A few weeks ago I started blogging about keyword research. The first blog post is available at: All Credit to the Keyword Research (Part 1). In this post, I discuss how to start creating a keyword list for your business.

Keyword Research – Where to Start?

Businesses need to put a lot of effort into creating a complete keyword universe. There are many elements involved in finding the right keywords for a business. Below is a list of 3 preliminary steps to take:

1. Website Research – This involves familiarising yourself with the clients website and the services they provide. We go through every page on the site and look through the content and Meta details and extract a list of keyphrases. As your keyword list expands you might start noticing opportunities for incorporating landing page expansion. For example a services page might contain 10 different services which all target different keyphrases. Targeting 10+ keyphrases at one page is not an effective strategy. Therefore, it would probably be worth your while expanding out this services page into 10 separate page, with each page targeting more specific keyphrases unique to that service.

2. Client Feedback – Nobody knows their business better than your client. It is vital to get their feedback. We ask the client to supply us with the most important keywords for their business. We also ask what keyphrases they ‘must have’ top rankings for. There are always some phrases that are very important to the client which you might not have found or thought of through your research. These phrases might not bring in much traffic and it might not make much sense to target them but in our experience we find that not obtaining top rankings for these ‘vanity’ keywords can often be deal breakers. Clients can be very stubborn when they want to be.

3. Competitor Analysis – Your client will have many competitors online. Many of these competitors will be more successful than your client and they will actively embracing Internet marketing. Get a list of your clients main competitors from your client. You need to know who your opposition are. You can also easily find out who your client’s competitors are through searching through Google. I feel it is important to get your client’s feedback. Often times there is a passionate business rivalry going on; finding out who your client wants to beat most and what keywords your client wants to beat their ranking for can be useful in ensuring strong client relationships. When you have discovered the competitor list then visit their websites and perform website research.

After these 3 steps are performed we will have a preliminary keyword list. This list doesn’t mean much unless we can put search amounts beside the keyphrases. Then we will know the relative importance of our keyphrases. This will dictate how we assign our keywords to web pages later in the optimisation process. Also, this list is very much an incomplete list. There are hundreds of keyword possibilities not explored yet. This is when we turn to our keyword research tools. To be continued……