How to Do Keyword Research for your niche market and internet marketing

Search engines are the primary way that all web users find what they are looking for on the Internet. But in order for visitors to reach their destination - your website - you need to provide them with specific help that will direct them right to your site. You do this by using carefully chosen keywords in all of your pages of the website.

Think of the right keywords as the "Open Sesame" of the Internet. Find the right words or phrases, and bingo! - hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site - or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive - decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the basis of your internet marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great care and accuracy, no matter how aggressive your internet marketing campaign may be, the right type of customers may never get the chance to find out about you. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. You are probably WRONG. It's hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business. You need to be able to think like your potential customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and making assumptions, ask your existing customers how they found you. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers' understanding is significantly different. The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keywords to the list. (We also recommend an invaluable tool by the name of WebCeo - see the bottom of this article). Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By "quality visitors" I mean those consumers who are most likely to to buy rather than just browse around your site and disappear. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, there are 3 important aspects: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest way to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keywords are, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your website URL.

You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WebCEO (highly recommended for multiple search engine feedback - see the bottom of this article) or WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases.

The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only problem with this concept is that the more popular the keyword is, the higher the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn't enough. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the right type of customer, who is ready to purchase your products, will find you.

Imagine that you have achieved popularity rankings for the keyword "electrical companies." However, your company specializes in hot water geysers only. The keyword "electrical hot water geysers" would rank lower on the popularity scale than "electrical companies," but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a bunch of visitors interested in everything from buying a light switch to changing their fuse boxes, you will get only those consumers with broken hot water geysers or wanting new geysers being directed to your site. In other words, customers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

What motivates anyone to buy a product? Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer to figure out. What motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular seach word or phrase. Here's another example: If someone is searching for a job such as an IT manager in Washington. If you have to choose between "Washington job listings" and "Washington IT recruiters" which do you think will benefit the person more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in?

The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between parties. You want to find people who are ready to take action or make a purchase, and this requires subtle adaptation of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase. Luckily, there is software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. (We highly recommend that you check out Webceo.com.) This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the criteria you use when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of keywords is the one sure way for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work - and it is! But the more informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate you financial rewards.