Keyword research is arguably one of the most important aspects of SEO in that it guides and feeds into everything else you do in your campaigns to increase your website visibility.

Knowing which keywords to target and which to ignore can save you hours of work, and provide insights into how you can get your site in front of paying customers with the least amount of effort. It also provides an insight into how people search for your type of product or service, opening up new avenues to traffic that you may have not even considered before. 

Ideal outcome of this lesson:

When you've completed this lesson, you should have a list of keywords and phrases that you can then use to build the content that will become the backbone of your website, and importantly, attract the Google Bot.

What you'll need:

Most of the work will be completed using your web browser and a spreadsheet.

A much-misunderstood term, "keywords" are the words and phrases (usually the latter) that people use to search for when they're looking to find a product or service on the Internet. More commonly, a "keyword" is a phrase, i.e., people are more likely to search for "copper-bottomed saucepan" than "saucepan".

Google (and other search engines) have become extremely good at finding pages that match exactly what users are searching for, therefore users are now using more words in their search terms to focus on what they want, rather than using broad search terms and filtering out results.

What keywords are not

A common misconception is that you can "add your keywords to your page". This tactic usually involves populating the "meta keyword tag" of a page and hoping that this will help your pages to rank in Google.

It will not.

Google hasn't used meta keyword tags as a ranking factor since around 2003.

Splitting up our keywords

When we investigate keywords, we're going to be looking at two different methods to find the ones we want to optimise for.

Short-tail

These are keyword phrases (we used the term "phrases" interchangeably with "keywords") with just one or two words.

Long-tail

These are keyword phrases with three or more words in them.

Generally, the longer the phrase, the easier it is to rank for that phrase.

For example, it would be hard to get your saucepan shopping page found for "saucepan", however, it would be a lot easier to get it found for "28-inch copper-bottomed saucepan with detachable handle and lid".

And somewhere in between those two are a bunch of keywords that are medium-ish difficulty to be found for.

Keyword ranking isn't exact

Something to also bear in mind is that if you are optimising your page for a particular keyword, it's not an exact science - you might not be found for that keyword, and you might be found for others.

In the end, it's up to the search engines to decide how to interpret your pages and the words that will get people there. We can just nudge them in the right direction.