When planning for search engine marketing, keyword research is often a necessary but difficult task we are faced with as both an advertiser and a business. It is a crucial step in getting the most out of your marketing dollar. The more money you make from keywords, the more money you can invest in keywords. Follow these awesome keyword research tips below to learn and perhaps reinforce what you already know.
One Tool To Rule Them All
Google’s Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer) is a powerful and extremely popular tool to help businesses explore and analyze keyword phrases that are relevant to your industry. It can help you identify highly searched keyword phrases and the cost of running paid advertising through Google AdWords.
Know Your Audience, Be Your Audience
Before using you the keyword tool, identify the products or services that earn your business the most money. Understand your audience and get a feel for how they search in your industry. The keyword phrases you think should be targeted may actually be different than what is actually searched according to search engines. The Keyword Tool is one the more reliable resources we could find to analyze user search behavior.
Market research shows that an older audience searches more with zip codes, cities and states whereas a younger audience tends to search without zip codes, cities and states. A male audience tends to search with zip codes whereas a female audience tends to search with cities and towns. If you’re unsure of your audience, run both campaigns and measure the results. Look at the metrics in your analytics after you’ve run the campaigns for 30 days to see which campaign produced the best metrics. Things you’ll want to look at are goal URLs, average time on site, average pages per visit and bounce rate. Disable, turn on and adjust campaigns accordingly.
No Need To Reinvent The Wheel
Starting from scratch can often be a difficult process and delay the keyword research process. By now you should know which businesses are the leading competitors in your area for your industry. If they’re successful competitors, then they have to be doing something right, so let’s not reinvent the wheel. Go ahead and take a look at the keywords they’re going after. Using Google’s Keyword Tool, we’ll copy and paste the domain name of a competitors website into the Website field and submit the request. Upon submitting the request, the tool will return keyword ideas that this competitor is or should be targeting according the analysis of the content on their home page. Use these ideas to find keyword ideas relating to your industry and find a niche to improve the conversion of website visitors to customers.
It’s The Little Things That Make A Difference
In addition to targeting the seemingly obvious keywords phrases for your business, don’t be afraid to go after the smaller products and services within your industry. Plan your campaign around these more focused products and services and guide them within your website to a larger, more profitable goal. Be sure to keep in mind that you are always presenting relevant content to the user during their experience within your website.
Be A Risk Taker With Paid Advertising
After you’ve completed you’re keyword research, be careful hopping right into organic campaigns via search engine optimization. Optimizing your website for organic results can often be a lengthy and risky process that can be tough to adjust later. With very little time involved, Google AdWords can help you test your research, provide metrics and assist you in identifying the strong keyword phrases you can then use to optimize your website for organic rankings. With more money invested in paid advertising in search engines, more metrics are returned for you to analyze and thus provide a better idea of the keywords you should be going after in the organic area of a search engine results page.
Get A Bigger Tool Belt
As with any occupation, you need to equip yourself with the latest tools and equipment. Ubbersuggest (http://www.ubersuggest.com) and Merge Words (http://www.mergewords.com) are 2 more great online tools to assist you in the process of keyword research. There are many other SEO and internet marketing companies that continuously recommend tools to improve this experience. Follow their website, blog and social media profiles to become an expert in marketing your business within search engines.
Are We There Yet?!?!
Knowing, understanding and using these tips as you keyword research will hopefully prevent you from making the mistakes many businesses make when running their search engine marketing campaigns. During your campaigns, analyze, learn and modify these tips to continually improve the amount of quality customers to your website. We look forward to any keyword research suggestions, arguments and feedback in regards to this article.
