How to Easily Perform Keyword Researching for Your SEO Needs

This is a guest post by Debbie of SEO New York.

It’s no secret that in order to obtain and maintain a high ranking for your web pages in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages – the pages that come up when someone searches for a certain word or phrase) you need to use targeted words, known as keywords, in specific places in your article.

This is known as search engine optimization or SEO. The problem is, you don’t know what word or words people are searching for without doing a bit of keyword research. Several people have written books and even entire courses on how to do keyword research properly, but the basics are pretty straightforward.

How to Find Popular Keywords

To find popular keywords for your specific niche, you need to put yourself in your target market’s shoes for a minute. Your target market is the specific demographic of people who really want or need your product. You need to think the way your target market thinks to come up with the most relevantkeywords they might use to search for your products. Once you create a list of several keyword possibilities, it’s time to find a keyword research tool to help you determine the popularity of your choices.

Popular Keyword Research Tools

One of the most popular – and easiest to use – keyword research tools is operated by Google. The Google keyword tool is free to use and offers plenty of usable information to help determine quality keywords for your niche.

To use the Google keyword tool, you simply type in your keyword and hit the “Get keyword ideas” button. The tool will generate a list of related keywords and provide search data about each keyword. This data includes advertiser competition (how much people are paying for that particular keyword in Google Adwords), monthly search volume, (how often that particular keyword is searched on Google in your targeted country and language), the global monthly search volume (how often the keyword is searched worldwide) and whether the match type is exact or broad ranged.

By looking through the list of related keywords, you can find selections that have a high search number, but a lower cost for Google Adwords. This keyword tool can be used even if you don’t use Google Adwords. By looking for keywords with a lower cost, you are probably going to find words that have a little less competition from big business competition.

Other popular keyword research tools that work in the same way as Google’s tool include Wordtracker and SEO Book. Each of these tools has slightly different information, but they are all good tools for narrowing down keywords.

Determining Your Competition

One way to determine the competition for a particular keyword is to look at the data in the keyword tool. The advertiser competition figures and graph are great indicators for how much competition your keyword has. You can also type your keyword directly into Google search and see how many results turn up. The trick is to find keywords that have a large volume of searches and a lower volume of competitive pages. If you find a keyword with less than 500.000 competing pages, you stand a good chance of ranking for that keyword, if you optimize your content properly.

Conclusion

Keyword research can be time consuming, but it is critical to Search Engine Optimization and getting your website pages to rank near the top of the Search Engine Results Pages. Taking the time to determine the popularkeywords for your marketing niche will definitely pay off in site visitors and sales.