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First Step: Keyword Research

You may have a wonderful concept or an idea for a product, but how do you know it will sell? It would be a good idea to find out how people are talking about it first. For example, let’s say you were a raw food enthusiast and had spent the previous year testing recipes and developing meal plans until you had a book full of them.

Without keyword research, you might run the risk of preaching to the choir by using all the terms you had learned from other raw food enthusiasts and not the public at large.

With keyword research, you might learn that only a small crowd is interested in raw food but large numbers of people are talking about diets, weight loss, and fatigue. This information tells you what you need to know to get your message out to a much wider audience, thereby making more money.

Keyword Research: Your Business Ballpark

This is the very first step, and it is designed to discover the words John Q Public is using to look for folks in the business you are in. Visit: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

and type in a word or phrase related to your business or profession. You might also try words or phrases describing problems for which your expertise is a solution. (From time to time you might be prompted to type in a security code. Wordtracker is simply thwarting ‘bots.)

The results you see displayed are the number of searches recently done using phrases that contained your key word or phrase. You may notice a plural form outranking a singular form or vice versa. Grab a thesaurus and try a few words you hadn’t thought of. Cut and paste the results into a text file for future reference.

This is the “word cloud” that regular people use to find people like you. The idea is to get beyond insider terminology and into the public vocabulary.

Keyword Research: Your Long Tail Niches

“Long Tail” keyword sets are phrases that are searched for less often and therefore have less competition. It is fairly easy to achieve a rank within the first 5 listings on search engines for long tail key phrases. This means that when someone sees a search result, they won’t have to click or scroll to see your site listed.

The Local Expert Tactic Depending on what kind of business you are in, you might consider the local expert tactic. This means using the name of your town or neighborhood together with what you do as your primary key phrases. For example, if you are a beautician in Podunk, Iowa, you could easily rank with podunkbeautician.com. If there is too much competition for one term, there might not be for another such as podunkmanicurist.com or podunkfacials.com. It’s no good for a national business, but works wonderfully for local businesses.

To discover the best long tail key phrases for your site you need to use the paid side of Wordtracker. Although fairly tedious, it is definitely worth the effort. The long tail research I did for a client turned up a phrase which pulls in 900 hits a month on its own.

Here’s how to do it:

Go to http://www.wordtracker.com and purchase some access time. Make sure you have several hours to commit to the research task before you pull out your credit card. (They offer several purchase options. Individual site owners would do well to buy a week’s worth of time. If you have a friend that also needs to conduct the research, you can split the cost, but don’t access the site from 2 computers at the same time, as it will result in garbage data.)

Build your list of Keyphrases Click Here to watch a video on how to use Wordtracker to generate a large list of keyphrases.

Perform A Competition Analysis Click Here to watch a video on how to use Wordtracker to perform a competition analysis. Accumulate your results in a spreadsheet. (Warning: This is fairly tedious!)

Sort Results By KEI Click Here to watch a video on how to use the data sorting function of your spreadsheet to bring the best KEIs to the top. This will be important for your longtail keywords.

Sort Results By 24 Hour Count Click Here to watch a video on how to use the data sorting function of your spreadsheet to bring the best 24 Hour Counts to the top. This will be important for your menu headings and building your inbound links.

Select Your Best Phrases Odds are that if you do enough research, sooner or later you will come up with several key phrases that have a high KEI value. Ideally, these would also be key phrases that also have a reasonably high 24 Hour Count. These are the words to build your site around.

Keyword Competition Research

Another very useful bit of research is to check out the competition. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. Competitors for the same sets of keywords might not be competitors for the same markets. Therefore, these sites are excellent candidates for link exchanges. In fact, you are helping viewers when you do so.
2. When competitors for the same sets of keywords are competitors for the same markets, it is a good idea to find out what they are up to.