Keyword Research Simplification. Is That Good?

Jul 26
13:49

2013

German Calvo

German Calvo

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Even though we hear often enough that we must use keywords that have more the 850 searches monthly with little competition and not minding whether the phrase is exact or broad, and then use them as good keywords for our marketing online efforts, we must guard against such simplification tactic because it is not going to give us good results. No, refine instead you keyword research simplification so that every keyword matches precisely the searcher's keyword.

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We often hear when using keyword research tools,Keyword Research Simplification. Is That Good? Articles to select keywords that have at least 1000 searches a month and have little competition, regardless of the phrase being broad, phrase or exact matches and then use them as good keywords for our marketing online. This keyword research simplification is not going to give us good results. Instead, we need to refine our keyword selection in terms of matching precisely the keyword we choose to what the searcher is looking for.

Let us talk in terms of using keywords for our marketing of websites that sell products, these being physical products, digital products, software, programs and so on. Typically affiliate sites, or even store sites. And when a conversion is made, that is, the prospect either buys directly from our site or through an affiliate link, we get paid. So, we want more conversions, and the way to increase the number of buyers is to use keywords that are very specific to what exactly the prospect is looking for.

If a searcher is looking for information about building a bird house and our website has bird houses for sale only, we are going to loose that prospect. On the other hand, if one of the pages is about building a bird house from scratch and we offer the precise instructions for building the bird house they are after, we will keep the prospect interested in buying from us because he is thinking “great, this is what I was looking for”. This is what keyword research in depth is, or refined keyword research can do for our online business.

A searcher that comes to our store site, looking for a particular product, let us say, the latest “Tablet XYZ” coming out later this month, 2012, and finds reviews of tablets in general, again he or she will not be interested and leave unless we use the targeted keyword for that product, the specific keyword “Tablet XYZ model ABC 2012” which matches precisely what the searcher is looking for. Only then our chances of making a sale are much greater.

So, for the Tablet XYZ model ABC 2012 product, the keyword, the specific keyword we should use is exactly the product name, and it need not be a keyword that has thousands and thousands of searches, but being so laser targeted is enough to get us sales. Of course, increasing the traffic to the site, will gives us more sales since the product’s keyword is well optimized.

We can also look further to optimize our keyword use, by doing some competitive research. We can look at keywords that other marketers are targeting that are doing well for them. Sneaky? May be, but important, because if those keywords are working for our competition, they can work for us too. Throw those words into a keyword research tool and find out what monthly exact search levels they have and how many of those users convert. We may find words we didn’t consider or synonyms we simply did not know about.

When we have Adsense in our sites, we will benefit strongly from the traffic we manage to bring to the sites including those that we have ads on, where we get paid for impressions from people visiting our sites. The keywords for these types of sites must bring traffic volume and have high value per click, low competition and high cost per click. For these types of websites it is not so important that a keyword is so specific or that it is a buying keyword or not, so long as it get us high traffic volumes, low competition and high cost per click.

Keywords that are laser targeted, generally are easier to rank for, bringing qualified traffic and allowing our sites to rank better by the search engines. They also, and most importantly align our keywords with what the prospect is exactly looking for, and we already know what is likely to happen when this takes place, that is right, we benefit with better conversions, thus increasing our sales in our online marketing business.

What we must never do is to assume that we know what our prospects are likely to type in the search engines, to look for a product or service online. The fact is that we don’t know for sure, until we do keyword research. Believing that we know what terms they are going to use to get to our sites is a big mistake, and it will show in our sales count. The only way they are going to visit our sites, is by finding the words relevant to their searches to include in our sites, so that when they type them online, they match our optimized keywords and stay in our sites to get a solution to what they were searching for.

Simplifying our keyword research to search volume and competition alone, as we covered before,  it’s not a good idea. There are other very important metrics to consider depending on the purpose of our websites. Instead, we should be considering how to best align or match the queries from our prospects with the keywords we use in our sites, so that, ultimately it is good to refine our keyword selection and to get away from keyword research simplification.

G Calvo