Your websites visibility depends on how Search Engines understand and interpret what your site and business is about. All of this involves one crucial element …. words.

Researching keywords that relate to your business, the demand and usage of these keywords provides valuable insight into what your customers are searching for and how to position your business for these searches.

 

The Basics of Keyword Research

 

Understand your Keywords

All too often a business get hung up on a few keywords for their website thinking that if they rank for these keywords then traffic will materialise, without checking the amount of traffic that this “vanity” keyword could produce for the business.

 

Is it a Vanity Keyword

A business needs to determine if the keyword is actually relevant to the business, does the website actually have content relating to this keyword?. If a searcher had to land on this website / page after searching for this keyword, will they find the content relevant, will they find what they are looking for, or will they leave the site to continue searching.

 

Keyword Research

Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner tool is a common starting point for SEO keyword research. It not only suggests keywords and provides estimated search volume, but also predicts the cost of running paid campaigns for these terms.

See: Google Adwords Keyword Planner

 

I personally use SEMrush for all my keyword research. It provides related and phrase matched keywords in an easy to visualise format perfect for basic keyword research. As a business grows more confident in their understanding they can also take advantage of :

• Cost-per-click, CPC Distribution per regional databases, Competition, Number of results, Trend for each keyword
• Top phrase match and related keywords
• Top domains and their landing pages that pop up for each keyword in search results
• Top AdWords ads
• Ads History widget

 

See: SEMrush

 

Keyword Research

 

To give you a better understanding of keyword research, lets pick a very B2B, unsexy, never in the spotlight … “plastic moulding” as a keyword to research.

They have the usual off the peg five page website : Home – About – Service – Our Approach – Contact Us

With all the usual market fluff taglines, like “moulding the future” : Not that there is anything wrong with market fluff, but are you providing the information needed to the searcher that they are looking for to make an informed decision ?

 

 

Straight away, from this one search we can see the monthly search volume as well as addittional phrase match and related keywords.

Plastic Injection Moulding: is an obvious one to incorporate into the website, at almost the same amount of monthly traffic as plastic moulding, the business could double their potential traffic.

In the Related Keywords ( related as in people also search for ) we have two sets of keywords with even higher traffic : injection moulding 6,600 and injection moulding process 1,000

These can be incorporated into the site, in the form of a dedicated page and reinforced within the site by using articles : Injection moulding process used for plastic garden chairs; provide images, technical specs etc. Video on the moulding process for different products.

Become a Leader in the field for providing information around the subject, Every product you make becomes content and in-turn keywords relating to and ranking for your business.

Repeat the Process

 

Other ideas for keywords or content ideas around keywords, is what your competitors are targeting on Ads. Very helpful to also see how they have worded their ads, if you intend to use PPC

 

 

It’s wonderful to deal with keywords that have 5,000 searches a day, or even 500 searches a day, but in reality, these popular search terms actually make up less than 30% of the searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lie in longer tail keywords / search terms. The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day, but, when taken together, comprise the majority of the world’s search volume.

 

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