Researching your keywords is an absolute must if you want your SEO efforts to pay off for you. Your keywords are critical to targeting qualified visitors and weeding out useless traffic. If your keyword research isn’t specific, detailed, and well-researched, it can severely impact the success of your site, because without quality, highly targeted keywords, your website will not show up to users who are searching for your specific service/product/information, which negates the entire purpose of doing SEO in the first place.

So, What Are Keywords?

In basic form, keywords are terms or phrases, which can be associated with your website and specific content. Without targeting specific keywords, every word on your site essentially becomes a “keyword”, which can be detrimental. The reason for this is that a user may search for a term, and then stumble on your page, only to find it has nothing to do with what they are looking for. At the same time, a user that is searching for the exact niche that your site serves will likely find a competitor’s website as opposed to yours, because they have targeted and placed an emphasis on these specific keywords, and you haven’t.

Here is an example: A “silver jewelry” maker could have a website showcasing their products and services. If they do not target their specific, long-tail keywords, they will have a much harder time getting natural visitors who are interested in their website. Here, the obvious keyword “jewelry” would not be as highly valued as more specific keywords like “silver jewelry”. The keyword “jewelry” can be associated with “crystal jewelry”, “gemstone jewelry”, “pearl jewlery” etc. and these visitors would be useless to a “silver jewelry” store.

What Are ‘Short Tail’ and ‘Long Tail’ Keywords?

Short tail keywords are essentially any keyword or term which is very broad and nondescript. A keyword or term such as ‘Jewelry’, ‘Rings’, ‘Necklaces’ would be considered short tail, as the user that is searching for one of these terms is likely seeking a more exact product or result than simply “jewelry”.

Long tail keywords, on the other hand, are more or less specific descriptive terms or phrases which are more targeted to the specifics of the website itself. An example of a long tail keyword would be ‘women’s gold rings’ or ‘diamond engagement ring’. These keywords are very specific, thus targeting a keyword like “men’s gold watches” on a website that sells gold watches for men would allow the site to be returned in a search for “men’s gold watches”, thus being useful to the user.

Finding and Researching Your Keywords

Now that you know the basics, you need to know how to take advantage of long tail keywords, by researching and selecting the best possible keywords available.

There are dozens of keyword research tools available on the internet, whichever one you choose is entirely up to you. However, our favorite is the keyword suggestion tool provided by Google itself -> Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool (who can have a bigger database of keywords than Google itself?). When you use one of these keyword research tools, you are essentially tapping into search term history with multiple search engines, but mainly Google. When you enter short tail keywords into these programs, they scour tens of millions of possible terms and search phrases, and then create a list of recommended keywords to use.

From this point, it is your job to analyze and carefully select each keyword that will be beneficial to you. The simple method in doing this is to compare the ‘search volume’ and the ‘advertiser competition’ for each keyword. You want to find keywords that have a high search volume, and low advertiser competition.

Search volume is, in essence, the average number of searches for that particular keyword. The higher the search volume, the more often the keyword is searched for. Just remember to try and find long tail keywords, as they will be much more beneficial to you that a short tail keyword that has 100 times the amount of searches.

Finally, advertiser competition is determined by how many people are targeting the same keyword with paid search results and advertisements. A keyword result with a large number of advertiser competition is likely to be a very competitive term, thus your chances of effectively using it will might be slim to none. Once again, sticking to a low-medium advertiser competition, as well as a medium-high search volume, is the best method to finding excellent long tail keywords.

Leave a Reply