Last post we talked about making good use of html headers in your content to help boost SEO results.

This time I want to talk about using the Google Adwords keyword tool. This probably should have been my very first post in the series. Afterall, if you aren’t targeting the correct keywords for your market, then all your work is done in vain.

It is absolutely crucial to know what keywords your potential clients are searching. With that being said, there is a lot you can do with the keywords tool and this blog post will be a very quick overview.

The first thing you’ll want to do is create an adwords account at https://adwords.google.com. You will not be obligated to spend any money what so ever to do this, and to use their keywords tool. It is totally free.

Once you log into adwords and select the keyword tool, you will see a screen similar to what I have below. I have targeted the phrase “web design” for my example.

 

There are a few things I would like to point out here:

  • Results are broken down into global and local searches. Depending on your market, you will be targeting one over the other most likely. In my case, I am targeting local customers because I prefer to work locally, and my site is catered more to a local crowd.
  • You will also notice a competition level. It would not be wise to target the highest competition word that you can find with the highest search volume. You want to stick out from the competition! I try to target medium competition searches generally, although there is no hard and fast rule here.
  • You can search as many keywords as you’d like, and view them all together. There is also a new “Ad Groups” beta feature which is extremely handy as well. This feature allows you to enter a keyword phrase and get your results in logical “groups”. In the example of web design we might have: “affordable web design”, “great web design”, and “professional web design” to name a few. These groups are very useful for generating Adwords campaign ideas, but I digress, that is a whole other post.

The Adwords keywords tool is extremely useful, and should be used FIRST and FOREMOST before doing any SEO for your site. If you’re targeting a very low search volume keyword phrase, you might be #1 for that search on Google….but no one’s actually searching for that.

So in closing:

  1. Before doing any SEO to your site, use the keywords tool to know what you should be targeting.
  2. Try to not target the highest volume, highest competition searches. These will be harder to stand out in.
  3. Make sure you are not targeting phrases that no one is searching for. (under 1000 monthly searches is probably a good benchmark here)
Next post I will be touching on Google Analytics, what you can learn from it, and how to use the data you gather from it.