Prior to starting SEO, the first step is to determine which phrases that you want to appear in the search engines for. This task actually involves a fair amount of thought and investigations.
Just think, if your site shows up as the top search result for wrong keyword, your site traffic may be high, but you’d have no sales and a huge bounce rate. The first step of keyword research is to scan through your site content to identify key terms and patterns that appear, think about the key phrase that describes your product offering-something like “Men shoes”.
Now come up with a quick list of around a dozen search terms you think customers would use when searching for your product. Some of the terms include:
- Latest Men Shoes
- New Men Shoes
- Affordable Men Shoes
- Men’s Footwear
- Shoes for Men
- Casual and Formal Shoes for men
- Brand shoes for men
To take things to the next level, look outside your business and ask friends/family what terms they would enter in Google search engine to find products. Take insights from your competitors where you can learn quite a bit from the keywords they’re utilizing.
Next step is to take advantage of Google’s Keyword tool, type the keyword phrase for your business, you will be amazed to see what you get for key phrase of “Men Shoes”.
Separate your keywords into various categories as follows:
- Branded keywords Vs Category Keywords
- Large scale Keywords Vs Long Tail keywords
- Competitive Vs Non-competitive Keywords
- Other categories
Prioritize your keywords in the following manner:
- Select your keywords that are associated with your brand –“Men shoes”, “Shoes for Men” etc.
- Select keywords which are general and long tail –“ Casual and formal shoes for men” etc
- Choose keywords that are general, but still highly relevant
- Your budget should be focused on the users searching for your product category in general, but with a purchasing intent. Targeting these users would enable you to still target relevant users, and still achieve potential sales.
The more search traffic a keyword has, the more interesting it is. Unfortunately, none of the tools for measuring search traffic are 100% accurate and different tools give somewhat different answers. However, one can use the tools to get a rough idea. On the positive side, once your website starts generating business, there are tools to determine not only how many visitors each keyword is giving you, but also how many buyers you get from each keyword.
The final factor is the cost of getting a good rank for each keyword. Given that two keywords may generate approximately the same amount of relevant traffic but may have completely different SEO costs, this is an important consideration. General keywords normally cost most than specialized keywords and short keyword phrases cost more than long keyword phrases.
