Keyword Research Strategy

by Kelly S. Digital Marketer

If you want your online campaign to be successful, you must first carry out detailed keyword research to discover the keywords and phrases that people will use to look for the products and services you offer. Keyword research is a critical aspect of Search Engine Optimization because it is the first step in carrying out a successful SEO campaign. The level of success you'll achieve will be directly related to you selecting the most appropriate and relevant keywords and search terms and focusing your attention on the best opportunities that you have for reaching your desired audience.

Keyword Discovery

The optimization process usually begins with what we call the Discovery phase. This is where you, and your optimization expert, and possibly some of your clients, brainstorm a seed list of keyword phrases. This is a list that contains all the major terms likely to be relevant to your website and your products and services. Refining the seed list Once the seed list has been produced, the research is continued by looking at your competitors websites, relevant online forums, newsgroups and by using a range of popular keyword suggestion tools. At this point, there will usually be a seed list of between 30 and 500 search terms, depending upon the size and complexity of your website as well as the number of pages that are being optimized. When this is done, work to find more specific terms and phrases is done. These will be used to help guide the selection process for the keywords that you'll actually use for your pages. This involves considering a number of factors such as popularity, relevance and competition for each of the phrases in the list. By the time we've finished with this process, we usually have hundreds of keyword candidates for your website.

Keyword Selection

Phase three involves using various tools and some software to start to prioritise the hundreds of keywords found and to eliminate search terms that are not suitable for your website. The tools enable the Optimizer to calculate the most effective keywords for you to target for each of the pages of your website that are being worked with. We usually recommend having between 1 and 4 keyword phrases for each page. If you plan on doing your own keyword research, here are some useful tools that are the same ones we use: * Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool * Google's Keyword Suggestion Tool * Wordtracker * Keyword Discovery * Web CEO Once the keywords have been decided upon, it is time to take on the Keyword strategy and map them to your pages.

By: Software Development Company