These days, most website owners recognise that to achieve decent search engine rankings (and the important traffic they generate), unique, fresh, keyword rich content on their website is important. 

 You also probably understand that the content should be focused on keywords that are relevant to the products/services that you provide.  However, it can be a challenge to work out exactly  what keywords you should be targeting, and what types of content  are likely to be best for optimising your website.

You could probably rattle off a list of what you think are the important keywords for your site – but how do you know that these are the phrases that your potential customers are likely to be using on Google ?  Often, the “important” keywords that owners come up with are terms that they use in the day to day running of their business – which may be quite different to the ones used by  customers.

Keyword Research is Critical

Keyword Analysis is one of the first (and most important) activities that you should undertake when optimising your website.  Effective Keyword Research makes use a variety of tools and techniques to identify and analyse actual search volumes of keywords (for searches undertaken by real people on the internet) that are relevant to your “important” keyword phrases. 

 An initial goal of Keyword Research is to identify those keyword phrases related to your business  that are searched most often.  These high volume keyword phrases (which may very well include keywords that you probably hadn’t thought of) provide an excellent basis  for defining the structure of your site, and inspiration for  creating content.

 Explaining “How To” undertake Keyword Research is way too big a topic to cover in this brief article,  so:

• do some research on how to do keyword analysis online
• talk to a friendly Search Engine Optimiser,
  or
• get some SEO training…

but make sure that you do something towards identifying your primary keywords today !