How to Do Keyword Research and Testing!

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are the terms that Google researchers type in when looking for information on the internet.

You will want your website to show in the search results for these keywords indicating that someone has an interest in your product or service.

Therefore it’s critical that your website is optimised for relevant search terms used when looking for whatever it is that you are promoting on your website.

Why Is Research So Important?

There will be thousands of possible key search phrases that are relevant for your website.

However the question is what are the keywords that you should you optimise each page for.

Choosing the right keywords is critical since if you build your web pages using the wrong keywords there is a real risk that your online business could fail to get off the ground.

How Should You Go About Researching Keywords?

To start with I suggest you use Google followed by a keyword research tool.

For example if you search for “seo training webinar” you get the following results.

As you can see there are only around 50 competitors for this search term

However if you search on “seo training” you will find over 3m competing search term containing this key phrase that have been indexed by Google

If you use the following Google command you can filter these down to web pages with “SEO Training” in the page title.

allintitle:”SEO training”

This will reduce the competing pages to 89,000.

This is still too large as you should be looking for terms with no more that say 10,000 competitors with reasonable monthly search volumes. Unfortunately the Google search tool does not give an estimated volume but uses a graphic bar symbol to show an approximate monthly search volume.

The snag is that the volume of searches for “seo training webinar” is very low. Therefore if you are to attract a reasonable volume of traffic you need to do more research.

I would suggest looking for phrases of 2/4 words and a competition of no more than 10,000 pages with reasonable monthly search volumes

What Tools To Use:

There are no shortage of tools, some free and some paid. The ones I am aware of include:

• Interleado’s SEO Workbench includes Keyword Discovery
  • Can use free for 1 month
• Google Keyword Tool
  • Now provides search volume data by country and language
  • Onle list the most popular terms, not good for medium or lower volume search terms
• Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool.
  • Analyses your website to identify new relevant keywords that are present in your content but are not currently being targeted.
• Wordtracker
  • Can use free for 1 month
• Yahoo Search Marketing
  • Free tool, cumbersome process, need to sign in for every use

Local Keywords:

Local keywords are one useful way of filtering broad key phrases and reducing the competition further. In fact as keyword competition increases this is increasingly being used as a means to get a good ranking for your favourite keywords.

For example, the phrase “seo training boston” has only 19 competitors. Optimising this phrase for seo will increase the chances that anyone in Boston searching for this will find you. With the proper effort and focus, you should be able to get to one the top 3 positions on page 1 for this phrase.

Testing Your Keywords:

I suggest you use Google Adwords to test new keywords.

Do not test new keywords without having customised landing pages.

• A landing page is a page that visitors see when they click on the keyword. If you want to achieve successful conversion, you will need content on the landing page that is relevant for the keywords being tested.
• Use clear calls to action such as “Buy Now” or “Subscribe Here”
• Use techniques to reinforce the call to action
  • More benefits
  • Deadlines
  • Etc.
• Landing pages have been consistently proven to be more effective than Home pages in converting visitors to customers

I suggest testing each keywords for around one week or a minimum of 30 click thru’s.

Keyword Research Checklist:

Here are my suggestions for conducting a keyword research exercise:

• Select an initial set of 10 key phrases
• Focus on small-medium competitive keyword phrases
• Use a keyword research tool to add variations to these
• Use a software tool to check out what keywords your competitors are using
• Search from the point of view of your potential customers
• Run initial tests using Google Adwords to test:
  • Impressions or the overall volume demand for that phrase
  • ROI
• Then take the most popular keywords
• Select these for your SEO project
• Expand and keep building 10 new  keyword test campaigns at a time
  • Click Thru’s
  • Click Thru %
  • Conversion rates
• Keep writing quality content that uses these new keywords (I would recommend a blog for this)

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