Sounds a bit melodramatic but Keyword Research is where it all starts out. If you are looking at lead generation and increasing traffic to your website then keyword research is a must. Before you do anything else you need to understand what people are physically typing into the search engines, you need to understand any trends and look for gaps in the market. You need to look at each individual keyword as a market in its own right remember as people often use different words to search for the same thing.
Google Keyword Tool
The Google Keyword tool is free to all and is a good place to start. It allows you to enter keywords related to your industry and will return results of search volume on a global and national level. It will also give you suggestions for other related keywords that you may wish to consider. Alongside search volume it also helps you to gain an understanding of the level of competition for each keyword. You see, it’s not necessarily the best thing to target just the high volume keywords particularly if you are starting from scratch, these are usually the most competitive and therefore the ones that will take the most work and time to get results with. I’m not saying don’t go after them, but just that you may want to consider what we call long-tailed key phrase first.
Long-Tailed Key phrases
This basically means where someone has used more words in the search bar, it is usually more descriptive of exactly what it is that they are searching for. There are a few reasons to try and target these first for SEO:
- Less competition to get high rankings
- Less time required to achieve higher rankings
- This will also help in your bid to go after more generalised keywords
- Higher conversion rate for those searching
- Qualified traffic and so lower bounce rate and better overall results
Achieving Rankings
By rankings I mean that your website appears in the first few results on the first page that a search engine returns. With a key phrase that has less competition it is much easier for you to convince the search engines that your website is the most relevant and thus bringing you good results much more quickly.
Getting results for ‘other’ keywords
If the keyword I really want is yellow shoes, but I know that this is incredibly competitive I can start by targetting long-tailed keywords that have a respectable level of searches such as ‘flat yellow shoes’ (these are pure examples, I haven’t done the research. This will help me in my bid to go after the more general keyword because I will already be ranking well for a related phrase.
Increased Conversion and Quality Traffic
By going after long-tailed key phrases you are increasing your chances of converting those visitors into customers. The more specific people are about what they want the more likely they are to buy as long as you offer exactly what they are searching for. This also gives you quality traffic as the vast majority of people visiting your website are truly interested in your offering. There’s no point having 10,000 visitors if they are all looking for black shoes and you only sell yellow shoes!
So going back to my starting point, spend the time and effort on understanding your market before you get caught up in having a pretty website designed or going for keywords that you ‘think’ people are looking for. It’ much easier to change things at the beginning than finding out after the first year when you haven’t achieved any sales.