Keyword Research for SEO

I've been letting this old blog stagnate, and decided to get the juices flowing again with a quick discussion of keyword research. Partly because I have been buried in a lot of it lately, and partly because of a good article I ran across over at Search Engine Land (link fourthcoming...)

Keyword research plays a major role in the overall SEO effort, because it essentially defines the target search volume that is being pursued in any SEO campaign, in both the on-page and off-page optimization being performed. You can't begin any journey without knowing where you're going, unless you want to take a really round about route, which in business of course translates to a very costly and time consuming round trip.

Instead, discovering what potential customers are searching for, as it relates to your market and niche, and positioning your site to be visible in response to those search queries, is really the broad definition of SEO in general. So, it only makes sense to get this part right - if you don't, every link you build, every on page tag you create, could be wasted. Bad for budgets, and does not make for happy clients.

What I like about this article at Search Engine Land is that it concisely sums up 3 really good, valid of sources of objective data that reveal what real visitors are using to find your site, and specific products and services you offer.

Site Search Good site search functionality will provide data about the queries used by your site visitors, including top search phrases (most commonly used.) These are people on your site, digging for something to buy from you, so it stands to reason that paying attention to this, and optimizing your site to match these queries only makes sense.

Analytics The whole point of analytics, on some level, is to do exactly what we are talking about. Take an in depth look at all queries used to find your site, to determine which ones are used most often. In essence, analytics data, for the pupose of keyword research, is to your site, what your site search platform is to your products and services. There is some overlap here too, obviously.

Automated Keyword Tools There are many tools available, hosted or software based, to aggregate data for keyword volume, which allow you to dig deeply from a macro leve into micro niches, to get a global view of search. The amount of data we need to process in order to identify the most valuable keywords to target, which is a judgement call on the tradeoff between search volume and competition levels, is fairly enormous. It can be done manually using free tools, such as the Google External Keyword tool, in conjunction with Aaron Walls SEO for Firefox - but even with the powerful features included in these fre*e resources, the competition research alone could take hourse of billable time to process.

My personal favorite keyword tool, which totally automates these steps, including competion for both SEO (organic) search and PPC traffic, is Market Samurai. And that is not an affiliate link (and I wish it was..) because no affiliate program exists yet for this software. However, it deserves to be mentioned on its merits alone, and is well worth the cost of the software in terms of how much valuable, actionable information it provides in a matter of minutes v. the hours it would take to generate manually.