Often times when people talk about SEO, you’ll hear them use all kinds of acronyms and fancy words. One of the phrases that’s more simple, but vitally important to any successful internet marketing campaign is “keyword research”.
What are Keywords?
Keywords are the words or phrases that someone uses to search for something with a search engine. In other words, whatever someone types into the search box on Google or Bing is a keyword.
Keyword research is the meticulous study of what keywords people use in order to describe what their looking for with the search engines. For example, in the case of Lumin it’s important that we know whether people are searching for “Birmingham internet marketing” vs. “internet marketing Birmingham”, whether searchers are including “Alabama” vs. an abbreviation like “AL”, and so on.
Once we determine what phrases are being used most often by online searchers, we then optimize the website for those particular keywords. This is why keywords is the most basic and fundamental part of any successful SEO campaign and making a mistake in terms of what keywords to optimize a website for can result in months of lost time and money.
One of the tricky things about keyword research is that it’s often counter-intuitive. Because we’re humans and we all have a way that we would search for something doesn’t mean that’s the way most people would search the internet to solve the same problem, find the same product, etc. What we often find during the keyword research phase of an internet marketing endeavor is the phrases that are most popular, i.e. the one’s most consumers are using, aren’t the same keywords that we would first think.
How Is Keyword Research Done?
There are several ways to do keyword research, some much better than others. The most popular way is to use Google’s keyword research tool. Google’s keyword research tool allows users to input a keyword or several keywords, and it will provide estimated monthly search volumes. It makes sense that, of all people, Google would know exactly how often people are searching for certain phrases…and they do know. However, anyone whose been doing SEO for more than a month will be the first to tell you that Google’s Keyword tool is often extremely inaccurate. In my earlier days, I can remember several instances when, after a lot of hard work and optimization, we got a website to rank #1 for a targeted keyword phrase only to realize that Google had completely misrepresented the monthly search volumes.
So what do you do if Google doesn’t report accurate numbers? Search engine optimization companies generally do one of two things.
Paid Keyword Research Applications
There is some great paid keyword research software available. Some of the better one’s include Wordstream and SEO Book’s Keyword Research tool (which is actually free for basic use). While these keyword tools are great at finding additional keyword opportunities and getting a general sense of which keywords are used more than others, every keyword tool in existence at the time of this writing are far from accurate. If someone must rely on keyword tools, it’s generally best to make sure that there is come sense of consistency across all or most of the third party keyword data sources.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns – The Best Keyword Research Tool Available
The final option is to conduct an investigatory PPC campaign to determine the actual number of searches occurring for several possible target, keyword phrases.
This has several benefits over traditional keyword research methods.
1.) You know the data is correct – When conducting an SEO campaign for a client, there’s no room for failure. For the most part, it takes 2-3 months to rank for targeted keywords in an SEO campaign, so once you realize that the search volumes aren’t there you’ve already wasted that much of your clients budget and will be having a hard time showing any ROI. Rather than risk this possibility, it makes sense to make a small financial investment up front to pay for a small Google AdWords campaign set on exact match. If you’re low on funds you can do the reseach with Microsoft AdCenter for a lot cheaper and multiply the search volume times three. The other benefit of using AdCenter vs. AdWords is that it will tell you all of the keywords your campaign triggered, whereas AdWords will only tell you the ones that resulted in clicks.
2.) Ability to Target Geographically – One of the main problems with traditional keyword tools is that they give you either global or national search volumes. In many instances, a client is only interested in selling to a specific geographic market and the way people search is often cultural, i.e. people in the South might search with one keyword phrase, people in the North another way, the West, and so on. By getting an idea of how many searches their are within a geographic target market, you’ll be a lot more confident about what you should expect from the campaign and can therefore create those same expectations for the client.
Continuing with Lumin as the example, we would go to AdWords (or AdCenter) and create a campaign set to only target the Birmingham metropolitan area. (This way we could include areas like Hoover, Vestavia, Mountain Brook, and so on.) Then we would setup themed Ad Groups for similar keyword phrases and let them run for a minimum of 2 weeks. 30 days is usually best, but 2 weeks of data is better than none and a far better investment than guessing with a little help from keyword tools.
