Building and ranking sights in order to be profitable and attract visitors is a competitive task. However, if done right, it can be lucrative and rewarding. There are many phases to building a successful web campaign. It is primarily broken down into building the site and marketing it. However, within the marketing aspect, search engine optimization, or SEO, is the primary way to market websites. And, keyword research is one of the most important aspects of SEO.
Keyword research is the absolute, and most important step of any SEO campaign. That is because you will be building your entire campaign around the words that are discovered during the keyword research phase. The most important keyword research tool you can use is your brain. However, there are other tools that can help supplement your creativity.
The first thing you will want to do when doing keyword research is to get in the mind of the customer. Sit down with a pen and paper and jot down all the words you can think of that they would use to find your website. Spend a few minutes doing this. You can easily come up with 10 to 20 words in a few minutes.
Once you have those words, you can start expanding them out. You can use your brain for this, or you can use other keyword research tools found on the market to do this.
From your base keywords, you can add suffixes and prefixes to the work to come up with more variations. You may add buying keywords to the beginning to make them more targeted. Words like best, top, cheapest, etc are buying keywords. They serve two purposes. One they make the phrase longer and easier to rank on. Second they signal that the searcher is in a buying mode. The volume may not be as high, but the conversion per visitor will be much higher for these words.
If you do want to use a tool to help with keyword research there are many available. Tools like Long Tail Pro, Market Samurai, Micro Niche Finder and others will help you brainstorm lists of keywords. They can also accumulate important data for you to help put together your campaign.
These tools can find out things like search volume, competition, etc. This can be important data. If you have a word that gets no volume, you may decide it is not working to rank on that term. Conversely, you may decide a keyphrase is too competitive to work on at first, but can be saved for when the site gets more traction.
Keyword research is the foundation for a successful search engine optimization campaign. It is important for both onpage optimization and offpage optimization. Without the proper attention paid to this stage, it is possible that an entire SEO campaign will be built upon words that have no volume, commercial intent or chance in bringing in buyers to your website. Ignore this step at your peril.