Simple and Quick Keyword Research

Keyword research is fundamental to any search marketing campaign. You should not put your time and money into a search campaign if nobody’s looking for you. 

There are already a lot of articles out there that can show you how to do in-depth keyword research. That’s not what this article will teach you. I want to give you a 10,000-foot view of keyword research. Perhaps you could call this an “introduction to keyword research.”

An Introduction to Keyword Research

My simple keyword research method involves only a couple of steps:

1. Is there a category in the Yellow Pages for your kind of services? Assuming you can find one of these ancient tomes, this tells you whether people are searching for you. If this is true, you might say that people are looking for you online, too.  Sometimes companies provide services that might not appear in a consumer-oriented directory. If this is your company, skip to the next step.
2. Consider some phrases a potential customer might use to find you and make a list. Take those phrases to Google. If the search results are competitors or related to your services, this might be good for you, too.
3. Take the most promising phrases to Google Trends. This will show you a lot of information about your search phrases:
   • From where are people searching for this phrase?
   • How common are these searches?
   • Are there any seasonal fluctuations in these searches?

If you do keyword research like this, you must be honest. I know you think it would be cool to “rank number one” on Google, but what good is that if nobody’s looking for you?

You’ll also need to avoid using technical jargon for this to work. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Sometimes, the best customers use the wrong phrase when looking for you.

Limitations of Quick Keyword Research

While this might be a quick way to do keyword research, it has several limitations.

How many people are searching for you?

Sure, people might be looking for you, but it might not be enough to justify a search campaign. Google Trends can help you see into this to a limited degree. Good keyword research is able to estimate how many people might be using a particular phrase.

Which phrase do people use more often?

There might be a couple of different ways to say the same thing. There might be several different ways to search for the same solution. Which one do customers use more often? That would be the phrase you should use in your search campaign. You could use Google Trends to compare phrases against each other. Good keyword research can offer better insight.

Will this be easy or hard?

There might be people looking for your solution, but there might be a lot of competition for those people. For instance, there are many businesses looking for IT Services, and there are many companies that provide IT Services.

Search marketing can also be difficult in broader categories. For example, many people turn to the search engines to find a “computer.” Unfortunately, that category is broad. Even if someone could find your business from that search, you might not have what they need.

Good keyword research should be able to identify the competition in your space.

So What Good is Quick Keyword Research?

With all these limitations, why bother with this quick method? It can give you a basic idea of what you could be doing—that’s all. For serious inquiries, in-depth keyword research is much more helpful.

For better keyword research, you’ll need to:

• Follow one of the guides I mentioned earlier in the article.
• Start a small PPC campaign to test the waters. I find the PPC experts do excellent keyword research. Bear in mind that SEO works a little differently.