Understanding Keyword Research – critically important for your SEO

Search engines have one primary objective – to display to the searcher, the websites that best match what he or she is looking for. It is therefore critical that the search engines can recognise your site as being relevant to search terms being entered.

However, first you need to determine which particular search terms you should be targeting – this is called Keyword Research.

Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated in identifying websites, the basic concept of relevancy and understanding the actual phrases (keywords) used by searchers has not changed since the early days.

Keyword Research therefore remains the bedrock for all tactics to help influence the ranking positions that webpages will achieve.

So how do you determine the best keywords ? And what does Keyword Research involve?

In its most simplest sense, keyword research is the process whereby you can identify the best range of phrases that your potential customers are actually typing into the search engines to find the types of products and services that you sell.
In order to truly understand what those words and phrases are, there are various approaches to take:

• look internally – talk to your colleagues and staff. Especially those employees who work in customer facing roles who hear the types of words that your customers use

• look externally – talk to your customers and ask them what phrases they would use to find your products and services through a website

• look at your competitors – what words and phrases are they choosing to target?

• use a free or paid for search tool – the most popular tool is the Google Keyword Search tool. This tool  can not only provide you with a range of phrases that you may not even have thought of, but will also provide approximate numbers of monthly searches undertaken for each phrase.

You will naturally want to target those terms that have the highest demand, but be careful as these terms are often very popular and are targetted by many other sites.

Try and aim for phrases that are not quite so popular, for which you may have a better chance of targeting and ranking well for. This should also include phrases that are relevant, but longer.

For example, if you are a hotel based in Soho in London, you would not target the term “hotel”, as this would be extremely hard to compete on, and not entirely relevant to your business – most people will not be specifically looking for a hotel in London if they search using the keyword “hotel”.

It would be better if you were to target “hotel in London”, or even “hotel in Soho London”. Not only will competition for these phrases be lower, but your website will be far more relevant to the search query.

A good way to identify how competitive a phrase is, is to try googling: intitle:”search phrase” (replace search phrase with the keyword you are targeting) and see how many websites are returned. These are all sites that have your target search phrase in the title of their website, and can therefore be assumed to be targeting this keyword. The lower the number the better!

Once you have undertaken Keyword Research and have identified the best words to target for your business, you are ready to start optimising your site for these keywords. But that is a subject for another day!