What Is Keyword Research And Why Bother?
All the great content you’re writing isn’t going to do you any good if no one finds it.
How will they find it? That’s what we’re going to be talking about over the next few weeks. Your first step is to do your homework a.k.a Keyword Research.
Let’s talk about this a bit for the next couple of days.
What Is Keyword Research
Let’s start by defining what exactly keyword research is. It’s the practice to use various tools and databases to find out how web users search for the topics, products and information we have available.
We then use that information to optimize our various web pages so they have a better chance at appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPS), preferably on page on.
Why do we do this? For free search engine traffic of course 
Now let’s look at how we go about doing this type of research.
How To Do Keyword Research
Start by getting into the head of your target market. I like to imagine specific person that has all the characteristics of my target market. What would she be searching for to solve her problem, find out more about a certain product or to learn more one particular topic. I make a list of those terms. They are my seed keywords. I then put those terms into one or several keyword research tools to find out exactly how related terms are searched, how often they are searched for and how hard it will be to rank for that term.
Keyword Research Tools
I’ll give you a brief overview over each tool today. Throughout the coming days, we’ll look at each one closer. For now, take a look at them and play with the two free tools (the google keyword tool and the free wordtracker tool). You may also want to sign up for a free trial for the Paid Wordtracker tool and give it a try.
This tool was originally developed for Google adwords advertisers, but has been opened to anyone. I’ve been using it for years to do some initial keyword research. Unfortunately it doesn’t give you any data on your competition, but there are ways to manually do this to see how competitive a keyword is. I’ll show you how in the next couple of days.
I also like using this tool to find out what keywords are in a particular page – good to know when you come across a competitors site.
This is another good tool, I like to look at both google and this tool to get a good initial feel for a group of keywords. Not that wordtracker shows you how often a term is searched in 24 hours, while the google keyword tool shows you monthly volume.
This is by far the most efficient way to do keyword research. The data is pretty accurate and you can find out with the press of a button how many other pages are seriously trying to rank for your keywords. The paid wordtracker tool also gives you the most extensive list of keywords with each search. You can easily generate a huge list of long and short tail keywords with it.
This is a great way to organize and analyze your keywords. Unless you are planning to get into quite a few niches and do a lot of keyword research, I don’t think you’ll need it. You may also want to keep in mind that this tool works best in conjunction with some of the paid keyword services like wordtracker and keyword discovery.
When I’m using the google keyword tool and the free wordtracker tool, I like to use Micro Niche Finder to automate the competitive analysis. It saves a lot of time and tedious copying and pasting.
Why Bother?
Lastly, let’s look at why we would bother doing all this research. We already touched on the fact that we want to do keyword research to have a better chance at ranking high in the search engines. Let’s take a closer look at that. By choosing a keyword that we know people are searching for at least a few times a day, and using it in the title, our article or blog post as well as in links pointing to that page, we have a pretty good chance of ranking on the first page of the big search engines for that term.
This will bring us a steady stream of targeted visitors who are ready to learn more, join our lists or buy from us. We’ll discuss all of this in more detail in the days to come.
I’ll go into more detail on each of these tools and other keyword resarch related topics in the next few posts. Feel free to ask any questions on this topic in the comment sections as well.
You may also like to read:
- Keyword Strategy – A Keyword Research Crash Course in 90 Minutes
- Wordtracker Free and Paid Keyword Tool Review
- Google Adwords Keyword Tool Review
- Leave A Comment Gain A Keyword Rich Link
- Long Tail vs. Short Tail Keywords – What To Use When and Where
Tags: keyword research, what is keyword research
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Hey Susanne – check out the free keyword tool from wordstream – http://www.wordstream.com/keywords
- i’d love to hear what you thought about it as a free tool.
-larry
Hi Larry, haven’t heard of this one before, but I’ll be glad to test it. – Susanne
When I first began working with keywords, I thought it was going to be a pain trying to use them in my blog titles etc. At first I kept a list nearby to remind me to use them. But now it comes much more easily. After you’ve written with keywords for a while, it gets more comfortable.