Keyword research is the most important part of an SEO campaign. If you do this wrong, you may be spending all your energy in the wrong direction. A good keyword research takes days, and is not an easy task. If you are a beginner trying to find your keywords, here is a quick guide for beginners. Again, keep in mind that this is just a quick guide. There is a lot more to do that is not covered here.
1. Start with asking your team members for a list of at least 20 keywords each.
Ask them to think of the keyword that your customers will be looking for. Ask as many guys possible, R&D, sales, support - everybody. People tend to think different and the more answers the better. Create a list from the answers you got, at this point don't filter anything.
2. For every keyword in your list, try to find all possible related keywords. Use as many keyword tools you can.
KeywordDiscovery is one of the best. (There are more in our
SEO tools list.)
For every keyword, look for all its variations. You will find hundreds of related terms, plurals, singulars, nouns, objects, verbs, adjectives, spelling mistakes and everything you can think of. Going over these lists will probably take you many hours and make you hate it, but don't give up... You need to build a huge list.
After this phase you should have hundreds or thousands of keywords in your list.
3. With the huge list you have in hand, check the following for every keyword.
a. How many results Google has for this keyword. (competition)
b. How many searches are made on this keyword according to keywords Discovery (or any other tool you use)
c. KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Indicator).
We use a software that was developed in-house to do this task, (sorry, not for sale) but there are commercial tools that can do a pretty good job. Again,
KeywordDiscovery is a good option.
4. Add another column to your spreadsheet, call it market value. Grade every keyword in your list between 0-3.
Give a 0 to keywords that have no chance to generate sales. Give a 3 to keywords that have a great chance to generate sales.
In your keyword research you probably found excellent keywords that have beautiful numbers but the chances for these keywords to actually sell are low. grade them accordingly.
Now, filter out keywords with low Market Value.
Filter out keywords with low number of searches.
Sort the list you got according to the KEI from high to low.
Choose the top 10 keywords and use them to lead your campaign.
Congratulations! You got yourself a keyword list.
Now that you have campaign leaders, go back to the full list and find keywords that support your leading keywords.
Create a group for every keyword in your top 10 keywords and try to add as many keywords possible to these groups.
These "secondary" keywords can later be used in the articles you write, and in the links you build.
Be smart!. It is very important. Don't try to do anything that does not make sense. If you try to spam, they WILL find you...
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