What exactly is keyword research? And what is it for?

When I run my SEO workshops it’s usually the section about keywords that leaves me with a room full of light-bulb moments. If you don’t know what keyword research is, or why it’s important then you need to polish up your business skills (and yes this is a business skill you can no longer ignore)

So before you can even start to plan how you will increase your visibility on google you need some information about what keywords you should be targeting. These could be an individual keyword or or a phrase/sentence. These are the keywords that your visitors are using to find companies like yours – they are not always obvious and you need to find one’s that are not already being dominated by your competition, or you need to be confident that you can beat them heads on with your SEO skills.  Either way you need facts.

The term keyword was coined back in the days when publishers of content on the web were left to choose their own keywords and add these to the meta-data (bit of code behind the website) But those days are now long gone. Too many web-masters spammed the keyword meta-data with popular search phrases like “Brittany Spears” “2012 Olympic results” etc resulting in search engines abandoning their reliance on the publisher in favour of working out what the keywords are all by itself.

Yes. You heard. GOOGLE DECIDES FOR ITSELF! (This is often the first light-bulb moment). Google’s job is to present people searching with the content they were looking for. The day this stops, is the day we stop using it.  As content, content types and search mediums evolve – so must our search engines. In fact google innovates and updates it’s algorithm (program/code) roughly every week in varying degrees (some major and some not so).

So how exactly do you find your keywords and how do I actually target them?

Join my SEO workshop group on September 14th for an intimate and honest presentation on how to create a marketing strategy, from a digital marketer who has run SEO campaigns for corporate giants as well as the small local businesses.  Learn how to use free tools to find the keywords that will statistically provide the best return and learn how social media, blogging and online marketing are as important as having a fully optimised website.

I hope to see you there!

“I had an amazingly helpful session on SEO with bweb.  Zoe was happy to answer any questions I had in plain speaking, and gave me some fantastic practical pieces of advice for me to implement in order to further improve my search engine rankings. Zoe is very easy to talk to, knows her stuff and is very encouraging so I’ve gone away with a new vigor for pushing ahead with her advice and look forward to growing the business.  I thoroughly recommend Zoe & bweb”