I was talking to the Executive Director of the local economic development organization this morning and the discussion turned to good keywords for the organization’s website. He’s looking into options for upgrading the current website to enhance the organization’s placement in search results and he had a short list of web developers he was considering calling for proposals.
I suggested to him that if any of his web developer prospects tell him that he’ll be responsible for furnishing the keywords to be used in building the website, it’s time to walk away! To me, that means that the web developer doesn’t understand keyword research and doesn’t do keyword research. And without good keyword research used in the development of a website, it will never rank well in Google results for relevant keywords.
Keywords are just the words and phrases used by Internet users when searching for information on the Web. Google and the other search engines keep track of various search phrases and you can obtain lists of keywords, with recent search volumes, from several places on the Internet. There are paid sources of keyword information and there are free ones. I don’t see any problem using the free sources when you’re starting your keyword research, but I use paid keyword research tools when building keyword lists for my clients. Here’s one way to build a keyword list using Google’s free keyword research tool.
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| Google Free Keyword Research Tool |
To find the Google tool on the Web, just search for “google keyword research tool” and click the first result in the returned list. When the page loads, you’ll see the Google keyword tool interface like the one in the screenshot above. I’ve entered three keyword phrases related to economic development and before I can use the tool, I need to enter the anti-SPAM phrase into the text box. When I do that, I’ll get the following results.
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| Google Free Keyword Tool Results |
You can see that “economic development” and “Texas economic development” look like good keyword phrases. There is little competition for those phrases and the search volumes for them are relatively high. I can click on the column heading and sort by competition metric, global search volume and local search volume to help myself pick out the keyword phrases with the most promise for my new website.
You may think that you know the words and phrases that your customers use, and I’m sure that you could recite some of them. However, I’d also bet that there are some keywords used by your customers that you’re not aware of, and without keyword research, you’ll never be aware of them. Without keyword research, you also won’t know the search volumes and the online competition you face for each keyword. Ideally, you’ll be able to identify keywords with high search volumes and low competition measures and target them in building your website.
If you’d like IX SEO Services to develop a keyword list for you, we’ll do that for you, using our paid keyword research tools, for the low price of $200. The list will include variations of keyword phrases relevant to your business and measures of the competition you’ll see online for each keyword phrase. We’ll also provide advice concerning how to use your keyword list in developing your Web marketing effort.
Call IX Brand SEO Services Company for advice concerning any aspect of your Internet marketing planning.
