the competitor’s URL where it applies. Wait a couple of minutes, and Google will surprise you with an awesome list of keywords your competition is using.

Now do the same for more competitors and see how your keyword list grows bigger, with the new keyword ideas you’d never think of!

Some quick tips:

Localize your keywords e.g. ‘Removal Company in Johannesburg’. So if your business location matters, you will have to create keyword combinations with local names. Tiny variations can make a huge difference; most search engines make a distinction between singular and plural forms, as well as stemmed variations – gender forms, or “-ing”, “-ed” forms.

So don’t forget it may be very useful for you to target different forms of the same words as well. It’ll bring some extra searchers to your site, maybe not that many of them, but as long as you make a sale, it’s worth the effort.

Keyword grouping

Now that you have a detailed list of keywords, you now needs to group the related keywords together and filter out the non-profitable keywords. Go through the list and identify similar / related keywords and group approximately 10-15 keywords / keyword phrases. Have as many groups as possible. Keywords that have few searches need to be filtered out.

To sum up, do your keyword research, group your keywords, build content around these keywords and optimize! You are bound to see great results.