Over the coming months I am looking to document everything that there is to know (or more likely what I can find out…) about SEO. This post is about Keyword Research – What is the perfect way to perform Keyword Research?

*I am more than happy to be corrected and/or edit this as I go along!

1. Take a brief from the client on the types of keywords that they want to rank for.
2. Review keywords that are relevant to the website.
3. Use this massive list and monitor the number of exact, phrase and broad searches per month, locally and globally in the Google Keyword Tool.
4. Check the number of competitive pages in Google.
5. Check the number of exact competitive pages.
6. How many links does the number one website have? (total)
7. How many links does the number one website have? (page)
8. Check the number of pages with your keyword in the title.
9. Use the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool.
10. Make a note of keywords that you are likely to have to link build to in order to get a positive result but also be sure to make a note of keywords that are less competitive for non-priority sectors of the website. This secondary list is very important as it can bring you “easy traffic” that can be gained just by a clever meta change.

I have found that Excel is the best way to monitor and keep your research data together. The sort data option is useful when choosing the best traffic terms. Alternatively, you could also use one of the various market research instruments out there such as Conjointly’s Conjoint Analysis Tool and others like it. These tools would help you figure out the optimum list of keywords. Once you have a list of relevant keywords and the data above you will be able to make a decent decision on the final keyword list. Generally, I aim to work on one keyword per page in the market. I know that other SEOs sometimes go for 2-3 but I think it depends on your sector.

There’s more to come and be added but I’m pretty knackered and need to go to bed 🙂

Keyword Research Tools:

1. Ubersuggest
2. Spyfu
3. SEObook
4. Market Samurai
5. Keyword Discovery
6. Wordtracker
7. Google Keyword Tool
8. Google Search Based Keyword Tool (soon to be discontinued :-()
9. Google Webmaster Tools
10. Google Analytics
11. Google Insights for Search
12. Google Trends
13. Social Media
14. SEMrush
15. Compete
16. Rank Tracker
17. Raven Tools