Once you have found your niche and perhaps also the products you want to promote, you will need to continue with your keyword research.
Keyword research is important because you will want to rank high for keywords that people are searching for. There really is no point in ranking high for keywords that nobody types into search engines.
So how do you find the right keywords?
The first place I usually go is the Google keywords search tool at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Select the country you want to target and then type in the keywords phrase you were thinking of targeting or the topic of your website. Fill in the captcha code and press “get keyword ideas”.
Google will now let you know how many searches there have been for those words in that month. If you want to be even more specific then you can select “exact” in the match type drop down box. Some results that have come up for the phrase “content management system singapore” are: content management system has 246,000 globally and 165,000 in the united States but that is probably a too wide a keyword or too difficult to rank for.
Finding the right keyword combination that you can rank for
Try to look for other combinations that may be less competitive but still get a good amount of traffic.
Web content management system gets 27,000 us visits and web content management system gets 2,700. Cms website get 14,000 and web cms and cms system 22,000. Content manager software 40,500. Simple CMS 22,000.”content manager software” is much better with only 17,000 search results.
Find out which keywords your competitor is targeting
You can also find out which keywords your competitors are targeting. I’ve got PPC web spy installed in Firefox which lets me find out which keywords competitors are bidding for. Another tool is Keywordspy. Find out who is ranking high and which keywords they are using.
Find out how difficult it is to rank for those keywords
The next thing you want to do is to find out how difficult it is to rank for these keywords. Go into Google and do a search for each of the phrases that you just found. At the top of the screen you can read that CMS has about 142,000,000 results. Far too high and it will be extremely difficult to rank for the very general term in a short amount of time. Let’s narrow it down and put our phrase in quotations . This will make it an exact phrase and will give you better results.
Another tool to test the keyword difficulty is SEOLogs.com . They check all websites for these keywords in their title tag, anchors etc. If I type in “Content Manager software” it comes out as 66/100 which is still quite difficult. simple cms does better with 45/100. Anything below 40 will be relatively easy to rank for with anything between 40 – 60 achievable.
Target several phrases
Finding the right keywords will greatly improve your chances of being found in search engines. Of course you can target several combinations, especially when your website has multiple pages.
In upcoming posts we will go into more details on how to optimize your pages and all other aspects of SEO. There are also lots of good tips in our free course so don’t forget to sign up for that. (top right of the page).
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