- Everyone will eventually develop their own approach and process to doing keyword research, and you'll ultimately need to find something that works for you. But the most important part of keyword research is to forget about you and your business and put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers. The process typically begins with brainstorming and answering some key questions. This stage is important from an organizational perspective because it will force you to look at different areas of your business. Start with answering, what services do you offer? Be as comprehensive as possible and list out as many keywords and phrases as you can.
But make sure that you do it from a customer's perspective. As people who work in our business as every single day, we might have a very different way of explaining our products and services. Take for example, a discount travel website. You might be tempted to write down keywords like high-value air transport and G76 eligible discount ticket, but at the end of the day, no one in the world is typing that into a search engine. While those things make sense to you, your customers are looking for cheap flights.
Well brainstorming can get you started. We'll look at some tools that can find and suggestsimilar keywords and expand your list of possibilities considerably. Once you've got that list of potential keywords, the next thing you'll need to do is take look at search volume metrics and see what kind of a demand there is for those phrases. As you do this, you'll notice that while a handful of keywords get typed in thousands and thousands of times per day, there are a whole lot more that don't get typed in nearly as often. These might be more descriptive keywords or less common variations but the important thing to note is that these are known as long-tail keywords.
is that these are known as long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords in SEO are incredibly useful.They let us go after a much larger amount of less competitive keywords that tend to beextremely relevant to our business objectives. And while individually there's not a lot of search volume on each individual term, they each do have some search volume. For example, if I were selling iPhone cases, I may start looking into the keyword iPhone cases, a term that gets typed into search engines a lot. It's extremely competitive and it's probably going to be very difficult to rank for.
going to be very difficult to rank for. But I might also take a look at more long-tail keywords like blue iPhone 5s cases. It's going to be extremely relevant, less competitive and easier to rank for at the expense of raw search volume. But here's the important part. You might be able to find hundreds or thousands of these long-tail keywords that together have the potential to get you more traffic than ranking for iPhone cases would have from the start. Finally, you want to add some meaning and organization around the keywords that you've collected.
You can do this by identifying themes or topics to group your keywords around, a process known as keyword categorization. Back to the example with the blue iPhone case. We may want to create a group that will just be about blue iPhone cases, that includes all the differentmodels of the iPhone. Alternatively, we could categorize these not by phone model but instead by color. There's no right or wrong way to do this, only the way that works for you and allows you to manage these groups of keywords as you optimize for them. Remember, in the end, that this is an exploratory and discovery exercise.
and discovery exercise. Everyone searches differently and you'll find lots and lots of data as you dig deeper and deeper. Be open minded, put yourself in the mindset of your potential customers and make sure to consider all of your options as you evaluate your keyword performance over time.
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