So let’s have a pop quiz here. What’s the most important part of any search engine optimization initiative? Bingo! It’s keyword research. Before you write any title tags or any META descriptions, you should do your keyword research. So what do I mean by keyword research? It means finding the right keywords that are right for your business goals. For instance, if you are a financial institution, you have a better chance of attracting and converting your visitors if you are targeting the right keywords. If your top keyword is “yogurt” then you probably will see a high bounce rate on your homepage or landing page. People who search for a rare kind of yogurt don’t come to your site to read your financial analysis, and you have probably 15 seconds to make that first impression, which you won’t with your finance-themed website.

But how do you know you have right keyword? You need to figure out what your business goals are? Are you trying to get more eyeballs to your site or do you want to convert more? That’s where super-crunchers come in. You can use your analytics team (in case you have that) to work with you to find the keywords that attract the most traffic and convert the best. But before doing that, you need to have an ultimate list of keywords that you will be choosing your main keywords from. There are two ways to do that. One way is to use tools such as Yahoo! Keywords tool (actually this is not really working anymore) and other free keywords tool and give your best shot at finding the best draft list for your business. Another way to do this is to use a professional keyword research tool such as WordTracker if you actually afford it (not that it’s expensive).
WordTracker allows you to do some serious keyword analysis by allowing you to compare search estimates for keywords and even compare their KEIs. This is particularly useful if you are trying to find keywords that are right for your business but necessarily so competitive that you can’t get ranked for. Imagine the term “books.” Now whoever says ranking for that term is easy is probably drinking something. But with the right tool such as WordTracker, you can make sure what you are going for before it’s too late. Don’t get me wrong. These short term keywords would make sense for some company such as Amazon, but not for a blog or small business at it would be really costly to get ranked for them.

The forecasting tool within Wordtracker is very powerful, while not completely accurate. You can find out if the keywords that you have chosen are likely to bomb in the next month or actually do some damage. But the best part of Wordtracker is the “dig” feature. You can find cool niches to target for your blog with this feature. As WordTracker describes it, digging is the process of moving to the next level in your keyword research to get more specific terms. For instance, digging the word waterboarding will allow you to find more specific terms such as “waterboarding torture” and see how competitive these terms are.

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I have been meaning to write a series about how to properly use WordTracker, and why you even need a subscription keyword research service. But before I get to that, and that could take a while, you may want to take advantage of the promotion that WordTracker is running for December. They are giving 15% off on their subscriptions and they also are offering 9 mini-courses on keyword research which could be helpful if you need some SEO keyword research drills. The final price on one year of WordTracker will be $255, down from $299.