Understanding KEYWORD Research
Keyword research is an essential tool. It gives you the opportunity to discover and research particular search terms which people specifically enter into the search engines when submitting any kind of search for information, products or services. This is extremely useful for optimising websites, because if you know what people are trying to find, then you can easily structure your site and its content so that the search engines index your chosen keywords. This will make all the difference in driving traffic toward your website. It’s not complicated, and there are a few really easy to use applications out there to help you perform this kind of research.
As a Virtual Assistant, you’ll want to optimize your own in-house websites, and it’s also quite possible that many of your clients will ask you to look into this sort of research for them as well. If you find that you’re doing keyword search regularly, then you may want to think about investing in a program that will automate some of the time consuming stages for you. However, you should always know how to do it manually, as these programmes aren’t infallible, and it’s always good practice to check the results you’re getting periodically.
Here’s a quick guide on how to do a keyword search with Google:
1. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You don’t need to be signed up for AdWords to do this. It’s an external search that you can carry out for free.
2. Insert the Keywords that you have an interest in checking out – in this example I’m looking up “Virtual Assistant”, then type in the captcha character text (if required) and click the Get Keyword Ideas button.
3. You will be presented with a detailed list of potential keywords and similar keywords from the initial keyword that you inserted.
4. As you can clearly see, the application has given us a list which I have itemised by local search volume for April. This tells us that there is very high competition for the word Virtual Assistant, and it also tells us that there were 135,000 searches against this term in April. We’re searching for a keyword that we can utilise to become ranked higher up in the search engines so we can direct more traffic to our website. So if we view this list, a good target is to locate a word with at least 100 searches per day. The competition for Virtual Assistant Services is still fairly high, but if we now go over to Google, we can take a look at our potential competition.
5. So, let’s perform a search for “Virtual Assistant Services”, and don’t forget to use the quotation marks or you’ll get back results with any combination of these keywords.
Here, as you can see this page tells us that there are 57,700 pages ranked for this combination of words. It’s not impossible for you to be able to compete with your page ranked for this specific word – you just need to put in a bit of work.
I’m certainly not saying that this is the best keyword for you to work toward ranking your Virtual Assistant business with. It’s simply an example of what you might have an interest in checking out. Be creative and ‘think outside the box’ with your ideas. What terms do you think your clients would search for? You’re going to want to repeat this process to find several keywords that you can utilise for establishing your Search Engine Index niche.
Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Executive Virtual Assistant who assists businesses and individuals with achieving their professional goals. Want to find out more about online business building success strategies? Support the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance today!
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