Keyword Research Tools & Techniques for SEO Success

Keyword Research Tools & Techniques

In the SMX session “Keyword Research Tools & Tactics”, Christine Churchill spoke about the importance of understanding your customer’s language online. With search marketing, the core element to success is researching and discovering the words and phrases used by your target audience when searching for you online. Optimizing your website with the right keywords can increase your relevancy and increase traffic to your various landing pages.

Keyword Research for Website Strategy

Everything we do online relies on the keyword phrases, especially in terms of search and search users behavior. It is essential to understand the language of your customers in order to select the correct phrases to optimize your website for.

The first step in created a targeted, keyword-rich website is to complete keyword research. This will help you understand how your customers search, which words your competition is optimized for, which words they are not optimized for, and which words have a steady traffic flow throughout time.

Here are some keyword research tools to get you started. Each of these tools are slightly different in the way they measure and report stats. No single tool is correct or has the “winning answer”. Play around with multiple tools to understand the vast scope of your overall keyword strategy.

Top Keyword Research Tools:

• Word Tracker
• Keyword Discovery
• Google Insights
• Google Adwords – Traffic Estimator
• Compete.com
• Google Trends
• Quintura
• Hitwise
• Clusty
• Ask.com
• Spyfu
• Comscore
• KeyCompete

This is just a start for keyword research tools. There are dozens of them out there, and each brings its own special relevancy and data. Keyword research is unending, as phrases and trends come and go in search marketing. Keyword research and search optimization is always evolving and is an ongoing process and strategy; it is not a destination that can be conquered.

Remember: Keyword research is a process…

1. Brainstorm your top keywords for your market.
2. Use the tools to search for keywords. Find correlated phrases.
3. Evaluate your keywords and the datapoints delivered by the tools.
4. Review the database of keywords you have selected against the pages you have to optimize for.
5. Select the appropriate top keywords for each page and implement.
6. Program the keywords into your website pages. Optimize all on-page and off-page factors for those selected keywords. Each page should focus on one keyword-theme.
7. Track the traffic and keyword placement of your optimized pages on search engines.
8. Analyze data and evaluate success.
9. Keep updating optimization strategy. Or if it is not working, repeat steps #1-8. ‘

Keep working at keyword research. As users get savvier, as your industry and brand develop, as competitors catch up to your keyword strategy, the words will continue to evolve. The tools are awesome, and many of them are free, so take advantage of them today to develop a strategic SEO campaign that produces phenomenal organic traffic.