Keyword Research

Firstly, if you own a business or are working for a business that does not have an online presence (i.e. a website, social media profiles, etc.) then you’ll want to get on that. Secondly, once you have established the said presence, it is time get your search engine optimization (SEO) going. This is utilizing your website, social media platforms, blogs, etc. in a way that will be positively recognized and ranked by search engine algorithms so that your site shows up at the top of the list when searchers google related keywords.

Of course, there is a process behind this. Your content on your website, blogs, and social media must contain the keywords that they are searching. It will not just show up because they type in “coffee” and you own a coffee shop. You have to optimize your site to ensure that it does show up for this competitive word. You have to perform a keyword search and find which words are commonly searched that best fit your services.

To get you started, here is the process of doing a basic keyword search:

1. Brainstorm

The first step is brainstorming what keywords you are going to optimize for. Ask yourself, What am I going to rank for? If you are in the coffee biz, you probably understand that people will search words or phrases like “best coffee in ___”, or “coffee shops near me”. So you want to make sure that you have saved those in a keyword spreadsheet. Take notes of any words that you think might be related to your business.  

2. Gather Related Terms

In Google, if you search for a keyword, at the very bottom you will see a list of related terms. Copy and paste these into your spreadsheet as well. These are terms that Google is telling you are related to the keyword you searched.

3. Clean & Prioritize

Now that you have a nice, big list of keywords, it’s time to go through and clean it up and prioritize the “best” ones. Some will be great, some will not, and some might be totally unrelated.

5. Get Search Volume

Now you have a shiny, beautiful keyword list. It’s time to run it through AdWords keyword tool to find the search volume. This will show you how many searches per month that particular term is getting, and help you prioritize it. You should target terms that are searched more often. If you want to run ads for that keyword, you should also get its CPC data. You can do that with AdStage CPC checker.

6. Target Terms to Pages

Now it’s time to assign words to pages on your website. On your website, it is important to create separate pages for areas that you really want traffic to reach. So, if you offer services, create a page for each service. If you sell a product, create pages for all related products within one category, although it is still lumping things together, you will be separating them into categories.

Take the words from your keyword list and create content for each page that incorporates the words you found. Be sure to make it sound organic and natural. Google and other search engines penalize for randomly placing words just to get to the top of the search list. This will put you much farther down the list if you do not incorporate it in a natural, easy to read way.

The same can be done for social media. Use your keywords in hashtags or in the captions of posts for your business. This must be regularly maintained on a daily basis.

You can also write monthly, weekly, or daily blog posts that incorporate the words and topics that are related to your business.

There are many possibilities but be sure to have a strategy set in place that ensures that you are positively affecting the search engine algorithms to end up on the top. We realize that this might be a lot to take in, so if you need help, call the experts! We are well versed in all things SEO, with years of combined experience on the matter. We are also constantly on top of the quickly changing trends and algorithm updates of SEO. We have your back!