In the last blog I left off with an introduction to Google's Keyword Search Tool. In this blog I'm going to further explain how you can use that tool to really hone in on your potential customers and get the most out of your keyword research.
As mentioned in the last blog there are two ways you can use Google's Keyword Search Tool. You can either enter keywords that people might use to find a website like yours or you can enter the URL for your website and let Google make suggestions based on the content it finds on your page. I recommend you enter your own keywords so you have maximum control over the keyword suggestions Google makes.
Once you've entered some keywords into the text field labeled Words or phrase go ahead and perform a search by enter the captcha code (captcha code is the distorted text used to make sure you're a human and not a software program performing the serch) and clicking the search button. You should now be looking at a long list of suggested keywords. You should also notice their is an indication of the amount of advertising competition on Google for each of the keywords, a number of global monthly searches, a number of local monthly searches, and local search trends.
The first step in using this data to find new and effective keywords to target is to make sure the keywords suggested by Google are somewhat relevant to your site. Hopefully you're looking at that list and thinking "wow, there are a couple of words I didn't think of". If you're satisfied the Google suggestions are somewhat relevant let's focus on the Local Monthly Search Column.
Local Monthly Searches indicate the average times per month the keyword was searched for in your country. To me this is the most important column because I have found the most valuable customers are in the US and speak english. Therefore I don't want to put much emphasis on the Global Monthly Searches column. The next thing I do is put the Local Monthly Searches column in order by the number of searches with the most frequently searched for terms at the top. That way the list will be in order of most frequently searched keywords. I do this by clicking on the words Local Monthly Searches.
Now that I have all the most commonly searched for keywords at the top of my list I move my eyes back over to the Keyword column and study the results. Once again I check to make sure the results which are most popular are relevant to my site. I also try to understand what the people who entered those search terms may have been thinking. Typically when I scan over a list I'll notice some anomalies like a ".com" next to one of the keywords. That indicates perhaps the people were using Google instead of the address bar in their web browser to go to a specific website. Therefore the keyword carries less weight even though it may have a high number of searches.
In tomorrows blog I'll continue my series on keyword research by showing you how to take all this data, put it into a formula and determine a total value for each keywords. Determining the total potential value of a keyword will help you focus on targeting the right keywords with your both your search engine optimization and your ad budget.
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