One of the most intimidating aspects of SEO for small business owners, is doing keyword research. Where to begin, what tools to use, what does all the data mean? It creates confusion, inaction and quite often falls back to reliance on hunches as to what people might be searching to find you.
Keyword research is a critical component of any search marketing campaign, and when done correctly can provide astounding results. I’d like to take a look at a few ways to get started with your own keyword research.
Let me begin by saying that you most likely have no idea what people search for to find you, and more often than not the supposed “money” keywords you are monitoring, are not the ones you should be concerned about. Keyword research can reveal the terms which will provide the highest quality traffic, identify areas of low competition in which you can capitalize and help refine your search marketing strategy.
This quote from Lisa Barone’s 2007 article on Search Engine Guide, sums it up:
One of the most common misconceptions about conducting keyword research for a search engine optimization campaign is the belief that you already know which terms a customer would use to find your site. You don’t. Not without first doing some research anyway. You may know what your site is about and how you, the site owner, would find it, but it’s difficult to predict how a paying customer would go about looking for it.
Getting Started
Brainstorming all the possible terms and phrases that could be used to describe your products and services is a great way to get started. Going analog with plain old pen and paper is a great way, or consider using one of the many mind mapping tools (we recommend Mind Jet, or Mindmeister) available to help keep things moving along. At this stage, don’t get bogged down by analysis, that will come later in the process. Here, we are simply trying to get topically relevant ideas on paper…er in a map.
Keep it Rolling
Once you have brainstormed your seed list, let’s find some additional items to add to it before we begin really drilling down.
Search Suggest
Ever notice when you search Google, Bing or Yahoo! how they try to “guess” what you may be looking for? They aren’t just using their Little Orphan Annie randomizer…those suggestions are coming from query data. Tap into it for additional ideas. (click the images below for a larger version).
Related Searches
Additionally, the engines are now trying to help refine your search by showing “related searches”. Theoretically, searches that appear in their query database that are used as subsequent or precursor searches to the query in which you used.
Google Wonder Wheel
A really useful tool for coming up with additional keyword and content ideas is Google Wonder Wheel. A simple search option in Google, you can search for a phrase and it will return a set of related phrases which will allow you to continue to drill down to more specific sets of keywords.
Now What?
Once you have a long seed-list of keywords, start to organize them by topic/theme and prepare to refine your list. In the next post we will look at refining your list, and putting some of the various keyword tools to work for you.
Tags: keyword research