SEO in 30 Days, Day 3: Keyword Research, Step 1

Why is keyword research important?

In Day 1 and Day 2 of SEO in 30 Days we talked about the importance of developing an SEO plan along with how to go about creating one. Today we’ll be discussing the value of doing keyword research.

Conducting keyword research early in your campaign is crucial for creating a strong online business presence. It will set the foundation of your organic search engine marketing initiative, and can impact your business for many years.

Keyword research isn’t exclusively for discovering the most important keywords that should be mapped to prominent landing pages — it can actually help outline your entire online business. This outline includes domain name selection, the content on your site, and how that content is organized and written on other online marketing and social media channels.

Tools to Use
There are several comprehensive keyword tools that you can use for initial research. We recommend Google AdWords Keyword tool, Hitwise, and Comscore (the latter two require subscriptions).

Keyword Discovery & Use
Ideally, before you begin the process of building your website, and even before choosing your domain name, you will discover which keyword phrases to target.

Keyword phrases are the words that your potential clients will type into the search box. Predicting what those phrases might be is a major component of successfully drawing qualified business leads to your website. Why?

Let’s say you’re an estate planning attorney who handles a lot of trusts. If your site does not use the phrase “trusts attorney” the search engines will have a hard time figuring out you handle trusts. However, if you use the phrase “trusts attorney” in strategic places throughout your website, the search engines will determine (more than likely) that your website contains useful information for people searching for a trusts attorney. Your website will be seen as relevant for that keyword phrase, and the search engines will serve up your site as an option in the search results.

Your goal is to determine what phrases your ideal customers or clients are typing into that search box to find a law firm (or whatever service you provide). Some suggestions on how to do this:

Do some competitive research. Let’s continue with the trust attorney example. Go to your favorite search engine and type “San Francisco trusts attorney” into the search box. Which law firms are in the top three? Visit those firms’ websites. What phrases do they seem to be targeting? Look at the headers with the copy. Look at the page title (this appears at the top of the browser window). Write down the phrases that they are using to draw in business around trusts in the San Francisco area. We cover competitive research in more detail in Day 6 of the SEO in 30 Days series.

Ask your friends and family. Ask them to imagine they were concerned about some aspect of trusts. What phrases would they use to find information or a lawyer? Best to ask people who are not in the law field so that you get phrases that would most likely be searched on by someone unfamiliar with legal terminology. Chances are the vast majority of your clients will not have a legal background. Add their suggestions to your list.

Use a keyword research tool. Enter a few general search terms into Google’s Adwords tool, making sure you ask for synonyms. Adwords will return a list of suggestions, along with how many times that phrase has been searched on in the past month. This data will be useful in figuring out which of the search terms on your list should be targeted most (the ones with the highest search volume probably will bring in the most leads and should therefore be used more often on your website). Complete your keyword list with these terms.

Once you have compiled a relevant list of keywords, you should begin thinking about your firm’s online identity, starting with your domain name.

Domain name
Your top, most relevant keyword phrases (the one’s that describe your business most succinctly and/or have the highest search volume according to a tool like Google Adwords) should be considered for your domain name. Search domain name providers for availability. While not necessary, we recommend using hyphens to separate multiple keywords in a domain name to better communicate separate keyword structure to search engines. You’ll benefit with these words being boldfaced on the search engine results page if they are queried (searched on).

Content, Organization, and Writing
After domain selection has been completed, you must next determine the layout of your website. What topics and areas of law will you be covering? Each of these topics and areas will be a category on the website. Ensure that you have picked keywords that are relevant to the categories. These are intended for high-traffic visits from search engines, and will further guide your visitors toward contacting your firm.

Copywriting is another important use of keyword research. Optimizing the content of your pages to include instances of the selected keyword phrase and using it throughout the copy will strengthen the pages’ relevance for that keyword. The more often a keyword is used, the more relevant a page becomes to that query — search engines will decide that a highly relevant page is the best page to rank for a particular keyword phrase.

It is important to note that pages should not use spammy text that stuff keywords onto a page. This will hurt search engine rankings, and reduce the readability of the page.

Social Media
Be sure to include your keywords on other social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to help with the reputation management of your business.

In Day 4 we’ll continue our SEO in 30 Days series, covering common mistakes to avoid while conducting your keyword research.

Related posts:

1. SEO in 30 Days, Day 6: Keyword Research, Step 4
2. SEO in 30 Days, Day 4: Keyword Research, Step 2
3. SEO in 30 Days, Day 5: Keyword Research, Step 3
4. SEO in 30 Days, Day 7: Keyword Research, Step 5
5. SEO in 30 Days, Day 9: Keyword Research, Step 7