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Keyword selection is critical to your online success. Your Web site must include the right phrases.
The right keyword phrases are popular, relevant to your offering and face appropriate competition. What is appropriate competition? If you target a keyword phrase that 200 million other Web sites also target, achieving a top search engine ranking is very hard.
You can use Google’s external tool to get an idea of keyword searches. If you are just starting to conduct research, enter your most basic phrase (for example: ecommerce.). By using a basic phrase first, you get a general idea of the themes people are using in their searches. You can export Google’s results into an excel file.
Google’s external keyword tool also gives you an idea of competition strength with its “advertiser competition” bar. When you export to excel, your file shows a number from zero to one in the “advertiser competition column. In this number range, “1” represents very high competition.
To see the actual competition, go to Google and enter your desired search phrase in quotes. Example: “ecommerce crm”. This is the only way to get an exact number from Google. If you are only looking at a few phrases, you can easily do this. If you need to consider many phrases, the process is very tedious.
To streamline the process, we recommend Wordtracker, which is an easy-to-use web-based service. We have successfully used Wordtracker on hundreds of keyword research projects. With Wordtracker, you can plug in some keywords, and the system gives you ideas for additional keywords that might work for your business.
The system will also tell you exactly how many other Web pages are targeting the keyword. This competition information is key and much easier to capture in Wordtracker than it is in Google. Wordtracker also uses its proprietary algorithm to predict how many people have searched on a specific phrase in the past 24 hours. This can give you a clue about current popularity for a specific phrase.
For more information on how to do keyword research, visit our page on best practices for keyword research.
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