What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the art of finding the keywords your potential customers are using on the search engines, then determining how to incorporate those keywords into your marketing strategy. Through keyword research you can determine what words your customers, and even your competitors, are using most. This gives you an advantage in picking out the keywords you should employ for best results.
Do You Need Keyword Research?
Yes.
More than 20% of the world’s population uses the Internet, this number is steadily growing all the time. As far as the South African market is concerned, Africa has the fastest growing online population today, having increased a whopping 882% between 2000 and 2007.
The search engines (namely Google, having a market share greater than the combined weight of every other major search engine) dominate the online time of this steadily growing population and are therefore the most efficient way to tap this market.
What Does This Have To Do With Keywords?
More than just an assemblage of letters, keywords are complex designations, combinations of which make up the phrases that, concisely and accurately, describe your business to search engines and their users.
Keywords each have an array of statistics attached to them, through research and the right tools you can determine these statistics, and the relevance of each to your business goals. Thus working out the keywords that’ll work best for you.
For instance, optimising for a common term that broadly describes your business might mean targeting a widely searched-for term, but competition at that level will be cut-throat. Intensive keyword research can help you to prevent making such tactical blunders in your campaign by telling you the ‘supply and demand’ of chosen keywords.
In addition, broader terms are less likely to bring your website qualified traffic. Keyword research narrows your focus to target specific, and perhaps untapped, niche sectors of your market.
The ‘How?’ of Keyword Research
The biggest mistake you can make when building a list of keywords is making the assumption that you know what your customers are searching for. Chances are that without at least some keyword research you have no idea what words your target market is using to find you.
Doing the research might sound like a time-consuming and frustrating business, but honestly, you need to put in the effort to make sure your website is successful and profitable.
The keywords used by your clients and customers will be ever-changing, requiring regular research to make sure that your keyword list remains effective by keeping up with the trends of your users. This might require that you invest in either keyword research like that offered at Net Age, or a keyword research tool to help keep track of this vital aspect of your online business.
There are many keyword research tools you can find online and you can’t go wrong by investing in one of them.
Some examples of keyword research tools are seo book keyword tool, wordze, wordtracker, keyword elite, keyword intelligence, Google keyword tool and Google Adwords keyword tool.
There are a variety of other tools available if you just search around a bit.
Alternately, Net Age does employ dedicated keyword research staff, and offers keyword research as a service to all our customers.