Keyword research is the first, and most important step in search marketing. Get our free SEO keyword research guide for an updated tutorial and explanation using the Google keyword tool.

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).

These are the best keywords for you to target.

If you’re not used to doing this kind of research, you’ll be surprised at how rapidly the number of competing pages drops off when you venture a little beyond the most popular keyword search terms for any subject.

When I think of a possible market to target, for a rough idea of it’s potential in terms of search engine traffic I head over to the Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture.com) Keyword Suggestion Tool to check the search frequency of a handful of terms, and in another browser window look up the same terms on Google.com to see the number of competing pages (enclosing my search keywords in apostrophes to restrict the result count to exact matches).

If I find the terms appear to be quite heavily searched and the number of competing pages reasonable (so that getting high rankings won’t be too difficult), I’ll do more in-depth research. If that’s not the case, I’ll go no further.

In terms of search engine optimization, what’s a reasonable number of competing pages will depend on your experience. If you’re fairly new to SEO, do yourself a favour and before anything else download a copy of the continually updated SEO Book. Then look at targeting keywords in the lower to mid tens of thousands range to start.

As your new website gets better rankings and more quality links you can move up the scale for harder terms. Initially setting your sights fairly low like this vastly increases your chances of early success, encouraging you to keep going instead of getting demoralized.

When I’m ready to do detailed keyword analysis I use keyword tools like Wordtracker or the one built into WebCEO (both have free versions). That’s because Yahoo Search Marketing’s search popularity figures are not reliable beyond giving a general impression, since although its database is accessed by many search sites, there are still many others that do not use it at all.

Even worse, the Yahoo Search Marketing keyword tool bundles together the singular, plural and variant spellings of a keyword as one search term (meaning if you check the popularity of the term “web site” the count of searches given includes searches for “website” which is considered as completely different by a search engine).

Nor does Yahoo Search Marketing discriminate between the order of words in multi-word keyword terms (so “reprint rights article” is considered the same as “article reprint rights“). And because a large number of automated PPC bid management tools and rank checkers access the network, search counts for high paying keywords tend to be artificially high.

As far as estimating the number of competing pages goes, using Google alone isn’t as dangerous as relying on Yahoo Search Marketing for keyword search counts, and can provide a reasonable overview for relative comparison of one keyword phrase with another. Plus you could always “guestimate” the competition by multiplying the numbers up.

Bear in mind though that although Google may be the most popular, it’s not the only major search engine and since the databases of each SE vary, you’re obviously not getting an accurate picture of the competition. This may be especially important in commercial sectors where a particular search engine’s proficiency in fighting spam will impact the number of competing pages for certain keywords in its database.

The advantage of professional keyword research tools is simply that they retrieve both keyword search frequency and the number of competing pages across many search engines for an unlimited number of keywords. They display all the data for you in a single table, saving you from having to manually check and collate data from so many searches. Worth it if you have the money, but by no means the only option.

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