Keyword Research
Keyword research is by far one of the most valuable, important, and high return activities in search engine marketing. Through the detective work of your market’s keyword demand, you will learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, and more about your customers as a whole. The usefulness of this data cannot be underestimated – with good keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that customers are already actively searching for.
Every search term phrase that’s typed into a search engine like Google is recorded in one way or another, and keyword research tools allow us to retrieve this information. However, those tools cannot show us (directly) how valuable or important it might be to rank for and receive traffic from those searches. To understand the value of a keyword, we need to research further, make some hypotheses and test.
Ask yourself…
Is the keyword term highly relevant to the content your site offers? Will searchers who find your site through the targeted term find the answer to their implied question? Will this traffic result in financial rewards and organizational goals, directly or indirectly? If the answer to all of these questions is a clear, yes, then proceed…
Of course, even the best estimates of value can fall flat against the hands-on process of optimizing and calculating ROI. Remember that the time and money you invest in a search marketing campaign should be weighed against returns. SEO is typically one of the highest return marketing investments but measuring success is still critical to the process.
Utilizing Long Tailed Keywords…
It’s wonderful to deal with keywords that have 10,000 searches a day, or even 1000 searches a day, but in reality, these “popular” search terms actually make up less than 30% of the overall searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lie in what’s commonly called the “long tail” of searches. The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day or even only once. but, when taken together, they comprise the majority of the world’s demand for information through search engines.
Understanding the search demand curve is critical, because it stresses the importance of “long-tail” targeted content – pages with information not directed at any particular single, popular query, but rather simply exposing the myriad of human thought, research, and opinion to the spiders of the search engines
