For many, making money online from home involves using keywords to drive traffic to your website. There are many articles and other sources of information on keyword research and the importance of using keywords to drive traffic to a website. Unfortunately, many of these articles and information sources only reveal part of the information you need to do keyword research successfully. The information they provide will get you started in the right direction, but it may cause you to miss out on some of the good keywords and phrases you could use. And the incomplete methods revealed in many of those articles can make you work harder and get worse results for your efforts.
There are three components to keyword research. First, you need to identify the keywords that people use to find information about a topic. This is the utility component: People commonly use certain keywords or phrases to search for information, and some keywords are used more frequently than others.
Most sources of information will recommend the Google AdWords Keyword Tool as a good way to measure the usefulness of different keywords, and it’s a great place to start. You can quickly get information about a keyword and related terms, and since it’s from Google, the most used search engine, you know that the information is based on real statistics on real searches by real people.
If you had a keyword research tool or service that you wanted to market, you would need to check keywords related to keyword research. The phrase “keyword search”, according to Google’s keyword tool, is used an average of 12,100 times per month. A related term, “keyword research services,” is used in information searches an average of 590 times per month. So from this measure, it would seem that “keyword research” is a better term for trying to drive traffic to your website, as it is used in 20x more searches each month.
The next component of keyword research is the competitiveness of the search term. Making money online from home requires making the most of your efforts, so you don’t want to put a lot of effort into highly competitive keywords if there are related keywords that are often used in search engines with much less competition. But don’t make the mistake of using the Google Keyword Tool to try to assess the competitiveness of your keyword candidates. The competition value given in the Google Keyword Tool represents the level of competition for the term in AdWords. And if you’re using keywords in your efforts to drive traffic to your website, you’re probably not using PPC campaigns these days, as they’re often hard to justify.
Therefore, you should get an assessment of the competitiveness of the term in general use, outside of AdWords. there are many ways to do this. One way is to simply enter the keyword into Google and see how many results you get. For example, “keyword research” returns 119,000,000 results and “keyword research services” returns 53,600,000 results. Please note that these numbers are not useful by themselves. They only have value when you compare them to each other. A good way to make use of these numbers is to list them in a spreadsheet so you can sort and compare terms by number of searches and measure of competitiveness.
The third component of keyword research is competitive quality. We just learned a way to determine how competitive a search term is, but that doesn’t give us any indication of the quality of the competition. For this component, we are not concerned with the quality of all the other websites that use a search term. We are trying to use the keyword to drive traffic to your website by listing your website in the top ten of Google results, so we only need to worry about the top ten competitors.
To get a good measure of competitive quality, you should use a keyword research tool. Finding one is easy using the Google search engine. You need to find one that shows how difficult it will be for you to get your site to rank in search engines for your chosen keywords. Competitor Quality Assessment will check sites using one of the keywords you’re considering to measure both the keyword’s usage on the page and the number of backlinks from other sites. With that information, you can determine the best keywords on your list to use in your efforts to drive traffic to your website.