One of the crucial steps when building a website and especially before you launch it is making sure that your site is optimized for the keywords you are targeting. It’s never a good idea to jump into a market or niche without without first doing some SEO groundwork and set keyword goals to target.

Your website is destined to fail you don’t do keyword research and not knowing who your competitors are, what they are optimizing for and which group of keywords it is more likely to rank well for.

This is not another article which tells you how to rank no.1 in Google, this article is to help you know a bit of what’s going around you. There are tools you can use to automate this process but I believe that you are better of if you will have a basic understanding on what the hell is going on under the hood.

So let’s say you have a hobby site that sells Remote Control Planes and you want to see what keyword variations are, what the trends are and how many marketers are already bidding for the range of keywords.

You can do this for free by using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Type in any keyword, such as “rc planes”

When Google is done getting the results you’ll see the results in columns labeled “Advertiser Competition”, “Search Volume“, ” and finally “Avg Search Volume.”

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Advertiser Completion shows how competitive a keyword actually is.

What you need to be doing is looking at the Search Volume shows how many times a keyword is searched in any given month while Average Search Volume is a yearly (12 month) average. This information is not actual but it gives you a good feel on what is going on and how much the keywords you are optimizing stand a chance in competing with other websites.

Do not get cocky and optimize for a general keyword that has 50,000 searches plus, save your time and energy for better use. To start of with I always recommend starting off with something that has a search volume of between 2,400 and 4,000 searches. Why? Because if you divide them by 30 (days in month) you will get at least 80 searches a day. You don’t want to optimize for a keyword with low search volume, at least not yet, we’ll get into long tail keywords in a later post.

Still with me or getting dizzy?

The next thing you want to see is how much competing websites exist for that keyword. Go to Google and type your keyword with quotes. Ex “electric rc planes” (easy) At the time of writing Google returns 12,000+ results. Outstanding, we don’t have to work as hard to get decent Search Engine Rank Placement (SERP) not like optimizing for “rc planes” which has 400,000+ competing results.

To start off with I recommend to build a keyword list that has around 2,400 to 4,000 monthly searches with less than 40,000 competing pages.

You can also have a look at Google Suggest.

As I mentioned earlier there are a lot of tools that you can use to automate this process for you, which I will be writing about in the near future, but that’s not the point of this post, it’s to show you how to do basic keyword research yourself.

Now go and search something.

Bonsai Jon

Tagged as: basic seo, free seo tools, keyword research