Successful online marketing depends on keyword research. While after doing keyword research it’s not really difficult, it is an area that will help you increase your online traffic. Mastering keyword research takes practice and a lot of trial and error, but as you continue to do your research, you’ll become more and more adept at finding the keywords search engines are looking for, thereby increasing your traffic.
When starting out with keyword research, the best tool to use is the Google Keyword Tool. This is a free tool and it is available to everyone, but for maximum benefit you need to sign in to Google, this is easy to do if you have a Gmail or other Google services account. The difference between signing in to the Keyword Tool or not is that with a Google account, when you do a keyword search, you’ll get up to 800 keyword ideas instead of just a few.
Once you sign in, start by entering your keyword or phrase, like make money online. Then, on the left side of the page, scroll down to where it says Match Types. Now depending on what you are doing if you have to choose between broad, exact or phrase. Let’s say you want to target a specific phrase to use in a PPC ad on Google or Microsoft/Bing, then click the box next to “phrase” and go to the next step. I will use Phase for this example.
The next step is to go to the area that says advanced options and filters and depending on whether you want to search for keywords just for US searches or all countries or some other specific country or even language, click on the appropriate box and Choose my example I will use all countries and English.
Then click search. You will get two different options, one is keywords and the other is ad group ideas that you could use to put together different ad groups for your blogs, PPC or SEO advertising. Let’s use the actual keywords found. In our Make Money Online example, the tool displays 800 different keywords related to the phrase. Next, you choose the keywords you want to use for your blog or advertising that will get the many search engines to search for you.
One thing you could look at is the number of global monthly searches or local monthly searches. If you want to get a global ranking, look at the global monthly searches. Now here’s a little tip if you want your ad, article or blog post to rank high on say Google for a particular keyword phase, look at the number of searches for a particular keyword and search hidden gems that are searched for, say, 1,000 to 3,000 times. and experiment using them as the competition will be less and the chances of appearing on the first page of Google for that search will be higher.