You can use the best SEO techniques in the world and invest the most money ever into creating content, swapping links and improving the code on your site so that it can be more easily indexed by Google but this won’t necessary ensure that you get lots of visitors or are a big success.
You see doing a lot of SEO is like firing a very powerful gun it will only do any damage if you actually hit your target. And in SEO the equivalent of aiming is doing your keyword research. This is incredibly important because otherwise you can waste all this money and effort heading in the wrong direction.
How to Do More In Depth Research
So what do you consider to be good keyword research? If you’re like many people then you might think that simply searching for the popularity of your potential keywords on Google’s keyword tool could be a good strategy. In fact though, this is only one very small part of what truly in depth keyword research should entail and just because the search term is popular doesn’t mean it’s always going to be, or that it’s popular with the demographic you want for your website. So what else can you do? Here are some examples of how you can do better research for your site.
Use PPC Advertising
PPC advertising shouldn’t be considered as better or worse than SEO, but rather as part of your online marketing arsenal and as complementary. One alternative way that you can use PPC advertising for instance then is as a way to research the SEO you are about to do. By using PPC you can quickly get your website to the top of Google for a particular search term, and then you can see how successful this is and how high quality your traffic is. Try out a few different terms using this method and you can then identify the best terms to target with your SEO so that you don’t waste your money. Think of it as renting the space before you buy.
Do Market Research
If you were a huge business, then you wouldn’t launch any kind of advertising campaign without first testing audience reception and doing some market research to see what went down well with your demographic and what the competition were using. You can use both these methods to see what works best for your SEO so ask your buyers what they searched to reach your site, and survey some members of the public on what they’d search for if they wanted your service. Likewise, look at your competition’s sites, and try to identify which keywords and phrases they’re using.
Think Ahead
Don’t just think about which keywords are popular right now, but think about whether there’s any temporal element or anything that could alter this. Changes to Google’s algorithms such as the recent Google Penguin and Google Pandora can alter how successful your SEO efforts are, but so too can changes in what people are looking for. Do your SEO research over time and aim to future proof it against future change.
Author: Brad Sharks
Courtesy of www.genuineseo.net
