Keyword research is the most important factor when planning your online presence, when it comes to SEO, and it is an area we cover in-depth on our SEO training.
Knowing the keywords firstly get you to think about the common words used to describe your business and product. Often you will have to move away from technical terms that you are used to and use more common generic terms.
Keyword research will let you know how many people are searching for your keyword terms in Ireland, worldwide or in any geographic location. This will be used with the competition research to measure if this is the area you are able to target.
The software for keyword research training we use in the course is free, but we will also cover some paid keyword tools.
Sometimes you will see that most of the competition is trying to aim for the keywords with the largest amount of traffic. It can be wise to export the data from Adwords and see which words are the most expensive to bid on and then use that as one of the metrics for deciding which area to target.
In an ideal world keyword research would be completed before the website is built and be part of the planning stage. This way specific pages can be planed that target particular words, however I have only worked in an ideal world twice – baring my own sites.
We will also talk about the long tail and strategies you can use to move to the head over time.