Keyword Research - Part 5.

Are phrases better than individual words?
Depends! If your customer is searching for self-cleaning widget, then you should use self-cleaning widget. If your customer is searching for just "widget", or "auto clean", you should use these words separately. The next question deals with this in more detail.

What are long-tail keywords? How do I use them?
A few years back, there were very few sites in each criteria. No matter what you were searching for, chances were you could get it pretty soon.

But now, you have 100s of thousands of web-pages with the same keyword. The other day, I decided to reward myself with a new fishing pole. (The old one was still showing the marks of an epic struggle with a monstrous fish last summer.)

If I enter "fishing", I may have to wade through a site to find exactly what I need. Hence I entered "fishing pole".

When I searched for fishing pole, Google returned 2,550,000 pages. And that is only the number of pages in English. Imagine you being one of them. The chances of your page being found among the 2 Million pages is negligible at best. Not a chance of my becoming your customer.

On the other hand, when I typed in "Arcanite Fishing Pole", I got the exact thing I was looking for. And there were only 166,000 odd pages. But you see, if you had used the longer specific keyword phrase, your competition just got whittled down by nearly 100,000 pages.

Users have begun to search for more specific keyword phrases too. Experts have calculated that even though many people still type in single word phrases, since it is divided among so many competitors, it is more profitable for you to be found by people searching using longer keywords.

Moreover, with long tailed keywords, you can catch your customer in the right spot on the sales cycle. If he says "buy Arcanite Fishing Pole" on the search engine text box, you know he is calling out for you, don't you?

How often do I have to check my keywords?

As often as you can. Your customers react to various influences around them and search for different terms at different times. To be able to remain on top with a good ranking you need to keep on top of your keywords.

Sometimes they react to an offer made by a competition and start searching for similar offers. I know. You are saying:”But I don’t have that much time to devote to just keyword research.” That brings us to the next question.

Do I have to do it all by myself?

I have had many websites in the past few years. In the beginning I did everything manually the old fashioned way. Lately I’ve found that using a few tools to help make life easier for me. Even though you can do it all by yourselves if you had the time and the tenacity(which I sorely lack), I suggest you find yourselves a tool to do the work for you.

Here are a few I have found helpful in the past and you should definitely consider! Some of these I still use with great results.