Keyword Research 101

Effective Keyword Research Theory and Practice

Keyword Research is critical in deciding the keywords for which to optimize your site. Focusing the site on the wrong keywords may indeed lead to high positioning for these keywords, but these keywords may be used infrequently by relevant customers, or bring worthless traffic to your site,  customers who are not interested in what the site has to offer. Keyword research is also essential for devising an on-line advertising campaign, such as Google Adwords, in order to focus adwords ads on keywords that convert well into actual sales.

Forming the Initial List of Keywords

The first step in keyword research is brainstorming: finding as many potentially relevant keyword combinations as possible. Start with your own list of keywords that you think are relevant (warning: what you think may change drastically by the end of the process) and build it up by:

  • Using Google Adwords free “Keyword Tool” (from the  side menu in the “Opportunities” tab) to come up with related keywords or more specific phrases that include your keywords.
  • Using a program like Keyword Discovery or WordTracker in the same way: these are cost programs, but they do have free trial versions – Keyword Discovery indefinitely and WordTracker for 7 days).
  • Checking your competitors’ sites to see which keywords they use by looking at the source code or the Density option on the SEOQuake Toolbar.  You can also put their site URL into the Adwords’ Keyword Tool and the tool will identify likely keywords for that site.

Identifying the Most Effective Keywords

The next step in your keyword research is identifying the keywords with a high search volume (more people to potentially attract to your site) but a low number of returned results (minimize the number of sites you will have to compete against).

  • For each keyword that you think is relevant, check Google Adwords “Keyword Tool” (same as above) to see what approximate monthly search volume is (hint: “not enough data is a bad sign).  Remember to target the relevant location and language.
  • For each keyword, do a Google search and see how many results come back
  • Divide the number of searches by the number of results (you may want to multiply the resulting numbers by 100, 1000 – to get numbers that are easier to work with).
  • The resulting number is the KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index). The higher the KEI, the more potentially effective your keyword is.

When choosing the final keywords from your keyword research, you may choose a word with a lower KEI over a word with higher KEI if:

  • The word with lower KEI is more niche-specific, and therefore more likely to draw focused traffic: people who are really looking for what your site has to offer and not just something “similar”.
  • The word with higher KEI is a very highly competitive field, especially if there is a good chance that many of the top sites for that word are optimized for that keyword and/or are big sites with lots of links to them.

Remember to keep tabs on the effectiveness of your chosen keywords:

Use Google Analytics to track how many visitors reached your site through the keywords that you optimized for.  If the results are not what you expected, you may need to perform another, more targeted round of keyword research.