You do keyword research when you try to find out what words (keywords) people are actually using in search engines when searching for a product, service, industry segments, etc. This is the basic notion of ‘what is keyword research’.
For example, you might assume that people looking for a book called ‘My First RC Airplane’ type the following into the search box:
My first RC plane
Through keyword research, you can find out that most people actually type:
My first RC airplane book
This second keyword phrase may be searched for more times per month than the first phrase, or perhaps this second phrase has fewer monthly searches but less competition (competition = how many sites are trying to rank on a search engine to appear on the first page). and trying to sell that same book; or volume and average cost of paid advertising for those keywords)
NOTE: The above sentences are totally made up, I did not research this sentence, it is just an example.
Why would you want to do keyword research?
Identifying the keywords that people are actually using when searching for the type of product or service you are marketing will make the difference between success and failure when it comes to:
– generate traffic to your website (people find you through search engines)
– convert traffic to sales (target traffic ready to buy finds your page and can buy from you)
If people can’t find you, they will never buy from you. This is why you want your site to be listed, for the search keywords you have discovered, as high as possible on a search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo.
If the people you attract to your website don’t have a buying mindset, you won’t sell much. People may not be ready to buy, they may just be looking for general information about a product, even just out of curiosity. For example, someone looking
motorcycle brand X
You may be looking for performance specs perhaps to compare to another motorcycle. But someone looking
Brand-X Motorbike Discount or Brand-X Motorbike Best Deal
You may be one step closer to buying that bike, therefore it’s a more attractive prospect to sell to. If your site ranked high in search engines for the ‘ready to buy’ type of keywords, more people ready to buy might visit your site and they are more likely to make a purchase. I’m sure you’re now beginning to understand why you need to know the answer to what keyword research is and how you can benefit from it.
In this case, you would perform keyword research to find data on the best “ready to buy” keywords that you could optimize your site for; with the intention of attracting ‘ready to buy’ traffic that will convert to sales at a higher rate.
I mentioned ‘optimize your site’ and of course I mean search engine optimization or SEO. If you want to be found, you want search engines to list your site at the top of the first page of results for keywords relevant to your product or service. You can help this by making sure that search engines see your site as a site that offers content relevant to those keywords.
You can optimize your site for search engine ranking in a number of ways, for example, by using the keywords you just found in your site title, using those keywords in your content, and above all, by making sure that your content is really very relevant to those keywords. SEO is a broader topic, I will discuss it in another article.
You may also want to do keyword research to really come up with a new name for a product or service, to find the best keywords for your paid ads, discovery or niche products, niche marketing…
As you get more familiar with what keyword research is, you’ll find that it gets deeper and a bit more complicated; At that point, you’ll realize that you can benefit from using keyword research tools to make your keyword research faster, more productive, and more accurate.
In fact, keyword research, depending on your needs, extends to research on other factors.
– Website competition for those same keywords
– How well optimized (SEO) are these competitor sites for those same keywords
– Pay-per-click competition from advertisers who pay for ad placement for those same keywords
– How many times a keyword has been searched per month
– Estimated amount of traffic you could receive if your site was optimized for those keywords and ranked in the top 3 listings on search engine results pages
– etc…
Good keyword research tools allow you to achieve more, faster.