What Is Keyword Research?

No matter what type of online business you have if you need to drive traffic to a website, you will need to spend a lot of your work day doing keyword research.  But what, and how, are you researching?

In a nutshell you want to find laser targeted keywords that are associated with your niche.   You want long tailed keywords (keywords with 3 or more words) because they tend to have less competition than one or two word keywords yet still get quite a few searches every month.

A good or excellent keyword will have at least 500 searches a month, obviously the higher the search amount the better.  You also want the keyword to have low competition less than 20,000.  The lower the amount of competition and the higher the amount of search volume is what you want in a good keyword.

Just remember: High Search Volume + Low Competition = Good Keyword.

There are some software programs you can get that can help you compile good keyword lists or you can use some excellent free resources such as Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool .

Here is a step by step method for finding top quality keywords:

1. Use the link above to go to Google’s keyword tool.

2.  Enter your keyword phrase into the box.  At this point it’s ok to start with a broad term.  For example, if you’re niche is about house training your Rottweiler, for now just enter the term housebreaking dog, or something fairly generic. Eventually you will become more targeted but start out general and see what comes up on the list.

3. Once you’ve got a list of some keywords start scrolling down the list and look for phrases that have a reasonable about of traffic, at least 500 searches a month.

4. If you have a software program that will compile the data for you, great, just upload the Google results into your software program.  If not you can do it by hand for free.  Just take each keyword phrase that has a decent amount of monthly searches (for the most part you’d be wish to ignore the phrases that have thousands of searches since they are more than likely going to have way, way too many competitors) copy it, open another Google window, paste that keyword phrase into the new window with quotes, and do a search.  The number you get back will tell you how much competition that keyword has.  You’ll want to stick with those keywords that have less than 20,000 in competition.

5. When you find good keywords copy and paste them into a notepad file and save them.  Ideally you want at least 20 keywords that fit into these parameters.  As  you start building your list you’ll think of other phrases that may work for your niche too.

Traffic is the back bone of any online business and a good keyword list could be worth it’s weight in gold.  Finding keywords is one of the most important things you can do to insure the success of your online business, don’t try to skimp or skip on this step.

No matter how you choose to learn to do keyword research, just make sure you learn.    Don’t guess as to which keyword will work best for you .   There are some easy to follow guidelines that, while not foolproof, will give you success more often than not.