Effective Keyword Research Method

In a recent article on Clickz, Julie Batten wrote about Effective Keyword SEO Research.
This is a great article which covers the basics of keyword research in 2 parts. Here's a quick wrap up of the 2 article.

SEO - Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine.

Why do i need SEO? - The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site.

Keyword Research?, yes that's the one of the most fundamentals of SEO activites.

Keywords are the building blocks of SEO. Although the days of the keyword meta tag being the golden ticket to top rankings are undoubtedly over, keywords themselves are still one of the most important aspects of good SEO. Just their application has changed. It's not about stuffing a hundred keywords into meta tags or your copy to get rankings. It's about uncovering the keywords that make the most sense for your business and using them in a way that drives targeted, qualified traffic to your site

Defining Keyword Research

The process of uncovering and selecting the appropriate keywords for your site is called keyword research. Very simply, it involves undertaking an often painstaking investigation to discover what terms people search for, how often, and how many and which other sites appear for those terms. Keyword research is a strategic exercise that enables you to determine which queries your site is most relevant for and for which you can feasibly expect a return, then optimize your site accordingly.

Doing It Right

The best keywords have the following qualities:

1. Strong relevance to your site: terms for which you have content to support


2. Relatively high search volume: terms people are actually look for


3. Relatively low competition: terms with a small number of search results

Without the above criteria, you'll typically land in one of two scenarios:

• You choose highly popular -- and competitive -- keywords. You end up with terms so broad that about a billion other sites are competing for them. You don't stand a chance of getting a top ranking.


• You choose very narrowly targeted or niche keywords. You end up with terms that are so specific that no one actually searches for them. A top ranking is wasted because no one's there to see it.

When you select keywords that meet the three key criteria, you exponentially increase your chances of ranking high in SERPs (Search Engine Result Page).

Helpful Tools


Two free tools to try:

• Google's Adwords Keyword Tool provides a long list of related terms and indicates search volume based on a five-point ranking.


• Yahoo's Keyword Selection Tool provides actual keyword volume for the most recent month it has data both for the term you type in and for related terms.

No matter how much time is invested, the knowledge you'll gain from conducting keyword research will be invaluable for any SEO initiative.

Understand Customers' Information Needs

Each person in your audience may have a different motive for searching. If you sell a product or service, people likely undergo a decision-making process before they make their final selection. For some products, this can be very quick (e.g., buying shampoo). For others, it can be very extensive and drawn out (e.g., buying a car or a house).

A simplified decision-making process involves:

1. Initial research

2. Consideration

3. Evaluation

4. Election/purchase.

Knowing these steps, we get an idea of the type of information needs users may have at each stage. Let's revisit the real estate example from part one. Say you're a home builder trying to determine what type of information users might search for. You might come up with the following:

1. Initial research:

• What type of house do I want?


• What area do I want to live in?


• What size home can I afford?

2. Consideration:

• Which builders offer my desired attributes at a price I can afford?


• Which builders have communities in my preferred area?

3. Evaluation:

• Which builders have the best reputation?


• How long must I wait for my new home to be built?

4. Selection/purchase:

• How do I purchase a home?


• How much will my mortgage be?

Develop Initial Keyword Lists

Once you have a good idea of what your audience might look for, you can start to think about keywords they might type in a search engine.

Some sample keywords to answer a couple questions from earlier:

• What type of house do I want?




• Detached homes


• Semi-detached homes


• Townhouse


• What area do I want to live in?




• Toronto area homes


• GTA homes


• Homes in Toronto

• How much will my mortgage be?




• Mortgage calculator


• Mortgage amount


• Home mortgage rates

By undergoing this exercise, you begin to formulate lists of keywords that may interest your target audience. You might later decide some aren't relevant to your site, but the point here is brainstorming, so anything goes.

Try to build out these themed lists by brainstorming with a variety of methods:

• Scan your site page by page for potential terms.


• Look at your analytics to see which search terms are actually used to find your site.


• Poll coworkers and the sales team.


• Interview your customers.

You should emerged from this process armed with multiple lists of keywords that could be relevant for your business. If you started with step one, these lists should be somewhat themed by information need. You may want to begin to group the terms into more focused topics. Loosely aligning these lists with the various content site areas can help down the road.

Employ Keyword Research Tools

Now that you have a good idea of what keywords your audience might search with, enlist the help of an online keyword research tool to find out what keywords people actually search with. (Some useful keyword research tools are suggested in part one.)

Copy and paste your themed lists one by one into the keyword research tool. If you do hundreds of keywords at once, you'll likely miss some important niche terms because they'll be overshadowed by the high-volume terms.

Each time you run a search, the tool will return a variety of different queries that relate to those initial terms (plurals, misspellings, related terms, synonyms, etc.). Some will be well suited to your business; others will be irrelevant. Don't try to scrub the results now. Instead, immediately export the results to an Excel spreadsheet.

Scrub the Lists

Armed with your results spreadsheet, go through the lists to narrow them down to the most appropriate and desirable terms. There's some manual labor here, but use Excel's many sort and filter functions to help automate some tasks. Some tips for scrubbing the list:

• Filter results to show only unique records, and eliminate any duplicate keywords.


• If you used a tool that gives you search volume and competition data, set a threshold for each metric and eliminate any keywords that don't meet them. You might immediately eliminate any terms that have less than 50 searches and more than 1 million searches (competition), for example.


• To target longer tail terms, eliminate any single keywords.


• Manually skim the lists and delete anything that jumps out as inappropriate, out of context, or irrelevant. Keep misspellings, however; you don't want to miss potential customers just because they can't spell.


• Remove any terms that are grammatically awkward that you don't see fitting into your site's copy.

Once done, you should be left with a relatively decent list for each area. Depending on how popular your market is, you could be left with 10 terms in each list or 100. If it's 100 in each, you'll need to be more ruthless with your scrubbing.

Make Selections and Allocations

Start to determine which keywords you'll actually use for SEO (define). That means choosing which keywords you'll target for which pages on your site. Check out "Doing It Right" in part one for help with selecting the best terms.

You ideally want two or three terms per site page. Create a new column in your spreadsheet called "URL or Page," and enter a potential page that may be a good fit with each keyword. Then sort by page, and see which pages require more or less keywords. Further edit and refine until you get to the final list.

Read the Entire post (A must read)
SEO Keyword Research Part 1
SEO keyword Research Part 2