Keyword research is an essential first step for every search engine optimization project, pay-per-click advertising campaign or new web site development project. Knowing which keywords your potential customers are using to search for the products, services or information that you offer is critical knowledge that leads to more contacts and sales.
Knowing which search phrases your customers are likely to use to find you can be the determining factor as to whether your web site is a success or a failure. Web site traffic is meaningless unless it consists of potential new customers.
While it is not hard to drive random traffic to a web site, driving targeted traffic that is specifically looking for what you offer is the key to success that results in more contacts and more sales.
The competition on the web today is overwhelming. That means that the competition for top rank positions in Google, Bing or Yahoo search results or Google AdWords advertising is becoming harder to achieve. That is all the more reason to assure that the search phrases being targeted for your campaigns are the keyword phrases that attract the most visitors that are likely to become customers.
But even if your top choices for keyword phrases have enormous competition, your SEO or AdWords campaigns can be supplemented with long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are secondary keyword phrases that are not used as often in searches, but can still drive a significant amount of targeted traffic. The fact is that almost no one searches using a single word these days. Users have learned to group multiple words together to help pinpoint their searches. Long tail keywords are multiple word phrases with much less competition and typically have a lower bid cost for Google AdWords advertising.
What We Will Need From You
We start with 10 to 20 keywords of your choosing. These should be the primary search phrases that you believe are the most important to your business. 10 to 20 initial keyword phrases will cover the needs of most small to medium businesses. If you focus on local business clientele, such as with a legal service, pizza parlor, insurance business, etc., be sure to let us know which cities and suburbs you target for your services. Due to the research methodology that we use, the initial list of 10 to 20 keywords frequently results in 50 to 100–or sometimes more–related keyword search phrases.
What We Deliver
Our research is performed manually. Keyword research can be very subjective, so we add our experience and knowledge to the results. We use Google tools to determine the best mix of related keyword phrases. Those tools also deliver estimates as to how many times each search phrase was used in a search during the previous month, both in the USA and worldwide. Similar services offered by others use WordTracker and other tools to generate extrapolated search estimates derived from much smaller search engines that are unknown to most web users. We use Google because it delivers real world search estimates based on actual user searches. If you are counting on Google to deliver higher quality traffic to your web site, you can’t do much better than when you use Google data.
The deliverable is an Excel spreadsheet that lists your initial keyword phrases along with all of the related keyword phrases that we discover during our research. We show you how many times each phrase was used in a search in Google during the previous month. We also include a count of the number of web pages that each phrase competes with. This tells us how much competition there is for that search phrase is Google search results.
In addition, there is a column that calculates the KEI, or the Keyword Effectiveness Index, for each phrase. KEI is one way to predict the chances for successful high rankings. KEI is a relative factor that compares the searches for your targeted keyword phrases to the number of pages competing for these phrases. The results are stack-ranked based upon the chances for success. The higher the KEI factor, the easier (theoretically) it should be to obtain higher rank positions and targeted traffic for the given phrase.
Finally, we highlight the keyword phrases that our experience tells us will likely yield the best results in either a search engine optimization project or a Google AdWords advertising campaign. The results of this keyword research can be used for either or both methods for marketing your web site.
Cost for This Service
10 to 20 initial keyword phrases will cover the needs for most small to medium sized businesses. As stated earlier, that list will likely expand into a much more comprehensive list. Our fee for doing the research for up to 20 initial keyword phrases is $200.
What If I Have Many More Keywords To Start the Research?
If you have identified a large number of keywords and you want to see where they stack up relative to each other and against yet-to-be-identified long tail keywords, let us know how many keywords we will need to work with and we will provide you with a special quote for services.
Feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.
