How To Get The Right Keywords – Get More Customers To Your Business

Knowing how to get the right keywords could mean the difference between success and failure of your online business. Getting the right keywords is a very important and you shouldn’t overlook it if you want to build a thriving business on the Internet.

What Is A Keyword

Keywords are just words and phrases that people type in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Keywords are going to be responsible for the success of your business. Choosing the right keywords is like having your hamburger stand right in front of a very hungry crowd in the middle of Broadway!

How To Get The Right Keywords

Basically I look for 2 characteristics when choosing the right keywords. First, the keyword must have enough monthly searches. But don’t think that you need to have a huge amount of traffic in order to have a good conversion and don’t make the mistake of optimizing for broad keywords because:

• It’s next to impossible (unless you have a big budget) to rank for them, and
• The conversion rate will be much lower because the keyword isn’t that targeted

Second, the right keywords must have little competition. Basically you have to check out the number of competing websites in the search results along with some other factors to determine if you can outrank them eventually.

Please take note that this is only a basic guideline of doing keyword research. I’m not a search engine expert so please feel free to comment below if you have something to add. There’s a lot of things to learn and I would appreciate it if you can share your thoughts regarding keyword research.

Let’s Do Some Keyword Research

As an example we’re going to get some right keywords in the weight loss industry. Go to the Google Keyword Tool (FREE) and plug in the word ‘weight loss’. We’re going to start with a broad keyword so Google can spit out more ideas that we can use. First change the results to include all countries and territories.

Here we get some keyword ideas for the broad term weight loss:

• healthy weight loss
• weight loss diet
• quick weight loss
• weight loss exercise
• weight loss supplements
• weight loss programs
• obesity weight loss
• green tea weight loss
• ephedrine weight loss
• low carb weight loss

These keywords are still too broad so we need to drill down a little bit further to come up with more targeted keywords. From the initial results we’re going to choose ‘weight loss diet’ and again plug it in again. Here’s what we got:

• weight loss diet plan
• vegetarian weight loss diet
• weight loss diet supplement
• protein weight loss diet
• weight loss diet menus
• weight loss detox diet

One thing that you’ll notice is that our keywords are getting longer and that is what we want. These are called long-tail keywords and they’re made up of 3 or more keywords that are based from your initial broad keyword ‘weight loss’.

With our last set of keywords we can still drill down if we want to but let’s settle in and try to see if we can rank for the keyword: weight loss detox diet

How Do We Determine Competition

Again, I’m not a search engine expert so take it easy on me, okay? When looking at the competition in the search results I first check out the number of competing websites. For the keyword weight loss detox diet we have over 800,000 competing websites.

To determine the real competition we have to surround the keyword with double quotes like this: “weight loss detox diet”

When you do this you’re asking Google (or any other search engines), How many pages in your database that have the exact phrase? Remember that this doesn’t have anything to do with how the searcher types in a phrase. Now from over 800K we only have 200K optimized results for our keyword.

That’s still a lot but there’s one trick I learned from Travis Sago while hanging out with him at the Wealthy Affiliate University. You can watch this neat little trick here. After applying this technique here’s our true competition.

From 200K we now only have 481 competing websites that are truly optimized for the term: weight loss detox diet. The general rule is that we can dominate phrases that have less than 5,000 results as competition. So having a 481 competition is a very good number for us! The keyphrase also gets around 6K monthly searches but that is not really accurate.

Researching keywords can also be a good method to come up with post titles. Typically your post can rank for this term if you will apply some proper SEO techniques like optimizing your titles, meta description, pretty urls and the most important of all… writing good quality content.

That’s it! Whew! I hope this article will help you in choosing your keywords more effectively so you can generate some of that free traffic and get customers straight into your business. Please feel free to add anything in the comments below.