Keywords and Keyword Research Today

“The three most important factors in marketing are location, location and location.”

How many times have we heard how valuable it is to have your shop located on Main Street so there will be lots of traffic passing by your shop?

But now, with the advent of search engines, the way people search for products and services has changed. They no longer take a stroll down Main Street to look in the shop windows. Or do they?

Actually, people still visit the town square, but it’s done by typing a phrase called a “keyword” into the query box of a search engine and clicking the "search" button. Suddenly, without ever leaving the comfort of their own home, they arrive on a virtual “Main Street” where the product or service described by that keyword is sold.

Now there are as many different “Main Streets” as there are keywords, each one characterized by the keyword which leads someone there. Now it is important to have your business website appear on the “street” (search engine results page) which is highly-trafficked by potential customers browsing for your specific products or services.

How do you ensure that your product or service is placed in a prominent position on a search engine results page for the most profitable keywords?

To make this happen, you have to answer three important keyword marketing questions:

1. Which keywords are potential customers of your specific products or services likely to search for?
2. Which of those keywords are most valuable?
3. How do you convince the search engines to list your website on the first results page for these “profitable” keywords?

Likely Keywords

The first of these questions is one that you can start to answer off the top of your head simply by describing your products or services. In this way, you’ll name some of the keywords potential customers will search for. But can you name all of the keywords that people interested in your products or services might search for? It’s not likely. In fact, you’ll probably have to do a good deal of keyword research to come up with a complete list.

Fortunately, there are keyword research tools available to aid you in your keyword research. A typical keyword tool accepts a “seed” keyword as input from the user, which is usually the user’s description of the product or service he offers. Then, typically, a keyword research tool will generate a list of keywords related to the original seed, each of which is usually accompanied by several columns of statistical data.

Lists of keywords returned to you by keyword tools will usually contain keywords which you had not previously thought of, but which people are likely to use in searching for your products or services.

These lists of newly discovered keywords, combined with their associated statistics, can help you to develop a complete list of profitable keywords for your business. They will also help you to discover untapped market niches, and get inspiration for new products and services.

Most Valuable

Additionally, a data column provided by many keyword research tools contains information about the traffic associated with each keyword. This column helps you to answer the second of the three important keyword marketing questions listed above. (i.e. which keywords are most valuable?)

It helps, but search volume can mean many different things. All you really know from high search volume is that there is a lot of traffic. But are these people looking for products or information? Many of the most trafficked keywords are educational terms - or keywords that are so broad that the traffic is really meaningless.

There is a way to start to ascribe a value to a keyword, however. In the following video we'll look at the proprietary ideas behind the way that we at Theme Zoom consider the value of a keyword:

Rankings

Now, having answered the first two important keyword marketing questions, it is essential to answer the third one: “How do you convince the search engines to list your website on the first results pages for your profitable keywords?”

As in most areas of life, one way to get what you want is to pay the right amount of money to the right people.

In the case of search engines, you can pay them to list your website on the first results page through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisement. However, you can also get your website “highly ranked” (i.e. appearing on the first search engine results page) without paying the search engine companies. This can be done through various Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.

One simple SEO technique is to avoid trying to rank your website for keywords which are already strongly dominated by your competitors.

To do this, you’ll need to be aware of your competitor’s keywords, and you will need to research how difficult it would be to “out-rank” your competition for those same keywords.

Of course, everyone is trying to rank highly for the high-traffic keywords of their business. But ranking highly for lower-traffic keywords which are highly-specific to your business can produce just as many sales as ranking highly for higher-traffic keywords which are not so specific to your business.

This is the whole idea of the “long tail keyword”: People searching for a highly-specific keyword know exactly what they want to buy, and they are likely to be at a point where they are ready to buy. Therefore, having a few of these “highly-qualified” visitors on your website often achieves as many, if not more sales than having many “unqualified” visitors on your site. And, if you construct your website according to the principles of Silo Architecture, you can rank your site for not just one, but many highly-specific keywords. Choosing the right research tool can help you immensely to analyze your market in ways like this, and to act effectively on the results of the analysis. For more information to help you choose the right research tool, click here.

SEO keyword research

SEO keyword research tools return lists of Search Engine Optimization keywords which can help you to outrank the competition for profitable keywords. But these keywords are only profitable if you know how to prioritize them, and where and how to use them.

Many keyword tools claim to aid you in optimizing your website by providing you with SEO keywords, but unfortunately, most do not provide much guidance on how to prioritize the keywords they return, or on where and how to use the keywords most effectively.

In fact, it’s not uncommon for a keyword research tool to leave you in a more confused state than when you started.

Most tools provide you with a lot of “interesting” keywords and statistics without telling you how to prioritize them, how to organize them, or how to use them most effectively for the SEO of your website.

Fortunately, there is at least one keyword tool which does help you prioritize the keywords it returns, and guide you in where and how to use them. And, if you still really like the keywords generated by other keyword tools like Wordtracker™ or Keyword Discovery™, you can import those Wordtracker keywords and Keyword Discovery keywords into this keyword tool, and it will help you to prioritize them as well.

Find out more about The Last Keyword Tool now.