What All The Keyword Research In The World - Won't Tell You!

  Written by Richard Petrillo on Feb 29, 2012 10:49 am

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I think we can all agree on one thing. Success on the internet depends on, Traffic! 

You can offer the best product or service on the planet, but if no one knows you exist, or they can't find your website or articles, you are dead on arrival!

Traffic to your website starts with Keyword Research!  Let me rephrase that… Traffic to your website starts with proper SEO (search engine optimization) and Keyword Research.  

There are many components to consider when setting up your website or blog and optimizing it for the search engines to find you.  

Here are 4 steps to follow that are often overlooked.

1. Title Tags 

2. Anchor Text 

3. Alt Tags

4. Description

For an in depth look at these 4 overlooked steps you can read my article here! 

If you are maintaining a blog, doing article marketing, or just posting in different article directories, keyword research is paramount in landing you on the first page of a Google search.

There are hundreds of tools on the internet to assist you in keyword research and one of the most popular free tools is Google's Keyword Research Tool.

I am going to assume you already know the basics of doing keyword research because I want to share with you what all the keyword research in the world, won't tell you!

It won't tell you exactly what keyword phrases people typed into a search engine that led them to your article or website.

(If you can read between the lines below, you will see one aspect that goes into my keyword research and what you need to keep in mind when searching for great keywords.)

Allow me to explain: A while back I did an article titled: "Which Group Buying Platform is Best? Sites Like LivingSocial - Move Over!"

My main keyword is, "group buying platform". My keyword research told me that term is only searched for about 590 times per month globally, but has a lot of competition according to google's keyword research tool. It ends up there are 35,600,000 competing websites.

As of today my article is on the 2nd page, in the eight spot. Not bad but, the goal is to be one of the top 3 spots on the first page, mid-way on the first page isn't a bad place to end up either. :)

Normally I wouldn't try and rank for a keyword with so few searches and such high competition but I have a specific purpose in mind with this article. 

In doing my keyword research I found "sites like LivingSocial"  to have far less competing search results, only 1 million, but that term is searched for over 1900 times each month. Thus the reason for including it in the headline.

To date if you type in "sites like livingsocial"  you can find my article on the 2nd page of google, mid way down. Not my ideal placement, especially since there are only 1.3 million competing websites for that phrase, but it wasn't my main keyword either.

Alright, here's the Golden Nugget I want you to walk away with from this article!

If you use a website tracking system such as Google Analytics, or a plugin I use called StatCounter, you can find out all kinds of information and track down exactly how someone found you based on a varitey of different stats. Keywords being just one of the many useful ways.

So be sure and check your stats often to see what keywords are being searched for that brought readers to your site. It's a great way to come up with new keywords terms that you might not otherwise have thought of.

Here is one example of some surprising results I found regarding the article listed above.

Someone had done a google search for the term, "How to build a site like LivingSocial"    

At the time of this writing my article, "Which Group Buying Platform is Best? Sites Like LivingSocial-!" shows up on the first page of Google, in the 10th position, with search results of 31 million competing sites.

Google's keyword research tool shows no match for how to build a site like LivingSocial.  Yet that term, or Long Tail Keyword, upon further investigation told me that reader spent 36 minutes on my website, visited 4 different articles, and exited to a capture page of mine which resulted in a new lead.

In closing, keyword research encompasses many aspects and setting up your SEO is vital if you want people to find you online. If you've been struggling with getting your articles on the first page of Google, I hope this tip along with my previous article links above will assist you in how to go about doing proper keyword research.

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