SEO Keyword Research

SEO keyword research is possibly the most important element of a precise internet marketing strategy. Let me be absolutely clear,

“If you optimise your site for the wrong keywords then all of your SEO (search engine optimisation) work will be wasted”.

I cannot emphasise enough the importance of doing proper seo keyword research. Before you do any search engine optimisation work you must do proper keyword research. Do not make the same mistakes that I made when I started learning internet marketing, of blindly choosing some high volume keyword and attempting to get my site ranked. I promise that it will lead to a lot of wasted time and effort without any rewards. I really want you to succeed online and make a lot of money. It sounds cliché but in order to do this you must build solid foundations. Proper SEO keyword research is the foundation to your online success.

Why is proper seo keyword research so important?

Proper seo keyword research is important for the simple reason that it what will determine how successful your site is.

Let me explain.

Imagine a person who is just starting out in internet marketing who decides that they want to get into the weight loss niche. This person imagines that a lot of people are going to be typing ‘lose weight’ into Google and consequently without doing any research decides that they are going to build a website and optimise their site so that they appear on page 1 in Google for ‘Lose Weight’.

Imagine another person who has a real passion for collecting corkscrews. They decide that without doing any keyword research that they are going to build a site relating to the ‘collecting corkscrew’ niche and sell related products to people with the same interests.

I hope you can instantly see what the problems are. In the first instance, if the person had done some keyword research, they would have realised that there is an extremely slim chance that they have any chance of ever ranking on Page 1 of Google for a keyword (s) such as ‘Lose Weight’. So the first critical point to note is that,

Proper seo keyword research will give us a very good indication of the competition there is for our rankings.

Taking the second example, if the person had bothered to do some proper keyword they would have learnt that apparently the market for used corkscrews was none existent. This leads to the second critical point that

Proper seo keyword research will also give us a very good indication of whether there is a market for our product our service.

I am sure that you will agree with me that knowing the competition in your market and the size of your market is mandatory. Keyword research will help you provide with this information.

Imagine for one second Mr. Newbie Internet Marketer. Mr. Newbie has heard that ‘SEO’ if quite hot at the moment and decides that he wants to rank his website no1 for the keyword ‘SEO’. You being much wiser than Mr. Newbie do a quick search on Google and confirm that the keyword ‘seo’ returns a result of 189,000,000 pages! You don’t need to know much about internet marketing to realise that there is a lot of competition and that it is going to be extremely hard to rank for this term. So instead you leave it and concentrate your efforts on a keyword that are much easier to rank for. If you didn’t do this research you could waste years trying to rank for this and get absolutely nowhere. This is such a common mistake and something that you want to avoid. So to repeat myself one more time,

‘SEO keyword research is the foundation to all your seo efforts. If you try to optimise your site for the wrong keywords, you are either going to waste your time entirely or optimise for a keyword that nobody has any interest in’.

Before you start any kind of search engine optimisation work, please, please do your keyword research.

How do I conduct proper seo keyword research?

By now you understand the importance of doing proper keyword research. So you probably want to know how you do it. Well it is important to point out that there is no right or wrong answer, to use a cliché it is more of an art than a science. People have their own methods and ways of doing it and this just my opinion. In the first instance I believe that you primary goal is to find and optimise your website for ‘golden keywords’.

‘Golden Keywords’ are those keywords that have a good monthly search volume but relatively low competition. I class good monthly search volume as anything over 1,000 searches per month and preferably 3,000 searches. By low competition I mean that the sites occupying that first 10 places in Google can be beaten.

Good monthly search volume + Low competition = SEO success.

High monthly search volume + High competition = SEO failure.

Now is it easy to find these ‘golden keywords’? The answer is no! The internet is ruthless and is extremely competitive, when other internet marketers find these ‘golden keywords’ they jump on and make good money. However that is not too say that there aren’t still a lot of excellent ‘golden keywords’ still to be found.

So to start with understand that the goal of proper seo keyword research is uncover keywords that have a good monthly search volume and relatively low competition.

When I am conducting keyword research I look at it as a 4 stage process. Firstly I decide upon a niche that I might want to get into, this could be something like ‘ dog training’ ‘the law of attraction’ ‘putting improvement’. Secondly I use a keyword research tool to ascertain the interest in the niche and look at keywords and search volumes. Then I look at the bigger picture ie. How competitive is the niche overall for certain keywords. Finally I look at the top 10 websites and ascertain what my chances of out ranking them. After all ultimately your gaol is to be no.1 on Google, so in reality the only real competition are the 10 websites that occupy the position on the first page (note I am talking about Google here because as I have mentioned before it still the most popular website and should be the one you are trying to rank for). Ok lets look at each stage in more detail.

Stage 1 – Deciding What Niche To Get Into

Really this is a decision that you have to make on your own. You might be really passionate about a particular hobby or subject. That’s absolutely fine. It might be something that has affected you personally. For example you may have bought a puppy and found the perfect way of turning the puppy into an obedient, respectful well trained animal. Honestly there is no end to the type of niche you can get into. You’d be really surprised at what interests other people share as well. One tip is to check out Google Trends. You can see what is popular at the moment and you can also see a chart of topics popularity. Initially it doesn’t what matter what niche you choose because you’ll soon find out whether there is any market for it.

Stage 2 – Ascertaining if there is a market for the niche

Once you have decided on the niche that you want to get into you need to ascertain whether there is a market for it. Now there are many different ways to do this but the easiest way is to use the Google Keyword Tool or the free wordtracker keyword tool. Use the tool to ascertain monthly search volumes. As mentioned if the monthly search volume is over 1,000 then it might be something that you want to get into. You want to get a healthy list of keywords related to your niche ready for stage 3.

Stage 3 – Looking at the ‘bigger picture’ for certain keywords.

Once you have your list of keywords, you now need to have a look at the bigger picture. This will help you get an idea of the chances for ranking. This does take quite a lot of time and effort but believe me it is well worth it.

*Note that the information I am about to give you is the real juice of seo keyword research.

I am assuming that from stage 2 you have a list of keywords that get over 1,000 monthly searches. Take the keyword and type it into Google and do the follow.

Step 1 – General Search

Type the keyword into Google and make a note of the results. There are no hard and fast rules, use your own judgment. If the search results return over 100,000,000 pages then the chances are that the keyword is quite competitive. Conversely if the results are less than 100,000 then it is possible that the competition is not so bad. Use a general search to get a feel for the size of the competition.

Step 2 – Perform “inanchor” search ***** Extremely important.

The next step is to perform the following search into Google.

inanchor:”keyword”

The inanchor search command shows us how many websites have the keyword as anchor text pointing back to their website. We may assume if they have the exact anchor text pointing back to their website that they have done some sort of linking building campaign for that keyword. Therefore it is logical to assume that they are the competition. No hard and fast rules but generally a result of under 1,000 is good and definitely under 100,000.

Step 3 – Perform “intitle” search

The next step is to perform the following search into Google.

intitle:”keyword”

These result will reveal how many website have the keyword in the title tag. It is generally accepted by most seo professionals that the title tag is extremely important for seo, as it is one of the first things that the search engines look for. This command can help give us an approx figure of the number of website competing for this keyword. Granted some websites may have put these keywords in their title tag by accident but the majority have put it there for a reason. i.e They want to rank for a particular keyword. No hard and fast rules about the numbers, obviously the lower the better.

Step 4 – Perform “intitle” and “inanchor” search

Now you want to perform both the inanchor and intitle search term. Input the following into Google

intitle:”keyword” inanchor:”keyword”

This will give you an approximate result of serious SEO competition. Smart SEO marketers will have the keyword in the title tag and will be building backlinks using the keyword as the anchor text. Therefore I think this helps to give us a fairly good idea of the competition. Remember the lower the search results from this command the better. Results of less than 1,000 may indicate to us that we can beat them with a relatively small amount of back link building. The higher the number the more competition and the harder it is the rank for.

Stage 4 – Analysing the top 10 websites for your keyword

That concludes stage 1.Hopefully by now you have chosen a keyword that has a good monthly search volume and relatively low link building competition. However we can’t stop there. You now must analyse the top 10 website on page 1 of Google. So far we have only analysed the number of competitors however we haven’t looked at the strength of the competitors. It is my opinion that you only need to try and beat the first 10 website after all your goal is to rank number 1 for the keyword. So we now need to analyse the strength of these top 10 competitors.

Step 1 – Type keyword into Google

The first step is simple, type your keyword into Google and make a note of the top 10 results.

Step 2 – Take each site and have a look at its backlinks.

The second stage is to have a look at the backlinks that each site in the top 10 results has. Now as I have mentioned before I believe that it is impossible to get an exact result on the number of backlinks that a site has pointing to it, however we can still get an idea.

Try going to Yahoo site explorer or One Utility. Enter the domain name and have a look at the number of backlinks the site has pointing to it. The more backlinks means the more backlink building competition for you.

Step 3 – Have a look at the age of the domains.

Most seo professionals believe that older sites are more trusted by Google. Do a quick search to ascertain the age of the domain.

Step 4 – Have a look at the onepage optimisation of each site.

For each site go to the homepage and then right click “view source”. This will allow you to see the source code. Check to see if you can find the following,

A. Keyword at the beginning of title tag.
B. Keyword in the keyword tag
C. Keyword in the description tag
D. Keyword in the h1 tags.
E. Keyword sprinkled throughout the page.

An absence of these might indicate that the site isn’t properly seo optimised and could mean that you could take advantage of this. Although I will repeat this again, it is my opinion that it is ‘offpage’ factors i.e. The number of backlinks that a site has pointing to it that is the most crucial.

Step 5 – Analyse if any sites have keyword in the url.

In a previous post I explained that I though the search engines put some weight on keyword rich domain names. If one of the site in the top 10 result has the exact keyword you want to rank for as the domain name then it may be harder for you to beat it.

Step 6 – Check the Page Rank of the domains.

Page rank is a way of Google showing us how important it thinks a web page is. You want to have a look at the page rank of the top 10 websites. Now it is quite possible to outrank a site with a higher page rank than yourself, however it is useful to help build an overall picture of the domains strength.

Step 7 – Check for prominence of Web 2.0 properties

A SERP (search engine results page) that has a lot of web 2.0 properties (e.g. Squidoo, Hub pages) may indicate to us that we are going to be able to rank well. Unless the web 2.0 properties have been heavily backlinked, then with our own back linking tactics we have a definite chance of beating them.

Perform all 7 of these steps and you should be able to get a good feel of your likelihood of dislodging the top 10 websites and getting to number 1.

That concludes my lesson on seo keyword research. Hopefully by now you can see the importance of it. So before you do any search engine optimisation make sure that you perform proper keyword research.

To your massive success.

Guy

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