The Importance of Keyword Research

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By SEO Advisor | February 2, 2009

Let me refresh our memories on what was the base of search marketing and adwords campaigns.
Keyword Research was and will always be the first step toward your search marketing strategy, and provides an essential foundation for all of your future search marketing efforts.
The worst mistake you can make is to spend time, money and resources optimizing your website or your adwords campaign for non-trafficked or non-converting keywords.

Keyword research is about -

1. Pulling all of the terms that searchers have used,
2. Organizing them properly: how many searches versus how many websites.
3. Choosing the keywords with the highest demand to lowest supply
4. Analyzing your top competitors on the search engines for the keywords you have chosen to see how well they are optimized for each keyword.
5. Optimizing your web pages or adwords campaigns exactly around those keywords will beat your competition.
Keyword discovery and research not only helps define your purpose and clarify your market, but also helps you understand your competitive landscape and the way in which your potential customers view your product and service offerings. Many companies start out believing there are only a handful of general terms to focus on, when in actuality there are literally thousands of keywords that are not only relevant to any given industry, but being typed in by your potential customers every single day.

Every keyword they type into a search-engine is begging for an answer. They’re seeking information, asking a question.

They want a problem solved.

By taking the time to research and understand which terms will most efficiently use your marketing energy and dollars, you will be attracting the right kind of traffic and converting more visitors into customers.

My main message, and one that should always be remembered, is that AdWords is about close targeting and answering a surfer’s question as closely and accurately as possible.

We do this by:

Grouping closely related keywords
Preparing an Ad that directly addresses those keywords.
Ensuring that the landing page on the website is directly relevant to these keywords – this may involve writing some extra pages.

So you understand how crucial keyword research is for your adwords campaign or your website. It has been said again and again: “testing, testing and testing” is the key to a high CTR.

But how to Improve your Click Through Rate?

As I’ve said before, it all starts with the right keywords.
Before, we all knew that the less competition you have, the higher the CTR. And therefore we always sniffed out the keywords where we had as few competing campaigns as possible.

So after all this retrospective on the importance of keyword research, imagine we get rid of all the above rules, techniques and notions just because we have a way of knowing what our potential competitors are using as keywords and how much they are bidding their AdWords ads to get on position 1 to 8. Interesting concept, wouldn’t you say? I would and I know it’s possible with Brad Callen’s new tool PPC Web Spy. This tool does just that, it reveals, in real-time, anyone’s AdWords keywords and the best thing it is free. Have a more in depth look at this keyword research tool and download it right now as it is still free.