The internet is a highly competitive place. Many websites get lost in the search engines and show little value to their business. Savvy companies realize the importance of SEO. Keyword research is one of the first and most important places to start when website optimization begins.

There are many ways to research keywords and many do this different ways. I’ll explain a couple ways I perform keyword research and some good tips to outsmart your competitors.

What do you do?

What is your page about? Each page on your website is an opportunity to generate targeted traffic. Optimize each page with DIFFERENT keywords. Pick 1-3 key phrases for each page.

Search engines and users both like relevancy. Optimize your pages to match the actual content on each page. Don’t pick a keyword you would like to rank for if it has no relevancy to the content on your page.

Check estimated traffic

Once you have narrowed down what your page is about, you should have a list of keywords in mind. Check each key phrase to see how much monthly traffic it receives. Once way to do this is with the Google External Keyword Tool. You want to find some good phrases that get some decent traffic, but aren’t overly competitive (for the most part, there are definitely times where you might go after some “big dog” phrases). If a certain phrase does not get enough traffic, there is no point in optimizing for it. Keep in mind, a general rule of thumb is the more traffic the keyword receives, the more competition it is likely to have.

Now you have a good list of keywords that are relevant and should drive some good traffic to your page once you move up in the serps. The next step is where you “outfox” your competitors.

Analyze your competition

Start plugging in your key phrases one by one in Google and look on the right side to see how much competition there is.

You’ll see something like this:

I Google’d the term “winter Olympics” and found there were 23,300,000 competing pages for that phrase. That’s a big scary number!

Next, take that same phrase and enter it in like this:
Allintitle:winter Olympics

Now the number of competing pages went down to 2,420,000. Much better! This tells you how many pages actually have the phrase “winter Olympics” in their title tag. This gives you a little more realistic view of your competing pages.

Keep going back and forth until you find some good phrases that receive a good number of monthly searches, with little competition that is relevant to your page.

I’m not going to lie, this process works great, but requires a lot of time.

If you are time challenged like me, another good way to complete your keyword research in a third of the time is by using a tool like Web CEO (affiliate link). This will allow you to brainstorm various phrases, check traffic and competition quickly and easily. Web CEO will also calculate the KEI (keyword effectiveness index) so that you can quickly sort keywords and see which terms have the best demand-to-competition ratio! This way you get very detailed and accurate research, a great set of keywords without spending all day doing it.

Smart marketers not only find ways to do their job better, but faster as well!

(image credit: law_keven)

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