Web Marketing Strategy Update

Keyword research is the first, and most important step in search marketing.

You can probably see why keyword selection would logically be the first task. But why most important?

Because if you choose the wrong keywords, everything else you do to improve your search engine rankings is wasted effort.

Or to be blunt: If you target the wrong keywords, you will not make money.

When you create a new website or web page, you want to focus the content on popular keyword phrases relevant to your subject matter. These are the keywords that people in your target market regularly type into search engines to locate information on the products or services you provide.

But it’s often the case that many of your first choice keyword searches will be very competitive, making it difficult — if not impossible — for you to get your pages to rank highly for them unless you employ an SEO expert.

What you need to do is find other, less popular keywords that are also quite heavily searched, yet are easier to rank well for because there are fewer competing pages in the search results (this also applies to Adsense keywords and other PPC’s, but in terms of paying less for your clicks because there are less competing ads).

I was catching up on SEOBook author Aaron Wall’s blog the other day. In this post he talks about how the new Google Toolbar 4 for IE suggests spelling corrections and keyword queries based on the search patterns of other searchers.

On the face of it you might think that’s rather mundane and pretty uninteresting news.

But you’d be wrong.

The key point Aaron raises is that these (semi) auto-correction features will effectively narrow down the range of search queries to the most common keyword phrases.

Here’s a simple example to help you visualize what that means (made up, so not factually correct, but illustrates the concept).

Queries from people without Google Toolbar who want to buy shoes:
“buy shoes”
“buy shoe”
“buy shose”
“shoes buy”
“shoe buy”
“shose buy”

Are all “corrected” by Google Toolbar search and spelling suggestions, to become:
“buy shoes”

The effect will be twofold:

1. Reduce the effectiveness of targeting mistyped, misspelled or otherwise imperfect search queries
2. Increase competition for the more mainstream keywords and thus drive up CPC