When it comes to Digital Marketing in Singapore or around the world, almost everything starts with research. This is the same for SEO, as well as other forms of Digital Marketing.
Why is Keyword Research Important?
We all know by now that keywords are not the most important thing. However, choosing the right keywords is still the foundation of your SEO or PPC campaign. Why?
• Know what your customers are searching for
• Get insight into the way your customers search
• Find new related keywords
• And much more
While good keyword research is not necessarily difficult, it can take a lot of time. But, if done correctly, it can set you on the right path to a strong SEO and PPC strategy.
How to do Keyword Research
There are several tools that you can use for keyword research. If you’re starting from scratch, the first tool would be:
1. Use your brain
Think of the most basic way to describe your business in just 2 or maximum 3 words. Let’s say you are a florist in Singapore. Your core keyword or keywords would be “Singapore florist.” Obviously, there are many more specific keywords than that, but we will start there. For the next step,
2. Introducing keyword planner
Next, pop that keyword into your keyword planner. The Keyword Planner is a tool in Google Adwords that is (mostly) free to use. If you’ve just opened your Google AdWords account, you can usually use your keyword planner free for at least a week. After that you’ll need to make sure you have at least one active campaign, spending at least $1 a month. Not much, right? Okay, moving on. You can access the keyword planner at adwords.google.com > click on “tools” in the top menu, followed by “keyword planner.”
There are several different tools within the keyword planner, so we’ll start with the first one:
3. Find new keywords
We’ll now click on “find new keywords” so we’ll type in “Singapore florist” under your product or service. We can also fill in our country (you can select up to 10 locations) and language, but we’ll leave the rest blank, so as to not make the targeting too narrow.
Now, we can see a list of keywords appear, together with how many people use that search term each month, how competitive that keyword is (based on how many other people are bidding on that same keyword,) and the suggested PPC bid.
From here, we can just click the arrows on the right side to add them to your plan which can later be downloaded. At this state, we can add any and all that are related. If you see some that are unrelated, for example, if you are a more luxury florist, you may want to skip keywords like “cheap florist.”
4. Search by landing page
Before you start filtering through the keywords that you’ve saved, you’ll probably want to try a few more methods in order to be as thorough as possible.
For this, we’ll go back to Google and type in “singapore florist,” and we’ll copy the url of the first website that appears, which in this case is fareastflora.com. Now, we’ll go back to the keyword planner under Search for New Keywords again. But this time, we’ll paste the link under “landing page,” and leave the other sections blank. This will tell us what keywords this website is likely optimized for. From this, we’ll see a new list of keywords appear and we’ll just go ahead and add them accordingly as we did in the previous step. If you feel you haven’t gotten any good results, you can repeat the same step using a different website.
Before you start filtering through the keywords that you’ve saved, you’ll probably want to try a few more methods in order to be as thorough as possible.
For this, we’ll go back to Google and type in “singapore florist,” and we’ll copy the url of the first website that appears, which in this case is fareastflora.com. Now, we’ll go back to the keyword planner under Search for New Keywords again. But this time, we’ll paste the link under “landing page,” and leave the other sections blank. This will tell us what keywords this website is likely optimized for. From this, we’ll see a new list of keywords appear and we’ll just go ahead and add them accordingly as we did in the previous step. If you feel you haven’t gotten any good results, you can repeat the same step using a different website.
5. Mix & match
When searching by landing page, you may encounter some interesting keywords that you would like more insight into. Let’s say “floral delivery,” as this is quite different than the first keyword we started off with, which was “Singapore florist.” We can then take this keyword, and repeat what we did in step 3. You can do this as many times as necessary until you feel like you have collected a comprehensive selection of keywords related to your business.
6. Picking & Choosing
If you are selecting the keywords for a PPC campaign, the next step would be to organize them in to AdGroups, based on topic, intent, and more. We’ll probably discuss that in another post. If you are selecting keywords for SEO, you’ll have to select more carefully.
A few things to keep in mind are relevance, competition, and search volume, and then finding the happy medium of these things.
Search volume: If only 10 people are searching for it every month, it’s probably a waste of time to base your SEO strategy around it. Unless, this particular keyword is very niche and specific to your business, then sure, go ahead.
Competition: This tells you how many other people are bidding on the same keyword, and how likely you will be to rank for it. Example “flower arrangements” and “flower bouquets” both have 880 searches per month. One is high competition, while the other is medium. So, why not choose that will more likely bring results.
Relevance: Last but most definitely not least, is relevance. There is no point in choosing a keyword that is not related to your business. Don’t choose “same day delivery florist” if you don’t deliver on the same day!
Long tail: okay, so I had to add one more point. Never rule out the long-tail. This is one time where it doesn’t matter if there are only a few searches per month. Add them anyway. What are long-tail keywords? Here’s an example: “florist in orchard road with moonflower bouqet.” It’s a very long key phrase, but also very specific. So if you have moonflowers, make sure the people searching for it can find it!
That was a bit longer than I intended for it to be. There are many other steps and methods that can be used when doing keyword research, but these should give you a good start.
What methods do you usually use in your keyword research? Let us know in the comments. 😀
