Keyword Research

We can’t stress the importance of keyword research enough. Many owners of websites think that it goes as far as brainstorming a few keywords they think people would enter into search engines, and throwing them into the meta tags and copy of their site. This is not even the tip of the iceberg. Sure, brainstorming potential keywords is an integral aspect of getting started with keyword research but there is a whole lot more to it. Here’s how we go about finding the most profitable or beneficial keywords to target for our clients.

Brainstorming

Our first step is to brainstorm the biggest list of potential keywords for your site. In example, if you are a tree lopping business these may be, tree lopping, tree surgeons, tree care and so on and so forth.

Using Keyword Tools

We would then take these core or ‘seed’ keywords and run them through our keyword tools which identify a wide range of synonyms and other search terms that are relevant. We can then analyse local and global search volumes, cost per click data and advertiser competition. At a glance, we can now see which keywords are really competitive, and which ones we may go after.

Spider Competitor Websites

To add to this list, we then spider all of your competitors websites to retrieve all of the keywords that they are targeting. This broadens the scope of our keyword research, and in most cases, can uncover a few little gems that may have slipped through our tools.

Google Insights

To expand our list, we may then conduct some searches through Google Insights, to get an understanding of rising searches, and in particular geographical information behind where these queries are coming from. This is really handy if your website and business only targets specific areas, because then we can see the most popular searches for that region.

Refining Relevancy

After all of the research above we may end up with a list of potential keywords about 500 long, or perhaps 2000 or so. Either way, there will be a lot! So our next step is to manually refine the relevancy of each of these keywords to your business. If you are restaurant that sells italian cuisine, but you’re targeting keywords such as chinese food, you will end up receiving the wrong types of visitors. This is why assessing only highly relevant terms to your website is extremely important, and it further tells Google exactly what you’re about. Targeting a wider scope of keywords will result in diluting the strength of those that you want to rank for, so appearing on the first page becomes much more difficult. It’s all about quality, not quantity.

Assigning Keywords to Content

Once we have determined the optimal keywords to target for your site, it is now a matter of implementing them across your site. This may include but isn’t limited to, adding keywords to meta tags, within copywriting, headings, internal and external links. It’s also a matter of theming all of your websites pages so that each silo of your site is extremely relevant to a particular keyword that’s being targeted. That’s how Google determines that your top pages are the best choice for them to display in search results, and the better optimisation of keywords across your site, the stronger your pages become, and the higher they will rank.

To see what’s next in our SEO process, visit our page on link building.