How to Do Basic Keyword Research

If you want a quick and easy way to come up with some keyword ideas watch this video. For a more complete and robust explanation, read on!

Having a good understanding of how to perform Keyword Research can really benefit your website or blog. Search engines rely heavily on text (words) and being able to find out what text could take you to the top of Google or Bing will give you a huge advantage in getting that important traffic.

In this Hub we will be using the free Google Keyword Tool so you will want to sign up for that. If you already have a gmail account, or a Google account of any kind, this process will be quick and painless.

The first step to any keyword research process is actually done away from the computer. Get yourself a notebook or a piece of paper. If you own an offline business go to it and listen to the conversations that your staff and customers are having. What words are they using? Listen for the customers/clients/patients especially. How are THEY describing your business? If it seems appropriate, ask them to describe your business to you. What words are they using? Eventually you will start to see (or hear) a trend in the language. Write down the common words, especially the phrases, on that piece of paper or notebook that you brought with you.

Take that list with you and keep it lying around somewhere for a while. Try to imagine what your future customer or visitor would type into Google or Bing to find your website or blog. Is your website about dogs? What kind of dogs? Get as specific as you can. Write down as many different ideas as you possibly can onto your sheet of paper or notebook. The more you have the better. It is not uncommon for professional SEOs (Search Engine Optimization Professionals) to come up with hundreds and hundreds of words just for a single website.

Now that we have that list, let's go to the Google Keyword Tool and insert that list into the "Word or Phrase" box. If we have any more last minute ideas, now would be the time to put those into the text box area.

Next, we will want to make sure that the "Broad" match is unselected but that the "Exact" match IS selected. You can find these two check boxes just under and to the left of the "Word or Phrase" text box. We choose the "Exact" option because this gives us the number of searches that are performed for this EXACT phrase. Without this, (or if we left broad checked) we would only see the number of searches for keywords like the ones we chose. This can make a huge difference if we are trying to optimize for a certain keyword specifically.

Once we are finished making sure the "Exact" match box is selected, we can go ahead and click "Search".

Now the exciting part! By clicking "Search" we have been given two very important things. The first that we will see is the "Search Terms" section. This is the data that Google gives us for the keywords that we came up with earlier in our brainstorming.

The second important thing that Google gives us in the "Keyword Ideas" section. This is a list of keyword ideas that Google's software has come up with based off of the brainstorming list that we input earlier into the "Word or Phrase" box. You could think of this as a suggestion box.

Now what do we do with all of this information?

First we can look at the estimated "Competition". The Google keyword tool tells us what the competition of our keywords are, in terms of PPC spend on that keyword. Not sure what that means? It's ok. Just know that the competition suggestions aren't exactly based on how many people are trying to rank for that word, but how much is being spent and how competitive it is to advertise for that word. Use it as a rough guide, not an exact science.

The second and most exciting thing that we can do is look at the "Global Monthly Searches". This is a very close estimate of the amount of times this keyword phrase is being searched every month on Google. Translation: This is how many times someone could be getting onto your site to look at your products, or services or read your blog. This is the exciting part!

With this information we can begin to make decisions about what to do next if we are trying to optimize our website or blog or do any SEO for it.

If a keyword has high competition and we need results sooner than later, maybe we should consider trying to find a keyword phrase that has less competition. Transitionally, the higher the competition, the longer it can take to get to the front page of Google or Bing.

Try putting your keyword phrases into your titles and headers on article on your site. Get back links with the anchor tag inline with your keyword phrases.Now that you have your list you can begin the process of "Optimizing" your site. There are plenty of ways to go about doing this and I will be publishing hubs to help explain.

If you have any questions PLEASE COMMENT below. I will happily reply and help how I can.

A note on time frames in SEO: Even for lower competition keywords, it can 6 months or more to get your website ranked on the front page of Google. Consulting a professional SEO is always a good idea, even if just to get an idea of how much work you have ahead of you. Don't get discouraged, SEO should be fun. If it isn't then you may be doing it wrong :-)