Starting a new website

Attracting website visitors

Improving conversion rates

Measuring and Testing

Keyword Research
- first step to getting more traffic

The internet has changed the way people buy. They are spending longer researching products and services before going anyway near a shop to buy something. A great starting point for your website is to help your visitors through this research phase, helping you build credibility and trust.

The art to getting traffic comes in matching up your knowledge with exactly what visitors are searching for. Fortunately, there are some useful tools around, so this does not have to be complete guesswork. In this article, we are going to be discussing a free keyword research tool from google: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal.

Step 1 - Enter intial keywords or phrases

To start with, enter some basic keywords or phrases for your industry. As I am writing this about website traffic, I have entered website traffic and website visitors. Put each word or phrase on a new line.

Step 2 - Analyse the keyword list

Google will list some keywords that match your search words or phrases. It also shows how much competition you face for those chosen key words or phrases and how many people search for them.

Step 3 - Add keywords or phrases to your list

For each relevant keyword or phrase, click the 'add' link at the end of the required line. Your chose words will now appear under your selected keywords in the right hand column of the page.

Step 4 - Find related keywords

Next, click the button 'Get more related keywords' under this list to find keywords that you may not have thought of. Repeat steps 2 - 4 until you have a list you are happy with. Download the list by clicking on either the text, .csv (for excel), or .csv links below the 'Get more related keywords' button. If you download a .csv list, you will be able to open it up in spreadsheet package like microsoft excel or open office calc.

Step 5 - Find existing keywords in your website

Go back to the original form and remove the keywords. Click the link 'website content'. Enter your website address and click 'Get keywords ideas'.

Google will now show all the keywords it thinks are related to your website. At the bottom of the keyword list, there is another link to download this table. Click on the option and save it to your computer. Choose the same type as you did when selecting your chosen keywords to download.

Step 6 - Compare actual keywords to ideal ones

Open up the two files you downloaded. Have a look at your ideal keywords, then compare this to the ones your site actually contains, and see which keywords are missing. This is an excellent starting point in terms of working out what content you should start putting on your site. Ideally, you would have one page centered around a particular phrase. If it is a broad topic, e.g. 'web design', consider adding a new folder to your website and use the keyword / phrase as the name. Then add several pages to this folder.

Once you know what to change on your website,
the question becomes how...

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