To become successful in any Internet business you should appreciate that keywords you pick for a SEO campaign are hugely important. If you unwisely go for the most frequently searched keywords, you are shortly likely to face a problem of overly high competition. This, in turn, can make you assume that ranking well on those keywords is unworthy of your time and investments. In the worst scenario, you may come to the conclusion that attaining top positions on Google for these keywords is practically impossible.
If you expect a SEO campaign to be efficient, you should act smart and start it with competitive analysis and keyword research. The purpose of these is to discover phrases and keywords, which are both pretty popular and, at the same time, moderately employed by rival firms.
The present article will give you a detailed guide on how to find out keywords,which would turn your SEO activity and, consequently, your online business into success.
The program of actions is given below:
1. Perform search on Google and reveal keywords used by your most successful competitors. Make a listing of approximately 50 most intensively used phrases and keywords for which competing websites have top-ranking.
2. Make use of a thesaurus and enlarge the list by adding more synonyms with appropriate adjectives.
3. Type the listing into the top field of the
Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, tick the box "Use synonyms" and then hit the button at the bottom.
4. Select to show these columns: "Estim. Average CPC" and "Approximate Search Volume" (both average and for the previous month).
5. Export results into CSV file, load the file into Microsoft Excel and sort all data by the "Approx Avg Search Volume" column in descending order.
6. Delete key phrases with fewer than 300 searches a month. Additionally, abandon all phrases with search trends steadily declining over the year.
7. Look through the table and leave only key phrases, which look reasonable and are applicable to your site. For a small website (less than a few ten pages), cut down the list to about 300 phrases that show the largest number of searches. For bigger websites you will need a longer list.
8. Add 7 another columns: "Searches/month", "Bulk" "Optimised", "Direct", "Opportunity", "Feasibility" and "Effectiveness", and save the document as an Excel file. Remember that every column besides the name you assign to it, in addition has a title, which is a letter assigned by Excel.
9. The next is rather tiresome, but really important step. Using Google enter into the search field the following combinations: a) "key phrase"; b) allinanchor:"key phrase" and c) allintitle:"key phrase", where "key phrase" is one of your key phrases. Do that for every phrase.
10. For each key phrase enter the three numbers generated by Google into the "Bulk", "Direct" and "Optimised" columns, correspondingly.
11. Enter the following expressions in the top 2nd cells (just below the the name of the column) of the next columns: "=MS^2/T1" into "Opportunity", "=MS^2/T3" into "Feasibility" and "=MS^2/T2" into "Effectiveness", where T1, T2 and T3 are the titles (letters) automatically assigned to the columns named "Bulk", "Direct" and "Optimised", respectively; MS is the number of searches per month.
12. Fill in those columns by highlighting the cell with the formula (in every column) and dragging it down to the last cell of the column.
13. Then choose the key phrases, which display the bigest numbers for the "Approx. Avg Search Vol.", "Effectiveness" and "Feasibility", as well as the smallest values for "Direct".
14. If the number of appropriate key phrases left is now less than ~150, go back to step 7 and keep additional keywords. Another way is to expand the list by using a thesaurus to find out additional synonyms and combine those with appropriate adjectives.
15. When you are done, you ought to have ~150-200 phrases in your list of the most efficient keywords that you are going to employ in your SEO campaign.
Thus, you have just composed a list of rather popular key phrases, which are, on the one hand, show quite large number of searches, and, on the other hand, are underused by your competitors. Those key phrases offer you much greater chances to turn your SEO campaign into success!
Now you are prepared for the on-page and off-page optimisation. These, though, are topics for other articles that will come out in the near future. Watch out for them!
About the AuthorThe author is an Internet marketing and SEO expert from UK. If you have queries about keyword research or need help with your SEO plan, feel free to contact a professional
SEO consultant at WebPro-SEO, a UK SEO firm. First hour consultancy is FREE!
Courtesy:
GoArticles