This is the third blog post in my series of blog posts concerning keyword research. The first blog post is available at: All Credit to the Keyword Research (Part 1). The second blog post is available at: All Credit to the Keyword Research (Part 2). In this post, I continue the discussion on building a complete keyword list.

Keyword Research Tools

There are many keyword research tools available and I am not going to go through them all in this blog post. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a very popular keyword research tool and it is one I often use myself. Keyword research tools allow you to get the search facts for a business. This takes the guesswork away from your research. These tools allow you to see exactly what search terms people are using and the relative search amounts for each keyphrase. This allows you to make an informed decision on keyword strategy.

Root Phrase – The best way to use these tools is to start by placing the root phrase for the business into the search box and analyse the results. The results will highlight further important keywords which you can then drill down further into. For example -Richard Burke Kitchen Design – a root phrase for this client would be kitchen design. By placing this into the research tool we are shown search amounts for a wide variety of related terms. Some of the related terms returned include traditional kitchen design, modern kitchen design etc. We then take these new search terms and put them into the keyword research tool. We drill down through the list until we have discovered all the long tail keywords that are relevant to your business.

Preliminary List – You should also take the preliminary list you created through the website analysis, client feedback, and competitor analysis and run these keyphrases through the keyword research tools that you use. Many of these terms will have been covered through the root analysis and subsequent drill down. There will however be many keywords missed in the previous stage.

After you have finished with your keyword research tools you will be left with a large list of keyphrases to be targeted. You will also have the search amounts for each so you know which keyphrases are the most important. There are a few more things that need to be taken into consideration before moving away from keyword research:

1. Geo-targeting - It is important to know where the target market is for your client’s business. This will have a large bearing on the keyword strategy. For example, if your client is only targeting the Cork region, then it would make sense to make your keyphrases location specific e.g. kitchen design Cork. If your client was pursuing a nationwide strategy then more general search terms could be used. You might also want to use the terms Ireland, Irish etc.

2. Web Stats or Analytics Package – If your client has access to a stats package such as Google Analytics then it is important to analyse the websites past performance. What were the most important keyphrases? What were the most important landing pages? You do not want to damage the website’s performance so you need to know the words that are performing well for that site. Making keyword strategy decisions without knowing the website stats is bad policy. While optimising the website you might jeopardise the current money making keyphrases being targeted on the site. Analysing a stats package will also help you to expand your keyword list as many new keyword ideas will be found.

3. PPC Campaigns – These campaigns are very useful for obtaining measurements of keywords that are important to your site. Keywords that perform well in a clients PPC campaign and bring in a lot of conversions should be strongly targeted in your SEO strategy. PPC campaigns show you what your money phrases are. This cuts out a lot of the guess work in keyword research.

4. The little things – It is important to also analyse the following:

• Company Name
• Competitor Names and Domain
• Product Names
• Synonyms e.g. home / house, travel insurance/ holiday insurance
• Split Words e.g. email, e mail,
• Hyphenated Words e.g. email, e-mail
• Common spelling mistakes
• Singular and plural words – kitchen, kitchens

After all these steps have been taken you should have a complete keyword list and you should also have a good idea how you are going to use it. From here you should move into benchmarking and then start optimising your site, but I think I will leave those topics for another day.