Keyword research step by step

15 Jan Keyword research step by step

1. The first step is to put yourself in your customers’ (or audiences) shoes, and imagine what keywords they might use when they are searching for your offering. By ‘keyword’ we really mean phrase. It is rare these days that a user enters only one word in a search box. Putting yourself in their shoes is important because it is often the case that we come up with less searched, or even less relevant, keywords when we look at it purely from our own perspective.
2. When you have a list of six or more unrelated keywords (i.e. in which the same word doesn’t appear in more than one) you are ready to extrapulate them to get hundreds of exact search terms which your audience might use, plus the number of searches each one gets in Google each month.
3. To do this, you need the the Google Keyword Tool. Just enter a single keyword in the “Word or phrase” box and click search. Then click the ‘Download’ button to save the list of resulting keyword ideas on your local machine together with their search volume (local and global).
   NB: Google will give more keyword ideas if you are signed in with a (free) Google Adwords account.

4. You will then have separate lists, one for each of your initial “root” keywords, and you can order them by volume of monthly searches.
5. For each list, you now need to add an extra column and all it ‘AIT’ or ‘All In Title’. In this column we are going to store the number of pages indexed in Google which have the keyword in its title. This tells us how many pages there are competing organically for that keyword.
6. To get the AIT figure, go to Google and type in “Allintitle: keyword” (replace keyword with each keyword). This is the most labourious part of keyword research, yet also the most rewarding.
7. Once you have a full list of AIT results you can then order your spreadsheet to show those with the least competition first. You should look for keywords which have an AIT less than 1,000 yet more than 1,000 searches (either local or Global, depending on your audience). These are then your opportunity keywords.
8. Separate your opportunity keywords from your other lists and keep them safe. These are a very valuable resource and should be kept and referred to regularly. They will make the difference between being indexed, and found, for your target keywords, and being ignored.