Keyword Research

Keyword research is an important part of search engine optimization. At SEO Firm, we provide keyword research and analysis to find the best performing keywords and phrases for your website. Our keyword research involves finding the most relevant and popular terms that describe each of your main pages.

Without keyword research it is nearly impossible to achieve highly targeted search engine traffic to a website. Your site may be built around a set of low-performing or irrelevant keywords, which means your traffic is also underperforming. It is important to have a clear focus on who the audience is. Your audience could be industry or product specific, but it also could be region specific as well.

If you are an Optometrist, practicing in a particular town, then most likely your targeted audience would be region-wide and not nation-wide. Optimizing for a national audience would only bring in irrelevant traffic with a low conversion rate. The main focus of keyword research involves five items: keyword popularity, keyword competition, keyword convertibility, cooperation and analyzing server logs.

Keyword Popularity

Many times website owners will come up with a list of common sense keywords for their businesses, which by all logic should produce excellent results. After keyword research has been performed it may become evident that a slight derivation of these keywords is what most people are looking for or that there are some other high performance common sense keywords that were overlooked.

Keyword popularity is usually measured by how many times a month a search is performed on several search engines for a particular keyword or phrase. It is important to know the potential traffic for the keywords before optimizing the website. High performance keywords generally bring in high amounts of traffic. There also may be more competition for these popular keywords since many will want to get a piece of this traffic.

Keyword Competition

SEO Firm's keyword research also involves researching the competition for each keyword in order to determine what specifically needs to be done to your website to achieve top 10 rankings. "Know thy competition" is an old paraphrase from Sun Tzu, a master Chinese warrior who is often quoted in modern business books. Unless you know who your competition is and what techniques they are using to achieve top 10 rankings, you have not performed full-blown keyword research and analysis. Good research will give you a leg up on the competition.

Keyword Convertibility

At SEO Firm, we analyze the conversion potential as part of the keyword research. This is an analysis of which keywords will convert traffic into sales. According to search engine studies, the two most common types of searchers are information seekers and buyers. Some high traffic keywords will bring in tons of information seekers to a website but may not convert many into sales. On the other hand, many low traffic keywords are often overlooked and these can be high in converting the visitors into sales. Many specific terms will fit into this category such as 3 or 4 word key-phrases. Good research will uncover these.

Cooperation

Keyword research is always done in conjunction with our SEO Firm clients. Who knows your business better than you? We ask our clients for their list of keywords first and then we perform our own independent keyword research and discuss our findings with you. Most of the time, the outcome is that our clients choose some of keywords they have chosen plus many from our research.

Analyzing Server Logs

After your website has been indexed by the search engines and traffic is starting to come in, you can check the server logs using statistical software to determine which keywords are bringing in the most traffic. This software can also measure the website's conversion rate. Analyzing the server logs is the truest way to determine the success of the optimization and research efforts.

More Information

For more information, see these links below (and view them in order as they sequentially tell a story of our services):

SEO Services

Keyword Research

Web Usability

Creating Meta Tags

SEO Copywriting

Link Building

Measuring Success

Technical Support

Consulting Service

SEO Training

Once you have read through the above pages, if you have any questions, please email us through our Contact Us page and we will be happy to give you an answer.