"Keywords" as the term is understood in the field of website design and SEO are those words and phrases that onlilne users type in the search box on Google and other search engines to find information, goods and services. Naturally, some keywords are more popular - and therefore more competitive - than others. If your business is highly specialized, your keywords will be naturally less popular (and less competitive) than those describing a business in the mass consumer field, such as travel, vacation deals, makeup, etc. Knowing what keywords online users prefer to find a business of your type is the first most important step in the process of website desing. Knowing how popular and competitive those keywords are will determine your website content creation as well as your marketing strategy.

What Keywords are Really Yours?

It seems natural to assume that as a business owner you'd know right away what keywords describe your business in the best way. And this can be 100% true. However, human brain is capable of rendering dozens of synonyms into one category almost instantly, on the fly. In the content of a conversation, words like "Joomla web design" or "Joomla website deisgn" would be perceived as fully interchangeable. But search engines are robots. Even though the nature of the web is inherently semantic and search engines nowadays have good databases of synonyms and related notions, they are still not humans, so they treat each keyword as a separate entity and generate different set of search results for each one.

As an SEO business owner, you might think that "Internet marketing strategy" is what best describes your services, but research shows that "website marketing" is what users think of when they look for your type of services. While you can be 100% correct about the best keyword to decribe your business theoretically, your can miss hundreds of online users who do not use proper terminology and go with laymen terms instead.

How to Select Keywords

Luckily, there is a way to test your keywords quickly and accurately. Use the SEO-industry darling free keyword checker by Wordtracker.

Step 1: Identifying the Most Popular Keywords in Your Field

Enter several keywords in the free Wordtracker keyword tool to see how many times those keywords were used by online users. Note that the results you'd see show keywords and their synonyms that were actually "typed" by people in search engines in the past few months.

Cross-compare some very generic keywords like "travel", "cars", etc. with some very broad and general keywords related to your business. Record the most popular keywords in your field and the difference in the popularity value between them and the more general ones. This difference will reflect the market demand for goods and services in your field as compared with broad consumer needs (in relative terms).

Step 2: Estimating Relative Popularity Values of Your Keywords 

Split the most popular keywords in your field into several parts and drill-down. For example, if you are in website design business in Ottawa like we are, you would first query "web", then "design", then "website design", then "web site design", then "website design Ottawa", then "web site design Ottawa", then "Ottawa" and record all respective numbers. Comparing and contrasting various keywords in this way will give you a very good understanding of how popular those keywords are in general and on the local market.

Paying attention to the actual choice of words and phraseology will tell you what users actually think of - and query - when looking for the services and products described by your keywords.

If your most popular keywords generate almost as many keywords as some very generic keywords like "travel", the SEO of your site will be a huge project and it will take a long time. So in this case, lower your bar a little, run a few local keywords to get the relative popularity number for local searchers, and then record 5-7 keywords that describe your business quite well but are less popular and come close to local search values, in relative terms. Then cross-compare those 5-7 candidates carefully and record the values.

Step 3: Selecting the Most Popular Keywords with as Little Competition as Possible

Now go to Google and record the "search engine results pages", or SERPs, numbers for each of those 5-7 keywords.  

IMPORTANT: Finally, select those keywords which have the highest popularity number and yet generate the lowest SERP number.

These will be your best keywords, as they would describe your business very well, will have real popilarity among online users, and will be realistically attainable

Note that none of the SEO tools we've used, even some of the very expensive and proprietory, produce 100% accurate results, and they seldom produce identical results (due to various source databases), so when you use SEO tools, allow for variations and treat the results in relative terms.

Here is sample of SEO keyword research conducted via Wordtracker for keywords related to "Joomla" and "Joomla web design".

{jcomments on}