subject: How to identify the top performing keywords for your website [print this page] How to identify the top performing keywords for your website
The keyword research phase is probably the most crucial phase in any SEO Campaign you need to make sure that you have covered all bases and that you are targeting the keywords that will invariably drive the highest number of conversions to your site. The main focus when researching keywords should necessarily be on traffic but the potential for revenue don't worry so much about driving thousands of visits to your website, worry about driving customers. Keyword research can be a relatively simple task when you get the hang of it and for experienced SEO professionals, a full keyword research document for a small to medium sized website shouldn't take more than four to five hours to complete.
The first thing you need to do is visit the Google Keyword Tool this tool is one that is provided free of charge by Google, and allows users to find estimated search volumes around their main target keywords. The most important thing to keep in mind here is that the volumes are estimates rather than exact figures, always keep an eye on the trend lines within this tool to identify if a keyword is having a particularly strong or weak month. It's also worth downloading your keywords in CSV format, this will allow you to view exact totals for keywords over the course of one year, and identify any spikes in queries. It's also important to keep in mind that this tool provides figures for search volumes, it does not give you an indication on how people will visit your website but rather an indication of how many people are searching for a particular term. The visits will likely be distributed between the top 10 results, with a particular emphasis and high click through rate going to the top positioned listing.
Another important thing to keep in mind when performing keyword research is the difference between exact, phrase and broad match. Broad match will return keywords that are broadly related to the query entered. For example, "running shoes" may be broadly related to "tennis shoes". Phrase match will return keywords that include the particular phrase entered; for example, if you type in "football boots" then all queries that contain the words "football boots" will be returned. Only when you enter exact will you see exact match volumes for the terms you have entered.
