Keyword Research: What You Need to know to be Successful!

If you’re serious about getting quality targeted traffic to your website, then you will need to take your keyword research very seriously. Some people believe that if they just make a page and slap some content up on the website that they will be able to get a ton of traffic. It used to be that easy many years ago. Unfortunately, the internet has grown by leaps and bounds. There are more and more people making sites every day. Which means your competition can grow by leaps and bounds every day.

How are you going to make sure your site is found and you get good traffic? You have to prepare and do good keyword research. While it may be tempting to try and target the keywords that get a lot of searches per month, this isn’t the best tactic to use. The sites that are ranking well for very competitive keywords probably have been around for years and have a lot of backlinks.

When you’re doing keyword research, it’s important that you keep in mind not only how many searches per month the keyword gets, but also how much competition there is for that keyword. You may think that it’s not worthwhile to target a keyword that only gets a few hundred searches per month. However, if you can target a few keywords that get anywhere from a few hundred searches to a few thousand searches per month, and rank on the first page you will do quite well.

For example, let’s say you uncover a keyword during your keyword research that gets 10,000 searches per month. However, there are 2.5 million websites who also target this keyword. While the traffic is lucrative, your chances of making it to the first page of the search results are very slim. Unless you put a lot of time, work, and effort into getting first page ranking for such a competitive keyword phrase.

Now, let’s say you uncover 10 keywords that average to about 1,000 searches per month. Each one of these keywords has minimal competition. If you create content around those 10 keywords, you will then achieve the same goal. It’s just instead of one keyword for 10,000 and fighting tooth and nail to get a good ranking, you spread it out to 10 pages of quality content which would equal roughly 10,000 searches per month.

You may think that creating content around 10 keywords is a lot more work than creating content for one keyword. This much is true. However, the time and effort you would save in trying to fight the competition with the one keyword more than makes up for the additional effort you have to spend on creating the extra content.

There are many free tools to do keyword research. However, these tools don’t usually offer important and critical features that paid keyword tools have to offer. For example, you can find keywords with decent search volume with little to no competition with free tools. However, be prepared to spend a lot of time doing this. Most paid keyword tools, are made specifically to help you find low competition but well searched keywords. It’s highly recommended that you look into some paid keyword research tools. They will help you to get better search engine rankings much faster.