The Theory Behind Keyword Research In SEO
- Keyword Research is one of the most important, valuable and high-return activities in the search engine marketing field.
- Every search phrase that’s typed into an engine is recorded in one way or another, and keyword research tools which we are going to discuss in this unit allows us to retrieve this information.
- We can say that it is good to deal with keywords that have 5,000 searches per day or even 500 searches per day.
- but in reality these “popular” search terms actually comprise less than 30% of the overall searches performed on the Web.
- The remaining 70% lie in what’s commonly called the “long tail” of search
- However, those tools cannot show you (directly) how valuable or important it might be to rank for and receive traffic from those searches. To understand the value of a keyword, you need to research further, make some hypotheses, test, and iterate—the classic web marketing formula.
The tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day, or even only once ever, but when assessed in aggregate they comprise the majority of the world’s demand for information through search engines.
Traditional Approches: Domain Expertise, Site Content Analysis
One of the smartest things you can do when initially conducting keyword research is to use automated tools to brainstorm original ideas with the participants in the business. This can be surprisingly effective for coming up with numerous critical keywords.
Start by generating a list of terms and phrases that are relevant to your industry and pertain to what your site or business offers.
One easy way to begin this process is to gather your team in a conference room and then follow these steps:
- Produce a list of key one- to three-word phrases that describe your products/services.
- Spend some time coming up with synonyms that your potential customers might use for those
- products and services.
- Use of Thesaurus.
- Create a taxonomy of all the areas of focus in your industry. It can be helpful to imagine creating a directory for all the people, projects, ideas, and companies connected to your site.
- Broaden your list by thinking of higher-level terms of which your products or services are a subset.
- Review your existing site, and extract what appear to be key phrases from your site.
- Review industry association and/or media sites to see what phrases they use to discuss your topic area.
- List all your various brand terms.
- List all your products. If your site has a massive number of products, consider stepping back a level (or two) and listing the categories and subcategories.
- Have your team step back and imagine they are a potential customer, and ask them what they would type into a search engine if they were looking for something similar to your product or service.
