If you downloaded my free ebook IM Guide for Newbies (which is still available in the upper right corner of my site) you know that I talk about the importance of focus. When I first started out I was all over the place. This was the case for products I was buying, techniques I was trying and the people I was following. I was doing to much without focus.
My lack of focus led me to believe that the things I tried online were unsuccessful. I was close to giving up. Then I decided to focus on one technique until I got it to work. This was the light bulb moment for me and the beginning of my success online.
At the time when my focus was lacking in life it spilled over to my websites as well. I would create sites and then just randomly create posts without any clear goal in mind. Don’t make the same mistakes I did!
I want to show you how to do free keyword research when creating content for your sites.
Keyword research is important because, if you build a site around keywords that aren’t being searched for you probably won’t see much success will you?
The same goes for keywords with high competition. If there are 20 million sites competing with yours, what are the chances your website will be found by your target audience? Once again the likelihood for success would be low.
This is where keyword research comes into play. Keyword research will not guarantee your success, but will definitely increase your chances.
There are many tools available to do keyword research, but today I want to focus on a free method that any beginner can get started with.
Finding Your Keyword
I’m sure you already have some sort of idea of the topic you want to focus on. Once you have that idea or keyword I want you to go to SeoBook.com and use their free keyword tool.
Let’s walk through this together. The topic I am going to be using is “perfume”.
When I type that into the SeoBook keyword tool I get results like the ones below
click to view results
The first column will show you a list with your main keyword and keywords that relate to it. The columns to the right of the keywords provide an estimate of the number of people searching for each term.
You’ll want to focus on keywords that have a decent number of searches in the “Overall daily est” column. When I say decent I would shoot for something over 650 searches daily.
Research Your Competition
Next you want to find out how many people you will be competing with. To do this you will use Google.
I am going to take my main keyword “perfume” and search for it in Google using quotes. If you take a look at the top right corner of the results, you will be able to tell how many sites you will be competing with.
click to view results
As you can see for the term “perfume” you would be competing with 128,000,000 other sites. Not good!
We now know that perfume is searched for 1,548 times per day but there are 128,000,000 sites that show up when searching for it.
We can still use the perfume theme for our post or site, but we are going to have to dig deeper. Got your shovels handy? Good let’s get digging.
Go back to the SeoBook results you had earlier. You’ll notice the second keyword in the left column is “what is the perfume hoax”.
A sentence using our main keyword is often referred to as a long tail keyword. This long tail keyword has 1,053 people searching per day. That’s not far behind the main keyword of “pefume”.
Now take “what is the perfume hoax” and type or paste it into Google. Make sure to use the ” quotes” around the term. This let’s Google know we are searching for an exact match. What results did you get?
click to view results
The number of competing results returned for me was 109,000. This is still to much competition for me to recommend building content around. But you can see how much your chances of success would increase by going with this rather than “perfume”.
There are 1,053 people searching for this term each day and 109,000 competitors. This is much better than competing with 128 million.
When looking at competition I would say anything under 10,000 is great. I sometimes go up to 50,000 for some of my keywords. You can go above that but you will have to work harder to move up in the rankings.
Those are the Basics
Keep in mind, this is very basic keyword research to get you started.
There are paid tools out there that simplify this process. However, when I started out, I didn’t have a lot of cash to spend on products right away. If this happens to be the case for you as well, I want to make sure that you know about the free options available to you and how to use them.
