Keyword Research

July 1, 2011 0 Comments

This post is the next in the series How to Build a Business Online in 7 Steps.

Step 1.4 – Keyword research

This sub-step will help you to understand the words and phrases your customers use the most when searching for your products or services. You can then use these in the content on your website (more on that later).

To start with you need one or two seed keywords to get going. I suggest you use the market you sell to as one of them. For example, if you sell insurance to homeowners then “home contents insurance” would be a good seed phrase to start with. If you sell car parts “car parts” would be a good starting place.

The free tool we will use to get our keyword list is the Google Adwords keyword tool which you can find by searching for “keywords tool” in Google, the link to the tool will be at the top of the search results.

If you have a Google account I recommend you click on the “Sign in” link at the top right of the page. By signing in Google will return a larger number of keywords. If you do not have a Google account I suggest you get one. They are free to obtain.

After clicking on “Sign in” click on “Start Now” to create your account. Next, enter your seed keywords into the tool to get a list of keywords that are relevant and related. Make sure you choose the correct country before clicking the search button.

When Google returns the list, sort it by descending order of Local Monthly Searches then download the list as a CSV file for Excel. Google will download the results in a format that you can open in your spreadsheet program.

EXERCISE

Create your spreadsheet containing all of the keywords relevant to your seed keywords. If you cannot come up with any seed keywords, either, enter the address of your website into the “Website” box in the Google keywords tool, or enter the website of one of your competitors into the box. Google will display the keywords that it thinks are relevant to the website content. Save these keywords as described above instead.