How to Perform Keyword Researches?

If we get everything set up, it is very likely that we will get excellent results. Keyword research is an important preparation, even before we start the website. There are important metrics that we should know during keyword research, such as number of searches, level of competition and Keyword Opportunity Index. Before creating a blog, we should make sure that we have a good list of keywords. As an example, if we have a website that is intended to sell clothing items, we should have keywords that are related the clothing industry. Other than keywords, we should also have keyphrases as long tail keywords. After the name column, there is also the “number of searches” column, usually the number of monthly searches.

Another important metric is the level of competition of each keyword. KOI is a simple formula to determine whether our keyword is suitable, regardless of how high the searches are and how low the level of competition is. Another important factor is to make sure that we have very accurate figures. The most common source is Google Keyword Tool and it’s nothing short of impressive for a free tool. It is updated constantly based on latest information from Google. Using the tool is very easy to do. We could just type in the keyword and clikc the search button, For each keyword, we will immediately get the number of searches and level of competition. We could start with the most obvious keywords and we should get idea for additional keywords.

Google Keyword Tool includes local and global options. Local option is necessary is we are targeting local consumers, because searches from other countries are irrelevant for our website.  In order to produce a set of relevant results, we could use the allinanchor: <keyword> syntax, such as allinanchor: green hat. If we do this, Google will display the number of related searches. The allinanchor: syntax provides with any website that contains links that are relevant to our keywords. This should give us a good idea about how much competition that we should deal with depending on the keywords. The last metric that we should know is Keyword Opportunity Index and this can be the most important.

Calculating KOI is quite simple, (searches x searches) / level of competition. This can be calculated automatically using any spreadsheet table. This should allow us to determine whether a keyword is suitable for our website. We can sort the table starting with keywords that have the highest to the lowest KOI. After we determine keywords with the highest KOI, we should also consider to use their plurals and synonyms. We could include them into the table and see whether they can be included as additional keywords and keyphrases. By doing this, we often find that there are many more keywords that we can use for our website. A keyword may seem to have a strong competition, but the exceptional amount of searches may make it a still liable choice. Some keywords may have low level competition, but poor choices due to very low demands.