Keyword Research - What Is It? Why Do You Need It?

Ranking well on the Search Engines is critical for your webpage to be found by prospective customers. A rigorous keyword research effort is the cornerstone for high Rankings.

Keyword Research is the term for identifying the keywords that are most relevant to the subject at hand. You also make use of keyword research to identify the exact words that your customer is searching for(which may be different from what you may use).

Keyword Research involves studying the words the user types into the Search Box on a Search Engine as well as studying the top words used by your competitors to achieve high rankings.

Why is Keyword Research important?

Keyword Research is important mostly because your ways of describing something may be different from other people’s. The words that you use may be very different from what other people use to search for such a product or service.

Often a businessman uses industry jargon to describe his product while the customer is searching for the same product using a layman’s term. One example is “Low Fares” as used by the airline industry Vs “Cheap flights” as most people search for.

When you do keyword research you understand what people search on and hence use the correct words in your copy. You drive more traffic to your website by coming up more often for searches. When you become more relevant, your website achieves better ranking.

Keyword Research can also be used for writing better headlines for your web page or link text for your pages. I like to use keyword research even while using direct mail.

Keyword Research tells you the current hot buttons for your prospect which you can use in your copy and also in the headline.

Ancillary Keywords

Keyword research gives us the opportunity to identify words that the user may be searching for; but may not have occurred to us.

Users may be using your product in a variety of ways. For example, if your product is an mp3 player, people may search for it as music device or as a gift item or even as a toy.

By using such words on your page or by creating separate pages that deal with each of these keyword phrases, you are able to target the different categories of searchers.