Keyword research is one of the most important bases of your internet marketing campaign – it is one of the pillars that helps decide whether your campaign will succeed or fail, and it is critical to get it right the first time! We looked yesterday at 4 of the essential activities that you should engage in when deciding on the keywords you’ll use in your internet marketing – today we give you four bonuses.

SEO

1. Think about vertical search terms to use

In your keyword research brainstorming session, you probably whittled your list down to fifteen or twenty general terms that describe your entire business (for example, bathroom fittings, public restroom furnishings, etc). However, there are a number of ‘vertical’ searches that are common within every industry, that you can often capitalize on. These can be broken down into categories:

  • Local terms (so add your city, your state, or your country to one of your general keyphrases. If your keyphrase is ‘search engine optimisation’, your vertical alternatives could be ‘search engine optimisation Melbourne’, ‘search engine optimisation Victoria’, or ‘search engine optimisation Australia’
  • Products that you stock, including brand names and even model numbers, in some cases

2. How does querent intent relate to each keyword?

What phase of the decision-making process is a person searching for a particular term likely to be in? What phase of the decision-making process does that part of your site serve? You need to think about this to determine how much return you’ll get from particular keywords.

3. Check out the PPC data, even for your organic search terms

Even if you aren’t interested in doing PPC advertising at this stage of your SEO campaign, it is always helpful to know which keywords show the heaviest competition in the PPC arena. These trends certainly cross over into natural search.

4. Check out the related searches

Most major search engines have their own version of the related searches tool. If you just want a few ideas, check out Google’s. Simply type your term into the search box, click the ‘Show Options’ link up the top, and then hit ‘Related Searches’ down the page a bit.

No TweetBacks yet. (Be the first to Tweet this post)