Choosing the right keywords lies at the heart of every search engine optimisation or Internet marketing strategy. Whether you are optimising your new blog post or a webpage on your company’s website, use of correct keywords is essential to ensure potential customers can find it easily on search engines.

How to choose the right keywords?

Choosing the right keywords for your web page is one of the first SEO steps you should can take.  Highly competitive words are not necessarily the best choice, in spite of high search volumes. This is because you will be competing against tens of thousands of businesses, making it practically impossible to achieve a high google ranking.

Here are some tips for choosing the right keywords:

• Choose keywords that users are searching for i.e. keywords with sufficient search volumes
• Choose keywords that have less competition so its possible to achieve a 1^st page rank on Google
• Narrow your keywords to focus on your targeted market e.g. “property in London” instead of just “property”
• Try to choose long tail keywords (3 words or more) if possible  in order to improve chances of ranking
• Choose keywords for each webpage separately and not for the entire site. This way you can optimise each page for only 1 or 2 keywords and devote all your attention to it.

Keyword Research Case Study: Step by step example

Let’s take an example of an Estate agency in London that targets customers looking to buy or rent property in London. What keywords should the homepage be optimised for so prospective customers can find the website on Google, Yahoo or Bing?

Below, we take a look at a step by step description of how to use Google keyword tool,which is one of the best free SEO tools, to identify the right keywords.

Step1: Make an Initial List of Keywords

List down the keywords you think are relevant for the web page you are optimising. Going back to our case study for a London based Estate agency, we could narrow our choice of keywords to the following:

Initial list:

• London estate agents
• Estate agents in West London
• Property to rent West London
• London property lettings
• London property sales

Step 2: Use Google Keyword tool to Refine Your Selection

Now that you have your initial list ready, enter your keywords in Google keyword tool and fetch the results. You can enter all search terms together, one on each line to save time. You don’t need to run the tool separately for each keyword.

The results for the above case study are displayed below.

Results for search terms entered:

Keyword Ideas or Suggestions

Google keyword tool will provide two sets of results. In addition to the search volumes and competition for the search terms you have entered, an additional list of keyword ideas or suggestions are also displayed.

The suggested keywords for the above case study is included below:

Step 3: Refine your Choice Based on Results:

As you can see from the results above, even though our initial list of keywords seemed logical for estate agents, in practice except for “London estate agents”, none of the keywords from our initial list have sufficient search volumes. It appears not many people are searching using those exact terms.

On the other hand, if you look at the keywords Google has suggested, it is easy to identify a few that make better choices for optimising the website. I have highlighted 2 that have low competition yet sufficient global as well as local search volumes.

Conclusion:

It clear from the above analysis that, without Google keyword tool, there is a very high risk of choosing the wrong keywords for your website. In the above example, this would have resulted in optimising the website for keywords that would not have resulted in high traffic even if a favourable rank on search engine results was eventually achieved.

If you want to find out more about SEO, read Google’s Guide to SEO – 13 SEO Best Practices.

Readers: How do you  research Keyword for your website? Do you use Google’s Keyword Tool or another tool? Please share your opinions by leaving a comment below.