Selecting wrong keywords and promoting your product to the wrong audience is the same thing. Just imagine promoting your business class air tickets to people who can’t afford to travel by air. Or imagine promoting your diabetes-related products to people who are not diabetic. Do you think you will get the desired returns from this campaign? The same thing happens when you select a wrong set of keywords for search engine marketing. You can get ranks for them but it will still produce very little in terms of conversion rates. So this is why keyword research is so important for your search engine marketing. Today I am going to share with you ways to do keyword research that really work.
Identify Your Business Goal
The first step is to close your eyes, and ask yourself what your business goal is. What do I want to do? Do I want to sell my digital product or increase my subscriber base? Do I want to sell my service or goods? Do I want to create a list of followers and earn from affiliates? And so on. Each business has their own goal and own target audiences. So identifying the goal is the most important thing to ensure the rest of the work flows in the right direction.
Identify Your Target Audience and Their Common Psychology
Whatever the traffic source you have, at the end you are doing business with humans. So your business success will depend on how you can convince them. And to convince them you need to know who they are and how they react. For example, if you are selling any digital product then the audience who search for free products can’t be the best option for you. Either you need to ignore them or create a free version for them, so you can convert them in future. For example, if you are selling a banner maker tool, here are three keywords you can for :-
- Free Banner Maker (Searching a free tool, will not buy your product)
- Banner Maker (broad, can still produce some sales)
- Best Banner Maker (Searching to get the best banner maker, can produce sales with better conversion)
So its very important to know the psycology of your target audience.
Create a List of Phrases You Have On Your Mind
Now create a list of phrases you could use to search for similar products/services to what you are selling. Enlist the assistance of your friends and relatives to enrich the list. You can simply create your list in an excel sheet. This will help you add any other additional information you will get in subsequent steps.
List down Known Equal Competitors and Their Keywords
Most people think that spying keywords from competitors is always good and time saving. Yes they are right. But still there has to be something additional to consider.
- Have the competitors invested enough time to find the best keywords? If yes then fine, but if no then there will be a chance of missing out on lots of good keywords they might have missed too.
- Are you spying the keywords from the competitors who are similar to you in term of business sizes? Large businesses always have bigger budgets and can target keywords with high competition. But most of the time those keywords are not good for small and medium sized businesses, especially at the beginning, due to high competition and having a smaller budget.
So you need to find a list of keywords your competitors are targeting and need to include those keywords to your excel sheet. spyfu is the best tool to find competitors keywords.
Use Keyword Research Tools to Get Additional Data
Now you have a list, it’s time to identify how good they are. The best free tool to use is Google Keyword Planner. You just need to go to this tool and login with your Gmail account. Then need to paste the keyword list you have listed in excel.
Now You need to consider four important things from the result
- Keywords
- Avg. Monthly Search Volume
- Competition (Competition shows in Keyword Planner is for PPC campaign)
- Suggested Bid (mostly important for PPC campaign)
Remember keyword planner will show you additional search terms on the base of your input and you have to check all of them. The easiest way to do it is download the result in csv format and filter it. Just keep the keyword which is closely related to your business and have a certain amount of searches per month. Delete all other data from the sheet.
Now search for each remaining keyword you have on your list and check how many competitors they have (the number of search result) and also check the following data for all the 10 results you see on the first page.
- Page Rank
- Domain Authority
- Page Authority
- Trust Flow
- No of backlinks
By analyzing this data you will get the SEO competition picture which will help you to find the best set of keywords.
Treat the search volume as the quality of the product and competition as the price. You need to find a relatively good product within your budget. That means a good search volume that faces less competition. So you need to go through all of the keywords and filter them one by one to find the best few.
But remember this filtering system is time consuming and can also confuse you in many ways if you are new to keyword research. So I suggest using any paid tool for it, or getting help from someone who is an expert on keyword research. Paid tools will gather all needed data by themselves and against their competition.
Best Keyword Research Tools for you:
Cut Down the List and Include LSI Keywords
By either conducting a manual search or through keyword tools, you have got a few great keywords from the broad list you had. Now it’s time to find a few more related keywords. It’s easy. Just search with the keyword you have selected. Go to the bottom of search engine page. And check there you will get some additional keywords people are using to find similar product. Pick the closest related one from there.
Finally: Identify Your Strength and Select the Keywords You Can Compete On
Now it’s the last stage for you, and that is identifying the strength. Each and every business has its own SEO budget and strength. So it is important to identify how much competition you can beat and you should choose keywords accordingly, even it has relatively low search volume. If you are new, then it might be a little difficult for you to identify what competition you can beat. In that case, start with the keywords which have relatively low monthly searches, because more monthly searches mean more competitors. If you start with a lower one then it will help you rank faster, identify your strength, and in future you can target more competitive keywords for that / new project.
See also: How to Add Keywords to Website
If you are still confused or you don’t want to invest time on it or want some professional help then I can help you find the best keywords for your business. To get help to find keywords for your business contact me.
