Keyword research is an essential process and has to happen as early as possible, especially prior to any search engine optimisation. It is a vastly over-looked task and requires experience and patience.
In simple terms key word (key phrase) research is the task of discovering what combinations of search terms users tend to use in the search engines for particular products and services, at particular locations and times.
Understandably new site owners want to rank in position #1 for the biggest hitting generic search terms they can. Eg “flowers”, “computer”, “mobile phone”, “Florida”, “guitar”. All search terms like this are on tens of millions of pages and ranking for them is impossible for SMEs and also with most of the traffic being from users often not looking for goods or services.
Then, more targeted high-traffic key phrases such as ‘Olympics 2012’, ‘Digital Camera’ and ‘Iphone 5 Accessories’ while more specialised and valuable still have most likely far too much strong competition for any smaller company to achieve a Page 1 rank for.
At the other end of the spectrum, industry or specialist terms used in a site may work in the natural language of the business and be easy to rank for but users may rarely use them in context and potential customers may not even know them, especially in untapped niches.
The idea is balance and to find key phrases which have
- good levels of traffic from your potential customers
- a tendency to convert to sales
- a reasonable or low number of competitors
- competitors that are beatable (no mega sites)
- a degree of harmony with your other marketing activities
Digital Growth use an mixture of keyword research tools to deliver the best results and collate the results into a spreadsheet, providing each page on the site with 3-5 target key phrases.
These phrases will not only likely deliver higher levels of more targeted traffic, it is also better for the user who finds content (yours) which is more relevant than what was there previously (the less strongly targeted pages)
By carefully and conscientiously selecting key phrases we help your business, your users and the www at large.