The first thing any smart business needs to do is speak with their marketing team and discuss keyword research; that includes, web developers, content writers, social media managers, etc. Then you need to discuss what keyword strategy you want to implement and make sure everyone is on the same page. Once you choose your strategy, it’s important to make sure everyone is working towards that goal.
There are many pitfalls to keyword research so we’ve outlined some of the biggest mistakes when it comes to analyzing data, collecting the relevant information for your keywords, and implementing them into a firm strategy.
Beginning Keyword Research
The end result should be a long list of keywords that you and your team have come up with together. You can put these in an excel file to save for the future. These should be words that you, as a business, want to rank for. Once you have your list, it’s time to see if they are actually what people search for. For a free tool, use Google Trends to compare your search terms. Let’s say you’re a second-hand store that sells video games and you want to know which keyword is better to use for your store, “Video Game Store” or “Gaming Store,” for example.
You would just go to Google Trends and type in those terms to compare.
You can see that over the last 5 years in the United States, the term “Video Game Store” has been a more popular search term.
Our next step would be to test that theory. As a business, you know who you’re competition is so a quick search should reveal who’s ranking for that term. We use the website isearchfrom.com to search for websites without our personal history interfering with the search results. You can also choose a specific location. Let’s say you want to see who’s ranking for this term in Phoenix, Arizona because that’s where your local business is located.
This search reveals that the people to beat are the major retail chain Gamestop and a smaller local business called Fallout Games.
If you’re a smaller business, you want to look a little deeper into why another small video game store is ranking so well in your area. This will help you understand what it takes to rock good SEO.
A quick look into the website tells us that their strongest attribute would be the length of time they’ve been online and the fact that they have three locations.
If a new video game store were to come in and knew what they were doing with SEO, they could quickly outrank this franchise on search results.
From there, it’s a simple matter of optimizing your website for that keyword or phrase and checking the search results to see if you started ranking.
You’ll want a way to track your strategies with a platform like Google Analytics so you can test the value of different keywords on different pages.
Keyword Research Conclusion
It’s pretty easy to start keyword research; the hard work comes from tracking and changing your strategies when something’s not working. You need a way to track and analyze data so you can figure out how to adapt to your competition.
If you need help developing a keyword research strategy, contact the experts at WebCroppers for a free consultation. We’ll get your business ranking!
