Keyword Research Process: A Guide to Better SEO

There are 7 steps in finding the right keyword process.

Brainstorm
Categorize
Research
Compile
Winnow
Determine Competitiveness
Choose the keyword phrases

1. Brainstorming Keywords:

To get started with brainstorming the keywords, you should think about “Who your target market is?”

# Where do they live?

1. Geographical Region
# Local – Their specific geographical area,
# Nation – Is it the entire nation?
# Worldwide – Or even the whole world?

2. Demographics
What about their demographics?
# Are they women/men, children/adult who are looking for your product?
# Age – How old are they?
Probably you should also consider thinking about what they are, mothers, fathers, children, teachers, doctors, lawyers, students, dancers, painters, sportsmen, etc.
# Income – What is their income? A scale to determine how much they could spend on your product.

All of these makes a difference in the keyword you target. For instance, you are a dentist in Chennai, you will be targeting Chennai area and your keyword phrase will have the word Chennai and perhaps some of the towns to increase the proximity.

For those of you who think their target market is everyone, try to note down who your best customers might be. Define your target market that way.

To continue with brainstorming keywords, listen to how other people talk about your product/services and what keywords do they use. Do not be shy about asking your

# Customers
# Sales People
# Friends / Relatives
# Blogs / Forums
And learn what words they use to describe your product.

Also visit your competitors’ websites, note the keywords they used to describe themselves. But do not to put too much effort to know how they optimize the keywords. They may not know what actually they are doing or whether they have researched well.

Put all these brainstormed information into a list and do not worry whether it is going bad at this point.

2.Categorize

Now take your brainstorm list and categorize it by themes.

If you sell lots of different items, set the keywords based on the product or service themselves might each be a specific category.

Sometimes you cannot accurately do this unless you have done the next step.

3.Keyword Research

Here we may need to know the actual keyword phrase the people use in order to categorize them. So it is okay if we reverse this step with the next one.

Now you have to use the keyword research tools. Start with a seed phrase from your main category. Or if you already got your website, you can paste your website’s URL into the Google Keyword Research Tool and let it do the work for you.

4.Compile

Next step is to compile your research. All keyword research tools allow you to export the data into spreadsheets.

Once you download the spreadsheet, you may need to re-categorize as necessary or to the initial categorization.

5. Winnow

While your spreadsheets are open, you want to also remove the keyword phrases that are obviously not good for your website.

These include

# Ones that are not relevant to the product you offer.
# And, those phrases that have extremely low search campaigns.

For this winnowing process, you need to make sure you are very familiar with the nature of the business. If you are doing this keyword research for a client, make sure to have them involved in this process. They will always know the business better than you do.

At this time, you should now have a pretty decent list of relevant keyword phrases.

6. Determine Competitiveness

You have to know how competitive the keywords you have scrutinized are. When I talk about competitiveness I am talking about how many other websites are targeting those same keyword phrases.

Each phrase can be broken down into a specific level of competitiveness. From highly competitive -> fairly competitive -> non-competitive.

7.Choose – the ones you want to use.

Once you have determined the level of competitiveness, you are ready to choose which keyword phrase you actually use in your SEO project.

Basically, you will be choosing them by looking at:

# The number of searches they receive
# The relevancy to what you offer on your website and
# The competitiveness level
Hence, this is the keyword research process.