Keyword Research: Down and Dirty
Ashley Lichty
Keyword research is one of the most important stages of developing a website - especially if the purpose of the site is to generate money and business. Your first step is deciding exactly what you will be selling on your site - is it a product, service or information? Next is taking the steps to find out the type of things people type into the search engines when looking for your particular product or service.
It's the myriad of terms people use to search that will allow you to better target any search marketing you do, as well as start building content and links to help your organic rankings in the search engines (also known as search engine optimization). The wider your subject, the more in-depth your keyword research will be - sometimes ending in a list of keywords in the tens of thousands. For example, if you sell ONLY 3 brands of fishing rods, your keyword list will be noticeably shorter than if you sold fishing rods, line, bait, tackle, the whole nine.
Much of keyword research is just old-fashioned brainstorming. You sit down, think about your target audience and get in their frame of mind. Think about the types of things they might type in to find your service, and get yourself a general list of several terms. Once you have that together there are one of two ways to conduct keyword research - this is where the 'secret? comes in.
Most people will use online tools and programs to conduct keyword research. There are programs that will search several keyword tools on the net. You can also use the individual tools yourself and figure out which works best. Google's Keyword Tool generates a list of related keywords as well as suggested terms, also giving you an idea of how often they're searched for.
Of course, if the purpose of your keyword research is to build search marketing campaigns through Yahoo and Google, you can save yourself time, energy and the game of trying to figure out which keywords are the best to use and which will waste money. How you ask? Simply by doing a bit of experiment with whichever search marketing program you use.
If you have a bit of extra cash to spend, you can do your keyword research in a whole different way. Take your original list of several terms and begin building a campaign around them (this works for both Google, Yahoo and other search marketing affiliates). Most search marketing programs have the option of using a "broad" keyword match - meaning whatever combination of search terms somebody types in, as long as it contains your keyword, your ad will pop up for them.
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!
About the author: Ashley Lichty, along with her colleagues, do http://www.prospectmx.com/services/custom-lead-generation) keyword research, content development and other SEO techniques for http://www.prospectmx.com/ ProspectMX.com. You can learn more about her and her team by visiting ProspectMX.
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