I can't emphasise enough how important it is that you do your keyword research at an early stage of developing your Internet marketing strategy and that you keep up-to-date with the research if you want to make online profits.
Time after time I have people boast to me about being number 1 in Google for a particular phrase they have optimised but they don't have any traffic.
Why?
Because nobody is searching for the phrase they have based their marketing on...
I'm going to tell you about two tools you can use for your keyword research - one free and a more advance tool that costs you money but you can buy for a short period if you want to have an intensive period of research.
Example Of The Importance Of Keyword Research
I thought I would use a little example to show you the difference between how you think and how people who search on the Internet think.
To me IT maintenance, computer maintenance and IT service could all be used to describe the same basic operation.
The keyword research show 430 searches for "computer maintenance", 101 searches for "IT services" and zero for "IT maintenance".
To put that into perspective and sex does seem to filter into everything, the charming phrase "girls showing it all" reported 2,458 searches (which I found when I searched for "IT" honest) but on the same theme, a search in the keyword tool for "naked girls" produced 58,296.
But back to more mundane matters "business coaching" came back with 277 and "business coach" 160, "accountant" 423, "marketing consultant" 49 and "marketing coach" 11.
Wordtracker Free Tool
I found these numbers using Wordtracker's free tool.
It is great for quick searches like those that I did above but I have caught a cold with it in the past.
I did my research and discovered what I thought was a hidden gem, "business profitability" and the first Squidoo lens I created was about business profitability.
According to Wordtracker at the time, it was receiving over 500 searches compared to the business coaching numbers this looked great. My page has been on the first page of Google although it is currently on towards the bottom of the second page.
In the last 30 days, Google has delivered 27 hits, Yahoo 11 and MSN 3 but only 3 were for the phrase "business profitability"
The plus side of the Wordtracker tool is that it is very easy to use and when you get some feel for what is happening, I recommend that you search in Google and see what level of Adword campaigns are running. If there are many paid for links, it indicates that there could be traffic.
The downside of Wordtracker is that the numbers can be suspect and Yahoo/Overture used to have a free tool which you could cross reference but that has stopped being updated.
NicheBot
NicheBot (affiliate link) is a paid for service but it is a very clever idea in that it brings together many different sources of information about keywords, all in one place.
The downside is that it is complicated to use although there are training videos, but like all these things, the more you use a system, the easier it gets.
I can't describe it all, read the sales letter and I recommend you take NicheBot up on their 14 day $1 trial.
You either spend a bit of money forming a logical judgment about people's search habits or you guess, take a flyer and spend many hours writing website copy, articles and blogs just hoping that somebody will search for what you have written.
I use NicheBot. (affiliate link)
If you get your keywords wrong, then your entire Internet strategy may fail.
You can resort to paying for the traffic through Adwords and Adsense but isn't it better to spend a small amount on the keyword research and receive natural traffic than pay per click?
UpdateSince I wrote this blog on keyword research, Google have made their Adwords tool much more useful.
It used to show green bars to indicate the volume of traffic which made it impossible to assess good numbers from bad.
Now we are given estimated search volumes - check out Google External Keyword Tool
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