You don't need to buy lots of expensive keyword or market research tools to find out the best keywords for your website. You can find out all the information that you might need using free keyword research, there are many tools out there that do the trick, and I'll show you how to use the most popular one on the web, Google's Keyword Tool.
Apart from writing a best seller the only place where you can make real money using only words (keywords to be exact) is the internet. Everything revolves around the search term that someone types into Google or any other search engine. That someone could be looking to buy something, find out some information or they might just be browsing around.
There are two main things that we need to take into account when we are talking about building websites. Number one is to make sure that there are enough people searching for what it is that your website has to offer, and the second is to make sure that your website shows in the SERPs when people are searching via Google.
I'm going to explain a little about keyword research and then you'll want to watch the videos that take you through the several processes of keyword discovery. All of the video content you'll be viewing is step by step, I'll show you exactly how I carry out my Keyword Research.
You must know what people are searching for. If you begin to optimise a page for a search term that only has one search per day then you'll find that all the SEO in the world won't bring you any traffic. If you begin to optimise your page(s) for terms that actually have people searching on them, then you are going to receive free web traffic when your pages begin to rank well.
Every page on your website should be targeting it's own keyword(s)/keyphrase(s), and these phrases should have people searching for them every single month. This way, if each of your keywords/phrases on a 20 page site has 200 people searching per month, then you are competing for 20 x 200 = 4000 searches per month. These numbers are quite conservative too.
So the first lesson in Keyword Research is that you need to find and write about keywords/keyphrases that people are actually searching for before you do anything else.
I'm going to take you through the exact steps that I take when I'm carrying out keyword research, but before that it's worth mentioning that it's probably not a good idea to target keywords that are way too competitive.
I know that you'll work hard, but if you haven't seen results after a few months, then it's easy to give up. Pick some easier keywords.
A single keyword is always a bad idea, and a two word keyword may also be a bad idea if, again they have alot of competition.
A way to get around this is to find keyphrases that contain your ideal keyword(s), if you want to target 'wedding photography' it will take a long time and/or a large budget to rank well. So what you would do is find words that contain that term, eg 'contemporary wedding photography', 'birmingham wedding photography', 'professional wedding photography', 'reportage wedding photography' and many more . . .
This way you'll begin building momentum to be found for 'wedding photography' (first level keyword), but in the meantime you will start to be found for the second level keywords above, each of which has it's own search volume.
When you are building your list, you'll also want to consider related keywords too. If you were building a website about Debt or Debt Consolidation, you would also consider different words that mean the same thing, such as 'credit consolidation', or 'consolidation loan'. This helps with LSI, or Latent Symantic Indexing.
The last thing to talk about is how wide or deep you want to go with your market. If you're going really wide, ie you are a photographer and you want to target everything about photography ie, weddings, products, events, portrait, boudoir, contemporary, then you're going really wide and your keyword list would be enormous, bear in mind that your keywords need content and content costs either alot of time or money.
If you just want to target wedding photographer in leicester, then your list is going to be much smaller, and you'll have much less content to write or outsource.
Think about the goals of your business or site, why are you building your website? What do you want to get out of your website, advertising revenue? leads? enquiries? sales?
I encourage you to write down the goals for your website, and bear these in mind when compiling your keyword list.
What is a First Level Keyword
You might visit a website about catering supplies, so you would expect the owner to try and rank for the word catering supplies, this is a first level keyword for this website owner. Catering Equipment would also be a First Level Keyword too. There are usually only five-six first level keywords that you would want to target.
The way keywords relate to each other is the same as how markets relate to one another, you have a market, and then there will be lots of sub sections of that market. The subsection that describes your business most accurately would be your First Level Keyword.
Back to the Photography example – this is quite a large market. You might be a Photographer, but what type of photography do you specialise in?
If you are building a Directory of Photographers, then photography would be without a doubt one of the most attractive first level keywords, it is impractical to target a single word though, so you would drop down and make events photography, wedding photography etc your first level keywords.
If you are an Events Photographer that travels nationwide and this is the main core of your business, then Events Photography, and Events Photographer would be two of your first level keywords. If you are a wedding photographer that goes no further than london, then london wedding photographer would be one of your first level keywords.
Can you see how we are breaking the vast market of photography down into sub sections, it's like a ladder, and you get on the ladder as high up as your business allows.
Bear in mind that markets go wide as well as deep, if you are an events photographer in london, you might also attend weddings, and you might also provide portrait shoots. In this case your first level keywords have now expanded to wedding photographer london, portrait photographer london, events photographer london. There will be many more keywords that have people searching for them that describe the sub section of your market, and these are easily found using freely available online tools.
Second Level Keywords
This will help to further explain what I mean, if you are building a Directory of Photographers, then your second level keywords would be sub sections of your first level keywords, so if wedding photography is a first level keyword, contemporary wedding photography would be a second level keyword, a sub section of the wedding photography market.
Tertiary Keywords
Modifiers (Google’s free keyword tool doesn’t display modifiers that well – paid tools do)
Modifiers are what we type into a search engine when we don’t find what we want the first time to narrow down the search. You could start with digital camera, then slr digital camera, then cheap slr digitial cameras, then maybe cheap slr cameras in Wokingham.
So from the initial search of digital camera, the modifiers would be cheap slr, and in Wokingham.
We can see if there are any popular modifiers when we check your subject in the keywords tool. These are usually not targeted, but you will do well to include them in your site content when writing it.
So, keeping the above in mind, people talk about targeting the head of search and mining the long tail. The head would be your main keywords and some secondary keywords, the rest would be the long tail.
Head – 80% of your traffic will come from roughly 20% of your terms.
Long Tail – 20% of your traffic will come from 80% of your terms.
Other aspects of the keywords/markets you choose are seasonality and relevance to whats going on inside the searchers head. People will search for Halloween costumes all throughout the year, but they will only want to buy a Halloween costume in the couple of months leading up to Halloween. This also includes relevance; how would you monetise a website that is geared towards selling the halloween costumes in January for example? My guess is it would be difficult, so you would have to use other methods to make money during those times.
Your competition plays a large role in whether you want to enter a market or not, although to many people out there on the web, they won’t even consider competition because they are in the market they are in. If you run a dentist’s surgery then that’s the market you are in, but don’t worry because using the right methods that we’re going to teach there’s no reason why you won’t start to get traffic. For the people who are building websites purely to make recurring income however, you have much more choice over which niches to enter.
Don’t be afraid to compete, most of the people out there won’t know half of the stuff on this website, but bear in mind that there is a fine line, if you only commit to an hour a week then you won’t even be generating traffic for a site about Ceiling Tiles, if however you spend more time and commit to generating yourself a recurring income for years to come, then you can own multiple positions on page one of Google for many markets with websites that are turning a profit.
