Keyword Research: Down and Dirty
[Ashley is giving good advice here about making your site work for you. Find some possible keywords and research them. She seems to suggest moving to Pay Per Click and letting that be the next step of research, however if you do some good market research first you will lower your costs considerably. There are all kinds of free tools out there to help your market analysis and they do offer more than you pay for them! Gren. Bingham]
If you want your website found on the web, keyword research is the first step. Well, actually, the first step is deciding what products and services your website will sell and then actually building a website, but in between those two, keyword research has to be conducted. It means finding out what your potential clients are searching for online.
The thousands of terms people use to search for things related to your industry online will help you target your pay per click advertising and other web marketing, as well as help your SEO efforts (especially so you know what anchor text to use when link building). The wider your subject and more services or products your provide, the more in-depth your keyword research will get, sometimes resulting in lists tens of thousands of words long.
To start your keyword research, just brainstorm a bit and get into your target audience’s head. What might they search for in the search engines to find your service? From there you can generate short list of broad terms. From there you can take your research in one of two directions.
The more traditional school uses online tools and programs. Google’s Keyword Tool will generate a list of related terms and suggested terms as well as show how often people search for them. There is also software available that utilizes several online tools in one. Whichever you choose, do a bit of research to find how to best utilize it.
If you’re doing keyword research in order to target your pay per click campaigns, there is a way to save yourself some time. You may even wind up saving money in the long run. It’s just a matter of experimenting a bit with your search-marketing program of choice.
This technique involves spending a little cash on for your research, but it often yields better results than more traditional keyword research. Just take your first general list of keywords and build your text ad campaign around them in whichever program you use. Most marketing programs allow you to chose a broad or exact keyword match for your terms – choose the broad option. This means whenever someone searches for a combination of words that include one of your keywords, your ad will show.
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:
About the author: Ashley Lichty, along with her colleagues, do keyword research, content development and other SEO techniques for ProspectMX.com. You can learn more about her and her team by visiting her website.