
Online Keyword Research: 5 Tips & Strategies
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Here are 5 basic tips to help you make the most of your keyword research:
1. What keywords is your site ranking for now?
Take a look 'under the hood,' of your website so to speak, and look at your analytics software to see what keywords your current visitors are using to find your website. You should do this fairly often and you will most likely find a few surprises every time. Make a note of those keywords that you are already ranking for and try to find some related search terms to go with those.
If you don't have an analytics program, you should remedy that right away. Try Google Analytics, which is free, quite robust and easy to use. After you install it, give it a day or two to start gathering some results.
2. What are your top competitors ranking for?
Now you are going to be taking a peek under the hood of you competitor's websites with the full knowledge that nothing is keeping them from doing the same thing on your site. In your browser you can view the HTML source of any website. Look for the following lines in the page's source code:
<meta name="description" content="keywords are here" />
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords are here" />
This is where you will find that website's primary keywords listed. Take a look at their keywords and see if you get any ideas for additional keywords that you could start using for your website.
Another way to scope out what your competitors are up to is to use SEMrush.com to find out what keywords they are ranking for along with other useful information.
3. Develop a list of basic keywords to start with
Come up with a basic list of what is often referred to as a 'seed' list of keywords. These are the most obvious keywords that you can think of that your visitors might use to find what you have to offer.
4. Use a keyword tool to expand this list
Your next step is to plug that initial seed list into a keyword tool to expand the list. A good keyword tool will be easy to use, it will offer you just the information you need without a lot of additional data that you don't know what to do with. A good keyword tool also saves you time by helping you to uncover those long tail keywords that you might not have found otherwise.
5. Come up with a final list of primary keywords
Remember, your objective is to come up with a list of about 5 or so profitable keywords that get a good amount of traffic, but do not have so much competition that it's not worth your effort trying to rank for them. You will use these keywords in the titles and headlines of your content, as well as within the body of your website's copy and blog posts. You will also use your primary keywords as anchor text for you linking structure both within the site and inbound and outbound links.
Keywords are constantly changing due to several factors including the seasons, time of the year, trends, etc. You'll want to keep updating your keyword list to keep up with those changes as much as possible.
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