How to do Keyword Research – Part One

Mention the word research and most people just head straight for the door!  Keyword research is quite simple and in this article I am going to give you a simple method to research keywords, keyphrases and “long-tail keywords”.

1.  Click Here to open the Google External Keyword Tool

This website is where your research takes place.

2.  The first step is to edit this “Results are tailored to English, United Kingdom Edit” (it may display another country)  Click Edit and set it to your country – if you are concentrating on getting business from within your own country or set it to “All Countries and Territories” if your business is a global business with customers right across the world.

3.  Next, enter a keyword (i always start with just a single word rather then a phrase) that you think that your potential customers may use to find your business.  Make sure that “use synonyms” is ticked,  then click on “Get Keyword Ideas”.  For the purpose of this post, I am going to do a seach within Australia, for electrician…just to begin with.  It is more likely though that a potential customer would search for “electrician randwick” or what ever suburb they are located in…but first things first.

4.  When the results have been returned, I then click on the heading “Local Search Volume” which tells you how many searches for the prior month have been performed for that keyword.  By clicking on the heading, it sorts the results from highest number of searches to the lowest.  For our example, “electrician” at the time of this post, the external keyword tool has returned that the number of searches for that word for October 2009 in Australia was 200,000.  Quite a few!.  Apart from that, Google has also suggested a ton of other keywords, and some keyphrases.

5.  On the 13th of November 2009, if I did a search at google.com.au for the word electrician with “” marks around the word, and set Google to find “pages from Australia” there are over 890,000 pages with the word electrician.  That’s a lot of competition for you!

6. One of the suggested keywords Google has also returned is “electrician services”.  By following the same method as the step above, I find that there are only 890 pages to compete against.  The keyphrase electrician services gets over 3000 searches per month, and is definately an easy target to get your website listing on page one of Googles search results for that term.

The idea of the Google Keyword tool, then finding the amount of competition is to get you thinking about Keywords and phrases customers may use to find your website.  If there are 5000 or less competing pages for the keyword, and the external keyword tool shows that people do search for that phrase or keyword, then you are on to a winner and it is a definate target keyword for your website.   Try some other external keyword tool searches like electrician randwick.  It shows that it gets 170 seaches a month and that there are over 6000 competiting pages…a little outside our target level of competiting pages but still a very achievable keyword search to show your website on Google first page.

eOZhost.com researches the best keywords and phrases for all our new free website design clients…the research is free too.  We then give you a proposal as to what we recommend to get your new website targeting those keywords.  Every client is differnet and we take our time to give your business the full required attention it needs and deserves.

What is Keyword Research

If we take a look at the process of marketing and product creation, then you know that market researchers for years have firstly done their research, found a ‘gap’ (or niche) in the market and then created a product. All too often, websites are created without any market research what so ever.

For any new website, whether for a new online business or an existing bricks and mortar business, at least some keyword research (the market research) needs to be completed before a website is even started to be designed. By doing this keyword research, you give your website the best chance of visitors coming to your website via natural search engine search results (which are free!). Your website then needs to designed to be able to convey the right information to these visitors on your website and then to be able to “capture” somehow their information.

Lets take the example of a local lawn mowing business. The owner decides that he wants a website. Is it for vanity to say “hey look at my new website” or is to attract new customers in his local area? Hopefully it’s the later. If it is just for vanity, and to just “throw up” any old site with his contact details, then he should find the cheapest designer and website hosting he can. If it is to seriously attract new customers, then a little bit of research needs to be done first so that a website can be designed and launched with the best shot at attracting those new customers.

How? By doing keyword research. What is keyword research? Keyword research is simply that…researching keywords. What are keywords? These are the words (or phrases) that potential customers type into a search engine (such as Google) to find information. The results are displayed, then these customers click on a result and visit the website. It costs the website owner nothing for this to happen…except for the initial research and website design.

In my next article, I am going to show you exactly how to do keyword research simply and effectively. You do not need any special tools, software or anything. It’s completely free and very simple to do.

Remeber, before eOZhost.com does any website design, we ALWAYS do keyword research for our clients sites. We partner with all our clients to give their websites every chance of success! Click here for more information on our FREE website design service