Steps of Keyword Research

Keyword research is an area you should pay extra care and attention. It’s probably the most important aspect of SEO. Many people are engaged in an online marketing campaign targeting keywords. But don’t be afraid and be realistic about where you can expect to rank within the search engine results. Here are some things you need to do to win the competition.

• Produce a list of keywords

The first thing you should do is to produce a list of all the relevant keywords you can think of. We know Google has a very useful tool called the Keyword Suggestion Tool. Once you have listed all the ones you can think of, you can use this tool for some guidance. This tool will suggest alternative keywords we may have overlooked. Besides, you can also use many other programs designed to do this as well.

• Find out efficient of each keyword

Find out how efficient a keyword is may be the second thing you should do. There are lots of tools out there can do this while most of them you have to pay for, but many have free 30 day trials. We can use a tool called a Keyword Efficiency Indicator (KEI). Run your keywords through the KEI tool and put the search volumes, competition & KEI score into the spreadsheet we just mentioned above.

• Pick the best keywords

We can start to pick the best keywords since we sort the results in order of KEI, high to low. A keyword with a high KEI is better than that of a low one. But that doesn’t mean you can choose the highest KELs because it usually has very high competition. It may be a good choice to get rid of the ones with high KEIs even if they seem to have a much higher search and competition volumes.

Of course we should also get rid of KEIs with low score as they may have low search volumes. We only get a number of keywords with mid-high range KEIs of which we should take 5 to 10 keywords with the highest KEI score. Concentrate your effort on these. Once you are getting good results for these you can always add more. Now you have your list of keywords.