Keyword Research – The Foundation of Any Online Campaign

Before I explain the importance of keyword research, please allow me to describe what the process of keyword research looks like. The best analogy I have seen is comparing Keyword Research to panning for gold.

Keyword Research is Like Panning for Gold

Panning for gold you start with rocks, dirt and sand. You remove the larger rocks and then you swirl the pan around to separate the gold nuggets from the sediment.

Keyword research you start with a list of keywords pertaining to your main subject. You remove the obvious keywords that do not relate closely enough to your subject matter. Then you filter out the other keywords according to certain criteria of your choosing.

Some of the criteria might be:
How many searches per day for a given keyword phrase
How strong the competition is for a keyword phrase
The commercial Value of a given keyword phrase

What I have described here are the 4 golden rules of keyword research

Relevance – The keywords must closely relate to the content that actually exists behind the keywords.
Traffic – There must be enough traffic to support the competition.
Competition – You must consider how much and the quality of your competition.
Commercial Value – The cost per click dollar value of a keyword must be high enough in consideration of the amount of clicks or traffic that it produces.

Follow The Golden Rules

If you stay within those rules you have a stronger chance of actually making money or at least garnering some traffic. If you break any one of those rules, it does not just mean a small reduction in your success rate. It virtually guarantees that whatever project you have wrapped around the keyword culprits involved, is almost sure to crash and burn. You can make or break an online campaign based on good or bad keyword research.

Why People Shy Away From

Having said this, I can see why many people shy away from good keyword research. It looks like you would have to have the mind of nuclear physicist to figure all of that out. Most people cannot keep the gas and clutch pedals under control forget about balancing 4 complicated rules.

I must confess that I shied away from keyword research for the same reasons. Then I discovered that there is software out there that will do all of the filtering for you. These programs will retrieve keywords from Google that generally relate to your main keywords. After you remove the obviously unrelated keywords, you can then set filters to tweak your list and come up with some gold nuggets that have the best chance of working for your site or content. I am not going to get into software titles in this article because it is not a review. I will say that you may see this type of program called a keyword tool or keyword selector tool, If you want more info on software titles, get in touch with me.

The true purpose of this article is to awaken those that may be resisting the learning curve on keyword research to the fact that the curve is not that steep and can be learned in a matter of hours with the right software.

The Importance of Keyword Research

I hope you see how important keyword research is to any online campaign whether it be a blog, website, article or video campaign. If you do not use the correct keywords you will never get any traffic because you will be up against competition that is too strong or there is just not enough traffic or no matter how many clicks you get, the value is too low. An even worse scenario is that you just threw any old keywords up and your content does not even relate to them. This can get you banned. The reverse of this is that if you have the right keywords, you have a chance of people who are ready to take action finding you during their search.

So, you see keyword research is the foundation of any online campaign. That is if you want to be found by people searching for what you have to offer.

Stay tuned, in future articles, I will delve more deeply into the 4 golden rules of keyword research and give you my recommendation for keyword research software tools and training.