Do Your KEYWORD Research Correctly or Face an Uphill Struggle

When dealing with online business, keyword research is likely the most crucial part of your job when you’re preparing to design and build a website. It really doesn’t matter what you’ve planned for the website, assuming that you do indeed have something planned for it, because if you want your website to be seen by others in any meaningful number, then you’ll need to pay particular attention to this task.

In simple terms, a keyword is a single word or a few words put together into a phrase which describe something in particular. Hence, your keyword could be “dogs” or something more complex, such as “yellow Labrador retrievers”. This second example is a phrase which is commonly known as a “long tail keyword”, or in other words, a more detailed description of what someone may be searching for. The success of a website is based around the relevance of a keyword or set of keywords - even if the owner of the site doesn’t realize it! Your keywords will directly relate to the very nature and purpose of the website.

It goes without saying, that if you’re going to get involved with website development for a meaningful purpose, maybe as a commercial entity, then you’ll need to plan its construction carefully. An aspect of this construction deals with the proper selection of keywords, choosing less than 5 which are appropriate to your specific subject, topic or niche. Once you’ve selected your keywords, you should then build your website accordingly, and with a fairly structured approach. This is known as search engine optimisation, as it is basically a way of ensuring that everyone else in the world has a way of finding your site if they are interested in what you’re saying, promoting or selling.

Keyword research is the cornerstone of this task. There are a number of different trains of thought, but in this highly competitive world market of ours, you need to ensure that your chosen keywords are not only appropriate, but are realistic too. As you will be trying to “rank” for your keywords (or end up as high as you possibly can within the ubiquitous search engine rankings of sites relevant to your niche), you must make sure that you have a good chance of doing so, firstly, and then secondly orchestrate your approach to give yourself the best chance possible.

One of the most common mistakes that most individuals (including some so-called SEO experts) make is to misinterpret the actual supply and demand for your chosen keywords.

Demand: there are many tools, some more complex and more costly than others, which determine the demand for your keyword or long-tail keyword. In simple terms, how many people are searching for information directly related to your keywords. Google and others have a way of measuring the number of times that someone will search their engines for that exact keyword. They will supply you with figures which show, on a monthly basis and broken down into geographical territories if you wish, the number of times someone entered that phrase into the search box. This will give you a good idea of what the actual “demand” for information about your keyword is.

Supply: if you go to Google’s search page and enter your keyword in the search box, you’ll come up with a number of sites which Google considers to be relevant to that phrase. In some cases this can run into the many, many millions. If your keyword is – and it probably will be, a long tail, you should know that this initial supply figure is based on a broad analysis, and in order to get a realistic return on the number of relevant sites, you’ll need to enter your keyword in quotes “”. By doing this you’ll see that the number of sites returned is significantly lower, this being a good indication of the “supply” for that keyword. The websites returned in this way will be your competitors.

As you’ll quickly see from conducting this exercise, a very broad keyword – such as “dog”, has a very high demand and a very high supply. Don’t be tempted to run after this demand as the chances of ranking highly for this keyword are not that good. Generally speaking - the higher the demand, the higher the existing supply. However, part of the skill of keyword research is in developing long tail keywords that more accurately describe your particular niche. For example, if we research “yellow Labrador retrievers”, we can see that there is a reasonable amount of demand – somewhere in the region of 3000 searches per month for that term, and a low amount of supply – less than 1000 competing sites. In this example, we would likely include this exact keyword in our campaign.

This is just an overview into keyword research, which should be an integral part of your plan to develop your business. The correct implementation of chosen keywords is an entirely different issue, but you must make sure that your keyword research is correctly founded and conducted before you move on.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Experienced Executive Virtual Assistant who collaborates with businesses and individuals with the sole aim of accomplishing their professional goals. Want to learn more about these comprehensive online business building success strategies? Contact VMF Today!

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