25 Mar How to Identify Keywords that Work

When you do keyword research, you’re looking for the actual words or phrases your customers use when they search for information about your content topic.

Smart keyword research will show you in depth information about your audience — how they search, how they speak, and how they think.

Accurate keyword research helps you optimize your website for the search engines, and it also allows you to shape your content strategy. So it’s vitally important that you use smart tactics to help you find this information.

Once you’ve done with your basic keyword research, you’ll need to dig a little further to see whether a phrase is trending up or down and how they are being discussed in social media communities.

Here’s why — you don’t want to pick a keyword, optimize your entire site for it, and then discover that the popularity of searches for that word have been trending down for the past two years.

You want keywords that are not only popular, but have been steadily popular and have a good outlook for the upcoming months and years.

To find out the whether your keywords are headed up or down in popularity, you can use Google Trends, which allows you to put in several keywords at a time to run a comparison of those keywords for you.

You can use trending information to eliminate some of your keywords and narrow down your target list.

What about social networks?

Do you know how people talk about your topic when they’re having conversations with family and friends?

The approach to keyword research on social media networks differs from search. When people use search engines, they are generally looking for an answer to a specific question. Users on social networking sites are there to talk, share ideas, and interact with other users.

You need to know how people are actually using your keywords and phrases in their conversations and what questions they are asking. Are they speaking negatively or positively about your topic?

Once you have these answered you need to make an educated decision on what keywords you want your site to rank for, and then you have to optimize them.

For any one piece of content (blog post, article, etc.), you should pick one primary keyword to target. For your entire site, pick three or four that will be your targeted keywords.