Lesson 1.2 Keywords and Keyword Research Tools
First let us see what Keywords are and why they are important to you as a marketer. According to Dictionary.com a keyword is “a word used to classify or organize digital content, or to facilitate an online search for information”.
People go to the web to buy products, get information for their researches, gather information to solve their problems and for many other reasons. What they are typing are keywords. As a marketer you should be able to anticipate what the customer will type while looking for the product you are marketing. If you are ranked high in the search engines for your search term or keyword you will get a lot of traffic and you can take advantage of the traffic to generate revenue. Without good search engine ranking, nobody will see your site. So, as a marketer all your campaigns are revolve around Keywords.
There are two aspects of a good keyword to use in your marketing campaigns. First, it should be a term that people are searching for in the search engines. A term that has at least 50 searches a month would be considered to be a good one. Second, the search term should have a fair competition. If too many site have been indexed for it, it will be difficult for you to be ranked in the first pages. Remember you want people to find your site. To know your competition, you need to know the QSR of the keyword. You will get more on QSRs in the next lesson, don’t worry.
There are many FREE online Tools for finding the number of searches per month for any particular Keyword. I personally use Google AdWords Keyword Planner which you can find at: https://adwords.google.com/ and Wordtracker to be found at : https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com. Of course you can use other tools you found yourself. As for the QSRs, you will find all necessary information in the following lesson. It’s all important to mention here that with a QSR of 300 or less and good application of SEO techniques, you can rank any of your web pages very high.
Now it’s time to start finding Keywords. I want to find the domain name I will use for my next website where I want to market age defying products. I type in (Google) age and a number of terms come underneath. Type d the terms underneath change, and so on for e, f, y until you finish up with the whole search term age defying products. Now the terms which appear are the ones which people normally type. So you got an idea of what people type when searching for age defying products. These are called Google Instant Ideas. Let us call the way of finding keywords using this method the “Google Instant Strategy“.
I could have taken any term among the instant ideas above but I want to try anti aging products instead. I find this more appealing to me so I go to the Keyword research tools to find the number of searches it has and it’s competition. Putting the term into the Keyword Planner I find it more elaborated and a search term top anti aging products has 390 searches per month and an QSR of 210. Okay, I take that as my domain name “topantiagingproducts“.
Task: Search for Keyword Search Tools and register yourself. Practice on how to find keywords using the Google Instant Technique and the Keyword Search Tools and make a list of keywords you will use later in your site. You probably have in mind what you want to write about or market. Don’t worry about the QSRs at the moment. Put a list of about 30 keywords.
In our next lesson we will discuss about Quoted Search Results (QSR) and find ways to get them from the Google Browser. Note that this lesson simple as it is, is the foundation of all your marketing campaigns.
Cheers.