Google Traffic – The Importance Of Keyword Research
If you want a lot of Google traffic then there is nothing more important than keyword research.
Google serves up search results based on the keywords that users enter.
So, if you want to appear on the first page of Google you must identify the best keywords for your business.
Let’s assume that you have a dental surgery office in New York.
You need to identify the right keywords so that you have the maximum chance of getting it in front of the people that want what you have to offer.
But here is a sad fact:
The majority of business websites are never seen by their potential customers
Why Websites Fail to Attract Google Traffic
This is normally due to these factors:
The site is not keyword optimized
There is little or no SEO going on
Google only gives you 10 chances to impress (being on any other page than the first is pretty useless)
So, let’s look at the first one – keyword optimization.
When people search for stuff online, they use keywords. These are the words they type into Google to try and find what they want.
Now if you have a dental surgery called “Huber Dental Group” and you are based in New York, how many people do you think will search for you using Huber Dental Group?
Well, you won’t need two hands to count them that’s for sure! 🙂
Unless they specifically know about you and your dental surgery practice, then they are far more likely to search for something like “dentist New York” or “dentist NYC”.
This applies to all types of businesses in all areas of the world.
So why is it then that business owners use their name all over their websites but rarely use the keywords that people will actually be looking for?
The answer is simple:
They don’t understand the importance of keyword research and optimization
Of course, it is the responsibility of every business to build their brand and you need to do this too.
But you also need to appear in the top ten in Google for more general terms such as “Dentist New York” and this SEO Post Series will show you how.
By the time you have finished reading these posts and applied the recommended techniques, you will be able to leave the majority of your competitors in the dust!
You need good keywords for running Google ad campaigns as well.
Use the Google Keyword Planner
Google has provided a free online keyword tool that will tell you what keywords people are using and approximately how many people are using those terms each month.
This is an incredibly valuable asset to have and you must use it.
But before you do, use your most valuable asset of all first…
Your Brain!
The Google Keyword Planner tool will only help you if you first think about what kind of keywords people will use to find what you are offering so for our dentist example this could be:
dentist New York
dentist NYC
dentist Manhattan
dentist in New York
Now here is something important to keep in mind…
Singles and plurals are treated differently by Google. So “dentist New York” is definitely not the same as “dentists in New York”.
To access the Google Keyword Planner you need a free Google account (Gmail email address) and a free Google Ads account.
Once you enter the Google Keyword Planner, you will need to check that the country settings are what you want.
They usually default to your country, but you might want to target other countries and you can add these.
Now you want to enter a “seed” keyword to come up with good keyword ideas.
So, in our example, you could enter “dentist New York”.
You can add up to 9 seed keywords if you want.
Then hit the “Get Results” button and Google will return a list of keywords and their monthly search volumes.
You can download the keywords that Google finds into a CSV file, which you can use with an application like Microsoft Excel or a Google Sheet.
You will want to do this to create a master list of keywords in a spreadsheet that you can easily edit and add more keywords to.
OK, that’s it. When you come up with new keyword ideas just rinse and repeat.
Now we are going to look at just how difficult it would be to rank on the first page of Google for our chosen keyword terms.
Keyword Competition
If only it was as simple as choosing a few good keywords, throwing up a website, and ranking on the first page of Google!
The thing is that some of your competitors have already thought of that and have a head start on you.
Does that mean you can never get there? Certainly not!
You just need to make some smart moves to climb above those in front of you.
Analyzing keyword competition is a complex issue.
There are some services online such as Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest which is a great tool that will not only give you an idea of how difficult it will be to rank on the first page, but you can also find other related keywords too.
You can get a free account and try it out.
The other service that will tell you how much competition there is for your keywords is Ahrefs.com.
This is a great service but it will cost you a minimum of $99 per month to use it.
If you want to perform comprehensive keyword analysis for a large number of keywords then this can be worth it.
There are services available on Fiverr.com where you can send the freelancer your keyword list and they will tell you how competitive each term is.
Please note that organic keyword competition is not the same as the competition numbers you will see in the Google Keyword Planner. This is the competition for ads.
It is really important that you know how competitive the keywords you have identified for your website are. So, if you need to pay someone a few dollars on Fiverr to find this out then go ahead and do that.
What you ideally want are keywords that receive a high amount of traffic each month that are not very competitive.
Long-Tail Keywords
A long-tail keyword means that it has at least three words or more.
So, for our example “best dentist in NYC” would be a long-tail keyword.
This is important as long-tail keywords tend to be less competitive than shorter keywords that contain only one or two words.
Trying to rank on the first page of Google for the keyword “dentist” would be almost impossible because the competition would be so strong.
It would actually be a waste of time trying to do this, as the keyword is too broad.
What is the Google user looking for when they type in “dentist”?
It is not always easy to find long-tail keywords associated with your niche or business.
There are tools available to help you with this or again you can find someone on Fiverr to do this for you for a few bucks.
You can find some real gems with long-tail keywords.
They might not have a lot of search volume but you should be able to rank for them fairly easily.
Once you start to rank the pages of your website on Google, you will find that some of your other pages will start to rank well too.
In the next post, we will discuss the fundamentals of search engine optimization (SEO) for organic ranking in Google…
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p.s. It’s important to identify the right keywords so that you have the maximum chance of getting it in front of the people that want what you have to offer.
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