How to Do Keyword Research

Embarking on any type of marketing campaign without the proper preparation will result in lost time and dollars. The best marketing strategy in the world will not produce the right results if essential elements are missing from the picture. One of those necessary components of a solid and successful marketing strategy is targeting the right keywords.

So how does a business go about finding the right keywords to target in their advertising campaign?

1. A very important concept to understand regarding keyword research is that you want to target keyword phrases that people actually search for. The search volume of a keyword can be easily determined by visiting the Google keyword tool. You can view both global and local monthly searches.

2. Another important thing to understand about researching keywords is the amount of competition for a specific keyword. This can be found by going into your browser and searching for a specific keyword. In Google, the result appears at the top of the page.

Here are some things to note about using Google Web Search. A keyword phrase search can be done and have quote marks "placed around the phrase" like this. This provides a more precise count because this tells Google to search for the phrase exactly as shown without a change in the word order.

3. A keyword phrase that has high search volume and fewer competing pages is an ideal keyword phrase to target. For example, if a keyword phrase has a search volume of more than 1000+ each month and fewer than 9000 competing pages, then that is a good keyword to target if it is applicable to your business.

This is mentioned because targeting keywords that have nothing to do with your business is a poor marketing strategy. The idea is to drive traffic to your website that consists of people interested in the products/services you sell.

Attracting "targeted" traffic is very different from just attracting random traffic. You want potential buyers, and that means offering what they are looking for on your website.

Using the Google Keyword Tool

Enter a keyword that pertains to your business in the Google keyword tool. The tool will return a great list of associated keywords and phrases, and what's more, the list can be downloaded in a spreadsheet file. This gives you the ability to work with the results and sort them by search volume.

Next you evaluate the competition for the phrases with a high volume of searches, and start narrowing down to isolate some good words to start with. Some phrases are more ideal to target than others based on the numbers, but this does not mean the lower volume words should be abandoned altogether.

A marketing campaign is an ongoing task, so once you've targeted those high ranking words, you can begin to move to the medium ranked ones.

There are many software tools designed specifically to help marketers do keyword research. These are great tools to have because they do some evaluation of the words and help users determine the potential success of specific keywords and phrases.

Because this is such an important part of operating and marketing a business online, the small investment required for a good keyword research tool will pay for itself many times over.