Part 2 – How to do truly effective keyword research
Part 2 of 2 – Finalising your Keywords
If you are new to this blog, you may want to check out Part 1 of this series “How to do truly effective keyword research”. In the first post of the series I explained how to come up with an initial list of keywords that relate to your business and have reasonable search volumes. Now I will show you how to narrow your list and judge the competition for each one to help you decide which keywords are little gems and which should be discarded. If you are up to speed with part 1, let’s begin with part 2.
At this stage you could have a list of keywords as long as your arm on your “Keyword Research Template” (you can download this for free in part 1). Don’t panic. I am now going to show you how to narrow the list.
The first step is to work out which terms are conversion focused. For example, the term “virtual assistant” could be being searched for any number of reasons, whereas “hire a virtual assistant” can really only mean one thing – there is a potential customer out there lurking!
ACTION PLAN A:
- Go through your list and mark any keywords within the list that are actionable (into column F)
- Click the button on column F and “sort descending” so all your actionable terms are together at the top
- For now, the other keywords you found can be ignored but not deleted.
At this point things get even more exciting! This is the part where you start to check out the competition and it couldn’t be simpler.
When you search on google, a little figure underneath the search box pops up “1-10 of about….” which represents the number of pages google thinks are relevant in some way to your search term. If you include the phrase “allintitle:” before you search for something, google only displays the sites that include the exact search phrase in their title tag. This is an excellent way of judging what other sites are chasing that particular keyword or search phrase and therefore how competitive it is.
ACTION PLAN B:
- Enter the actionable terms you’ve found one by one into google.com with “allintitle:” preceding the phrase (don’t include speech marks and leave space between allintitle: and your keyword).
- Copy the number of results found into column E on your Keyword Research Template
If you are targeting an audience in a specific country like the UK or Australia then you may want to carry out this step using google.co.uk or google.com.au respectively rather than google.com. If your website is aimed at a global or US audience then stick to google.com.
Once you have this data it is time to pick out the very final keywords you want.
Action Plan C:
- Look for keywords that have a decent enough search volume (could be anything from 300 onwards) but are combined with a low competitor figure too.
- Make a note in column G of your Keyword Research Template if you want to use this keyword for your website.
Your final list of keywords will be a potent mix of actionable terms with good search volumes but low competition. Believe me when I say that is a winning combination.
Good luck, leave a comment if you have any questions or need anything clarifying.
If this all seems a little daunting we’d be happy to carry out the work for you here at AshaMoon. Our keyword research service takes the hard work out of it and simply places a list of winning keywords straight into your hands!
We also offer onsite SEO to ensure the keywords are placed effectively onto your website and a range of other professional SEO services such as link building, content marketing and social media marketing services. Contact us for further information.
