One of the first things that any business owner needs to do when starting a new online marketing campaign is in-depth keyword research. It doesn’t matter which internet marketing strategies they plan to use afterward, keyword research will form the backbone of the entire campaign.
There are several reasons why properly researching and using keywords will propel you out from under the crowd. Here are a few of the best reasons why you need to incorporate thorough keyword research into your marketing strategy.
First of all, the keywords that you choose will establish your own niche in the market. Nearly everybody uses search engines like Google and Yahoo these days to find sites that they’re looking for. Even if they know the domain name (which people rarely do, it turns out), they’ll still type part of that domain, maybe one or two memorable words, into Google and then look for the appropriate website in the results.
Now, if people who know what domain they’re looking for are doing that, imagine how many people don’t have any particular website in mind when they look for something. What are they doing? Well, they go straight to Google to try to find sites that match what they need. Those search phrases that they use are your keywords. If you have a website for Photoshop tutorials, you want people to be able to find your site by looking in Google. Now, there’s a whole lot more to SEO and PageRank than simple keyword relevancy, but for the time being this example will suffice.
So if someone wants to find Photoshop tutorials, they do a search, say for “cool Photoshop tuts.” Google then gives the results, and they click on one of the first 3 or 4 sites on the page. If you chose to use that particular keyword as the basis for one of your internet marketing strategies, you’re likely to be in the top of those results.
When doing your keyword research, you need to concentrate on two things: competition and monthly searches. The first, competition, is how many other websites are currently using that keyword to direct searchers to their site. The second is of course the number of people that search for that particular keyword every month.
The trick is to look for a keyword that has low competition while at the same time sporting high monthly searches. This is called finding your niche, and it’s the most important thing you can do as an online business owner. This process takes a long time if you want to find good quality keywords that give you both of the above criteria (low competition, high searches).
There’s nothing difficult about this kind of research, but it takes the right tools and the right frame of mind. Even with the best keyword tools out there you may be searching for hours before you find even one usable keyword, but remember that it’s time well spent.
