Why is keyword research important?
It is important because in order to attract visitors and maintain a good search engine ranking you have to write content about things your potential customers are looking for. This is done by using keywords which are essentially a phrase somebody would type into a search engine.
How do I use my keywords?
You use keywords to create titles for your articles. For example you may be writing about cameras on your site. So a keyword influenced title might be “How to clean my Nikon D60?” ?So in this example people typing the keyword phrase?”How to clean my Nikon D60?” may see your page listed ?high up in the search results and read your article and may purchase the cleaning kit for cameras you are selling.
You can also use variations of your keyword phrase as subjects within your article. Something like “Cleaning the lense” and “Cleaning the mirror“.
Thirdly you can connect some keywords to your social networks when you post a link to your article on let’s say Google+ or Facebook to help increase your rankings in the search engines.
How do I find my Keywords?
There are several ways to do this; some for free and some for a monthly or one time fee. Here are a few examples.
1 – Alphabet Soup
This technique is free and involves playing around with Google’s search box. You begin with let’s say our example “How do I clean my Nikon d60?” What you will notice is that Google will also suggest some alternative related searches. So now you have your original keyword and perhaps a few good alternatives you can use.
The technique also involves suffixing or prefixing the letters A-Z to your original keyword. This will render potentially many more useful keywords.
To illustrate this in action please see this short video on the alphabet soup keyword research technique.
?Click photo or this link to view video
While the Alphabet Soup technique is free it is a bit of a lengthy process to come up with a long list of relevant keywords for your niche. Also you have little idea which ones are the least competitive compared to others. Using low competition keywords is a good practice because though it may not bring you a lot of traffic for one particular keyword; the aggregation of all your keywords on your site will.
Also low competition keywords should render better search engine ranking very quickly. As a rule of thumb if your article is listed on the 3 first pages of the search result you are likely to get a good amount of traffic.
?2 -?Ubersuggest?
Ubersuggest.org automates the Alphabet Soup technique for you. All you do is type in your phrase in a search box and it will return a list of various suggested related keywords. You would have probably have ended with the same list doing it manually as explained above; but this is a lot faster and you can save and download you results for use later on your website.
Here’s how it works with another example keyword “how do you find good keywords“.
As we can see it found 56 results which you select and get to download for future use. Saving them in a spreadsheet or notepad file is where I suggest you keep them.
?Again the advantage of Ubersuggest is that it is free and quick to come up with lists of relevant keywords. But you do not have any idea of which ones are lower competition compared to the others in the group.
3- Keyword Research Suites
Now let’s look at some tools that will not only help you find keywords but also tell you which ones you should target and a bit more. There are several ?good products out there that are known as Keyword Research Suites. Here are a few good ones.
- Jaaxy
- Wordstream
- SEMRush
I’m going to talk about Jaaxy because it is full featured, offers a free limited trial, and is well priced.?Wordstream and SEMRush are excellent tools as well but are much more expensive and are geared towards larger businesses and enterprises.
Jaaxy has several features including keyword search, site ranking, affiliate program search, and domain name search. You can also save all your results on the site or download them for future use. And training is included. Here is an example of a quick keyword search using one of our examples. Note that I am only showing a partial result in order to present some essentials. A lot more is returned in actual searches.
?
As a rule of thumb we are targeting keywords with > 50 monthly searches and a QSR of 300 or less?
What I want to point out are a few statistics; monthly searches, estimated traffic, and QSR (Quoted Search Results) and the little colored dots. Obviously green means good and yellow or red are not as good.?Why?
As a rule of thumb we are targeting keywords with > 50 monthly searches and a QSR of 300 or less. This should represent low competition (QSR) for those keywords marked with green dots and you should rank high in the search results. Remember it’s the aggregate of all your good keywords that will represent your overall site traffic.
You can validate your keyword performance quickly
With Jaaxy you can measure the result of your keywords rapidly. As an example I entered below one of mine to see how it performed. The keyword is “boomer travel trends” which is relevant to one of my websites.
So the result was very good. My article showed up on page one of the search results. This means that potential customers will see this article right away and there is a good chance they will visit my site; and perhaps purchase something I offer.
So it is obvious that using advanced keyword research suites are the best way to optimize your keyword research as well as adding additional functionality. Jaaxy for instance does offer a free trial for thirty keyword searches. It’s a good way to explore the power of the tool before buying.
You can have a quick peek by using this search window below to see for yourself.
If you have any feedback or comments on anything related to this article, I would love to hear it. ?Please drop me a note in the comments below! I try to respond within 24 hours.
Mike, founder of The Wealthy Boomers
