An SEO Consultant’s View On Keyword Research
As an SEO Consultant, I am often approached to help folks with all sorts of sites. Like sites that sell mill worms and shea butter. As a matter of fact I am often asked to do SEO for sites with subjects that are completely unknown to me. I have no idea going into the project what folks are going to be searching for to find these sites.
For me, keyword research never stops when I am working on a project. I know some SEO Consultants are getting away from keyword research because of advances in LSI. In theory it sounds great. But where the rubber meets the road, I have not seen it really pan out. I still think keyword research is one of the most valuable parts of any SEO campaign.
I break down my keyword research into these phases:
- Site Owner’s Evaluation
- Offsite Keyword Research
- Analytics Analysis
A Business Owner’s Observations Are Worth Their Weight In Gold, Even If They Don’t Know It
Keyword research isn’t just about data. It’s about people. It’s about understanding the search habits of a specific demographic. How do they interact with the search engines. It goes way beyond what word is searched the most.
For example, if a business has a 50% higher conversion rate for customers that are in their forties, then I want to target the keywords they would use, and understand how they use them. A twenty-something searches much differently than a forty-something.
In this phase of the keyword research I start putting together a customer profile. After all, the customer profile may be the most valuable information available to me as an SEO Consultant.
I will ask the business owner, the sales people, the customer service people, actually anyone who will talk to me about their customers and what they are concerned about. You would be surprised at the valuable information I am able to obtain.
I ask them specific questions like:
- Who are your customers?
- What are they concerned about?
- How would you say they would search for your service or product?
- What are the five most common questions you are asked?
The more information you have, the better you are able to make an educated decisions on what to target on their website. Notice I said “information” not “data”. Information is data that has been interpreted. Once you have the data, you need to study it to turn it into information.
Keyword Research Using Various And Sundry Tools
Once I have a complete customer profile, I begin to use that information and match it against the various tools available to me. I like to order a report that is done objectively from SEO Research Labs. I have found their reports to be very useful as an SEO Consultant and I heartily recommend them.
Some other tools that I use:
If you know how to use these tools, it provides great information. But if you combine your research with SEO Lab’s Report and the information you gathered from the customer profile, you will have killer keyword research. Who knows, maybe you could even charge $10,000 or more for it.
Continued Keyword Research
I never stop keyword research. As a matter of fact, I always improve our keyword research using Google analytics or any other analytics package. I realize that there has been much discussion about Google getting smarter about LSI. This is not going to be a debate about LSI, but I must say that if it were the case that a synonym got the same results as the actual word, why are the search results for two related words so different sometimes.
The keyword tools do not give you all of the information, especially articles of speech or prepositions. Do you really think that searchers never use words like “in” or “a?” They absolutely do. You can easily increase your relevancy score by using these specific keyword variations that you see in your analytics account.
For example, your keyword research may say that people are searching “Painters Atlanta”. But in reality, they are searching “painters in Atlanta”. By using this specific keyword phrase, you are more likely to rank for that specific phrase ahead of a site that does not use that phrase.
My experience says that “relevance” is still very, very important and you can achieve that relevancy on your site. You still need relevant links, but if you do your site right, you need less links to produce the proper relevancy and authority to rank well for valuable keywords.
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Now I am hooked onto your blog. I wonder why you don’t have a feedburner delivery by email.
You are right about using the ‘in’ keyword. I loved seodigger for telling me the keywords that my competitors were ranking for and traffic for those keywords. I normally stick to wordtracker and adwords tool. Do you think all 4 tools should be used and will yield better results?
@Jeet, I think you should use all four tools. The biggest thing is not getting stuck in a rut and look for ways to improve your research.
I have had some issues with feedburner, mainly that they were not distributing my most recent posts. As soon as I get some time I will add feedburner back. Thanks for reading.
This is contradicting to what I’ve read from other site but it looks more logical.
Can you provide more information on this?
Thank you for this helpful article. Several of my web clients have asked me to handle this for them even though I am mainly their content creator. I like this step-by-step approach.
Rick,
You are welcome. What type of content do you write? Do you write for technology?
Thank you for the post. I learned how outsourcing keyword research to http://www.seoresearchlabs.com can save time. I’ll try them out.
HP
.-= HP@Tampa SEO Consultant´s last blog ..Time Frame of a Search Engine Optimization Project – Google #1 in a Week? =-.
well i think keyword is the basic element of any website search and here i find the info about how to search keyword from the website. tools are also available now. keep it up
I am a webmaster and an SEO consultant, just wanted to say thanks for the tips
Google adwords is the best tool I have found for keyword research espescially if you combine is with analytics.