When dealing with online business, keyword research is likely the most crucial part of your job when you’re preparing to design and build a website. It really doesn’t make much of a difference what you’ve actually planned for the website, assuming of course that you do have something planned, because if you’ve any interest at all in having your website be seen by the rest of the world, then you’ll need to take great care with your keyword research. Or, just get in touch with an expert virtual assistant to take care of this for you.
A keyword is basically a single word or a number of words strung together into a phrase describing something. Hence, your keyword could be “dogs” or something more complex, such as “yellow Labrador retrievers”. This second example is a phrase which is commonly known as a “long tail keyword”, or in other words, a more detailed description of what someone may be searching for. The real success of any website is primarily due to the relevance of a specific keyword or set of keywords – even if the administrator of the website doesn’t realize it! Your keywords will directly relate to the very nature and purpose of the website.
It should be common sense, that if you’re pursuing website development for a meaningful purpose, perhaps as a commercial business, then it’s absolutely essential that you plan its construction very carefully. An aspect of this construction deals with the proper selection of keywords, choosing less than 5 which are appropriate to your specific subject, topic or niche. Once you’ve selected your keywords, you should then build your website accordingly, and with a fairly structured approach. This is commonly known as search engine optimisation, as it’s the method by which you can ensure that everyone else – across the world, can find your site if they’re interested in what you’re discussing, promoting or selling.
Keyword research is the cornerstone of this task. There are a number of different trains of thought, but in this highly competitive world market of ours, you need to ensure that your chosen keywords are not only appropriate, but are realistic too. As you will be trying to “rank” for your keywords (or end up as high as you possibly can within the ubiquitous search engine rankings of sites relevant to your niche), you must make sure that you have a good chance of doing so, firstly, and then secondly orchestrate your approach to give yourself the best chance possible.
One of the mistakes that many people (including some so-called SEO experts) make is to misinterpret the supply and demand for your keyword.
Demand: there are many tools, some more complex and more costly than others, which determine the demand for your keyword or long-tail keyword. In simple terms, how many people are searching for information directly related to your keywords. Google and others have a way of measuring the number of times that someone will search their engines for that exact keyword. They will supply you with figures which show, on a monthly basis and broken down into geographical territories if you wish, the number of times someone entered that phrase into the search box. This will give you a good idea of what the actual “demand” for information about your keyword is.
Supply: if you go to Google’s search page and enter your keyword in the search box, you’ll come up with a number of sites which Google considers to be relevant to that phrase. In some cases this can run into the many, many millions. If your keyword is – and it probably will be, a long tail, you should know that this initial supply figure is based on a broad analysis, and in order to get a realistic return on the number of relevant sites, you’ll need to enter your keyword in quotes “”. By doing this you’ll see that the number of sites returned is significantly lower, this being a good indication of the “supply” for that keyword. The websites returned in this way will be your competitors.
As you’ll quickly see from conducting this exercise, a very broad keyword – such as “dog”, has a very high demand and a very high supply. Don’t be tempted to run after this demand as the chances of ranking highly for this keyword are not that good. Generally speaking – the higher the demand, the higher the existing supply. However, part of the skill of keyword research is in developing long tail keywords that more accurately describe your particular niche. For example, if we research “yellow Labrador retrievers”, we can see that there is a reasonable amount of demand – somewhere in the region of 3000 searches per month for that term, and a low amount of supply – less than 1000 competing sites. In this example, we would likely include this exact keyword in our campaign. Keep in mind that if you’d like to rank high for any keywords, a specialist virtual assistant can help you move forward fast.
This is just an overview into keyword research, which should be an integral part of your plan to develop your business. As any expert virtual assistant will tell you, the correct implementation of chosen keywords is an entirely different issue, but you must make sure that your keyword research is correctly founded and conducted before you move on.
