Good Search Rankings Start With Keyword Research

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Good Search Rankings Start With Keyword Research

Everyone wants better search engine rankings and all the benefits that come with those rankings. Those benefits include more credibility with customers, more authority with the search engines and of course, more of that nice, free traffic we’re all after.

However, there is one thing that almost every site owner misses when setting up a new site and/or starting an online marketing strategy that depends on either SEO or pay per click. That is the importance of keyword research.

When it comes to search engine marketing you need to determine two things very early on. The first revolves around figuring out which keywords people are entering into Google and the other search engines when they are trying to find products or services similiar to those your company offers. Many business owners make the mistake of thinking that sales prospects will enter their company name or domain name into Google. That is great when it happens but these visitors would not represent new business for you if they already know that much about you.

More likely, people would be searching for specific terms (we geeks call them ‘keywords’) related to your business. For example if your company name is Fred’s Pianos and your store is in Toronto it is more likely that someone will go to Google and type in ‘pianos Toronto’ or ‘Toronto piano store’ than they are to type in ‘Fred’s pianos’.Fortunately, Google has a free tool called the Google External Keyword tool that allows you to see exactly what people are searching for and how often they’re search for it. There is no point in targetting keywords that nobody is searching for at the search engines.

The second thing to keep in mind is understanding how many pages you would be competing with for each keyword term. This is determined by going to Google and entering the keyword term that you with to target and seeing how many pages Google already has indexed for that term. This number is given under the search box where it says “About XXXXX results (0.12 seconds).” The smaller the XXXXX number is the better your chance of competing for that term.

In many cases, a little keyword research at the beginning will result in dramatically different results in your search marketing. It is very common to find high demand (number of searches) keywords that have low supply (fewer indexed pages) for almost any market. It does take a little time and a little effort to uncover these golden nuggets but it is always worth it.

Once you know the keywords you want to go after – the ones that you know you can compete on – you can target those specifically with your site structure and your linking strategy. This way it is much more likely that you can rank well on Google or pay less per bid on your pay per click strategy than you would without doing this initial research.

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