SEO Keyword Research

Search Engine Optimization starts with Keyword Research. The mistake most people make when setting up a website is they do not do their keyword research properly. They aim too high and try and rank for very competitive words which for a new site might take years to rank for.

You need to understand firstly how much competition there is online for your product or service and also what words people use to search with. So here are 3 steps you need to do at the beginning of your SEO campaign.

1. Define your niche – how much competition for your product or service.
2. Understand Your Customers – i.e. what words are your potential customers searching for?
3. Broad, phrase, or exact search volume – understand the difference.

Step 1 – Defining Your Niche

Let’s say you sell catering equipment for restaurants, the chances are that you want everyone to find you when they search for “catering equipment“. You want the whole world to find you, so you have decided to optimise your site for the search term “catering equipment”.

The mistake most people make is optimizing their website for a broad search term like this without checking how many web pages they have to compete with to rank for this search term. You can easily find this out by doing a search on Google and looking at the results bar…..

There are actually over 4 million results on Google.com for “catering equipment” and unless your site is well established it is going to be quite difficult to rank high for this term.

Furthermore you are going to be competing with sites selling catering equipment for households as well as catering equipment for restaurants.

What you should really be doing is focusing on your own niche “catering equipment for restaurants” and optmizing your site for this niche.

But you also need to understand what words people are using to search with…

Step 2 – Know Your Customers

The next step is to understand exactly what your customers are searching for, and the best place to do this for free is Google itself. Google has a number of free keyword research tools which for most SEO purposes will be all you need to use.

The most important of these is the Google Keyword Tool which you can find by simply searching for “Google Keyword Tool”.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

To use this tool first select your country where you want to market or you can select All countries as in the example below. Secondly ensure the checkbox “Use synonyms” is checked (which it should be by default).

The first thing to note in our example “catering equipment for restaurants” is there are only 12 searches a month for this term, but if we look at the synonyms we can see there a number of other terms which are relevant with a much greater search volume.

We can see that “restaurant equipment” gets 246,000 searches a month and “restaurant catering equipment” gets “40,500″ searches per month so it would probably be better to optimize for one of these terms as we know these are the words people are searching for.

HOWEVER… We also need to go a step further….

Step 3 – Broad vs Phrase vs Exact Search Volume

By default Google will show you the number of broad match searches.

A broad search for “restaurant catering equipment” means that the words “restaurant” and “catering” and “equipment” or a variation or synonym or singular/plural of these words occurred somewhere in the users’ search.

For example the person could have searched for “supply catering equipment to restaurants”

A phrase match would mean that the whole intact phrase “restaurant catering equipment” occurred in the search. So for example the person could have searched for “find restaurant catering equipment suppliers“.

An exact match would mean that they searched for the exact term “restaurant catering equipment” with no other words in the search term.

Using “Phrase” or “Exact” search volumes would be a better indiciation to choose the keywords you want to optimize your site for.

If we change the keyword match to “Phrase” instead of “Broad” we get the following results. We can see that instead of “40,500″ searches per month for a broad match for “restaurant catering equipment” there are only 480 searches a month when using Phrase match, but that there is still a very high volume of searches for “restaurant equipment“.

The problem is the “restaurant equipment” niche is even more competitive than “catering equipment” which we started with. A quick search on Google shows us there are over 9 million competing sites and without an established website it would be difficult to appear on the first page….

So we need can go one step further … We can now take the phrase “restaurant equipment“, plug it back into the keyword research tool and see if there are any search terms with a higher volume than 480 per month….

Using the same settings with “Phrase” match we can see that “commercial restaurant equipment” and “restaurant equipment supply” both get around 2,900 searches a month and for our example would be a good choice to optimize for.

IMPORTANT: Don’t limit yourself to one search term.

In fact you need to be building a list of the most relevant keywords because by choosing related keywords and synonyms you are feeding Google information about your website. By finding related search terms Google will have more confidence about the main topic of your website.