Keyword Research Strategies

Hello

Yesterday we discussed the precise targeting offered by keywords. But even if a keyword is valuable, it might not be valuable for your business. For example, if you are a dentist in Chicago, it is not worth the effort to try to rank for the word dentist. Why? 99% of the people searching for that phrase do not live near Chicago, and are irrelevant prospects. What you would want to rank for, if you were a Chicago dentist, would be things like
- Chicago dentist
- Chicago dentists
- dentist in Chicago

Even within a niche like dental work, there are more specific types of dentists people search for, like implant dentist and cosmetic dentist. If you offer these types of services you would want to rank for keywords like
- Chicago implant dentist
- cosmetic dentist in Chicago
- etc.

There is a wide array of keyword tools on the market.
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/
Most of them have a free version which works well.

My favorite keyword tool is the SEO Book keyword tool - it is fast and free, powered by Wordtracker, and allows you to export your keyword data.
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/
Every keyword tool has some data errors or anomalies. Don't expect the tools to give you exact numbers, just rough ranges.

You can also look at emails from customers or customer questions as potential keywords. Anything people would likely search for to want to buy your services is a potential keyword.

After you get a list of keywords start grouping related keywords together.
- You should be able to target related phrases like Chicago dentist and dentist in Chicago using a single page.
- Chicago cosmetic dental work is a different concept, sold to a different audience. You should create a separate page targeting that that term and why prospects would want to buy that service.
- If you have Microsoft excel you can start aligning keywords and related modifiers with your URLs, like so
http://training.seobook.com/bonuses/startups.xls

Tomorrow we cover using PPC ads to discover the value of different keywords to our business.

Cheers,
Aaron Wall

PS: This article offers more background advice on keyword research
http://training.seobook.com/keyword-research-suggestion-tips

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