Keyword research

Before you optimise your website you need to know what keywords you're targetting.

To do that we do keyword research...

Find the keywords to focus your efforts on can be challenging. But there is a lot of data out there and a structured approach

Search engines have a hard time knowing what people are really looking for unless it is really spelled out. This is probably why you have followed one search with another more descriptive search more than a few times in your life. You try one keyword but it doesn't give what you're looking for so you try again with more descriptive terms.

It's important that we determine what people are typing in order that we can optimise our pages so that we appears in the search results for when those terms are entered.

Formal keyword research is the foundational piece in SEO. It will help you understand what keywords people are typing, how frequently they do it, how relevant those terms are to your business objectives and how competitive those terms will be to try and rank for.

How to research keywords

1. Put yourself in the role of your potential customers and try to think as they are likely to think.

2. Ask what services do you offer? Be as comprehensive as possible and list out as many keywords and phases as you can.

3. Collect search volume metrics for those phrases and see what demand there is for them.

4. Consider longtail keywords. These are likely to be extremly relevant and less competitive.

5. Keyword categorisation.

Tools

1. Google Keyword Planner

https://adwords.google.com/home

Provides a good measure on search volume and also keyword suggestion.

2. Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#cmpt=q

This enables even more information to be gained about how keywords are being used within Google. We can breakdown by country and see how changes have occured over time.

These two tools are sufficient to provide the backbone of our keyword research process.

3. MOZ Pro

https://moz.com