SEO FOR EVERWEB VIDEO COURSE

Keyword Research

Video Transcript:

Before optimizing your website, the most important thing you will need to do is keyword research.

What this entails is determining what keywords you are going to target on your website.

Choosing the right keywords can be the difference between ranking 1st and not ranking at all. But what do I mean by the right keywords? Well first let's take a look at an example of a wrong keyword.

I have Google open here so I am going to do a search for a keyword that would be very popular - computers.

As you can see, there are a lot of results for this keyword, several hundred million. You can also see the types of sites that rank in the top 10 for these keywords. They are some of the worlds largest and most well known websites and companies.

Targeting a keyword like 'computers' is a mistake for two main reasons. Number one, it is way too broad of a search term, and two, it will be nearly impossible to compete with these websites.

So let's begin our keyword research and learn about what keywords to target.

The first thing I want you to do is go to Google and do a search for Google AdWords Keyword Planner.

The first result should be for Google AdWords Keyword Planner, so click on that result. In order to use this tool, you will need to have a Google AdWords account, so if you don't have one, pause this video now and sign up for one.

Once you are signed in, you should see the Keyword Planner page which looks like what you see here. Click on the link that says Search for new keyword and ad group ideas.

In the first box, type in a term that is related to your website. So for example, if your site is an online golf shop, you can type in something that describes one of the items you sell. For this example, I will type in Golf Clubs.

I will leave the rest of the options in this form blank, and click on the Get Ideas button.

The next thing I will do is click on the Keyword Ideas tab. I now have a list of keywords related to my search which was Golf Clubs. For each key-term there is an average monthly searches number, as well as a Competition ranking.

My goal is to find a key-term that has a high number of monthly searches with Low or medium competition. Here is where you will need to use a bit of judgement because the number of searches is a relative number and it will differ based on the industry you are in.

When you have located a key-term that you believe is a good fit for your website, it can be a good idea to do a Google search on that term. Taking a look at the results, how many results do you see? Is there a really high number of results? What about the number of ads. Are there a lot of Google Ads for this search that are all competing for business? What about the search results? Are the websites ranking in the top 10 high authority websites that most likely will not be outranked by a new comer such as yourself? These are things to keep in mind when selecting which keywords to target.

Moving forward with our keywords, what I recommend is choosing 2 keywords per page that you will target. One key-term will be your primary key-term and the other will be your secondary key-term. This method is only a suggestion, but it will be the method that is demonstrated and applied in the remainder of this video course. So in other words, if you have a one page website, you should not attempt to target 5, or 10, or even 50 keywords. Targeting 2 per page will allow you to focus each page, and give Google and other search engines a much better idea of what each page is about.

This also means that if you are targeting a key-term on a page, that you don’t necessarily need to target that same key-term on another page. This would only result in you competing with yourself. Instead, you should find other keywords and different variations of keywords that you can target. Remember, not everyone looking for left handed golf clubs will search for that exact phrase. There will be many different ways to perform that search, so make sure to focus each page, and also broaden your chances at ranking by having different keywords and different variations.