Website SEO: Keyword research, step 2

Now that you have a list of terms gathered by brainstorming, talking to friends, customers, looking up online, let’s look at a few major components of the keyword research process.

Filter the keywords

The bigger the initial list the better. This will give you more variations of terms that refer to your product. Before you go into grouping the terms first make sure you eliminate all irrelevant terms. You can do it by running your list through tools like Google Keyword-based Search Tool.

It’s very likely that your initial bulk keyword list will be significantly shortened by the tool you use. That’s ok, just make sure that the keywords that are left are relevant to your business. Some tools like Wordtracker will give you suggestions on other relevant terms. Make sure you get through the list of recommended terms and only keep the most relevant to your product. Keep in mind that those terms should also have at least minimal approximate monthly searches number.

Group the keywords

By now you’ve cleaned you your initial keyword list. It’s the time to group the terms. In most cases your product has several variations / types / sub-products, etc. It’s helpful to divide your list into logical groups. For example, here’s one way of breaking the words into groups:

• SEO Services: seo, search engine optimization, organic search, natural search, etc.
• Paid search Services: ppc, paid search, adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, SEM, etc.
• Email marketing Services: email templates, email management, email marketing, etc.

Once you have these logical groups, it helps to run those through a keyword research tool. This will allow you to determine the terms you want to focus for each product. For example, for SEO Services page, the focus will be SEO Services Calgary instead of search engine optimization Calgary.

Implementation document

Finally, once you have the focus terms for the pages, it’s time to prepare the SEO implementation document. First it helps you to keep things organized. Second, it helps to communicate your SEO strategy to a web developer who will be implementing some of the technical things.

Different SEO professional will have different format for the implementation document. Some will have it as a Word Document, some will use a spreadsheet. I use an OpenOffice Calc to prepare a spreadsheet. Here’s an example of a SEO implementation document I use.

I hope this gives a bit of a shape to your keyword research process. Next up is an article about implementing your SEO strategy on your website.

I can conduct keyword research for your website

Related posts:

1. Website SEO: Think about it, step 1
2. Online marketing, SEO and launching a new website