Keyword Research:

Keyword Research is the action of searching for and finding those keyword s which users actually use to find specific content on the Internet. A webmaster researches keywords to optimize a website according to his research results to generate traffic , to launch profitable PPC campaigns, to find hot niches for AdSense sites or for some other purpose.

The information one is looking for in Keyword Research are primarily the exact wording of user search queries and how often a specific keyword phrase is searched for in one day or month. Correctly evaluating and applying his research results would help a marketer to target more profitable keywords in his website optimization activities or with his PPC campaigns. For example he would he run a no-smoking site he would optimize it for the phrase “how to quit smoking” as his Keyword Research would have told him that it would receive almost 3 times as much searches compared to “how to stop smoking”.

Keyword Research is generally done with a Keyword Research program which mines sample sources of millions of actual user searches on one or several search engines over a given period.
The research usually starts with a general or generic keyword like “golf” and the program has the task to find all those more specific keywords which search engine users have searched for. The result can be a list of hundreds or even thousands of keywords (number depending on the program settings).

Most Keyword Research programs give additional information for each keyword like the number of daily searches or how many competitor websites there are on Google for this keyword. Higher quality tools also give the AdWords max bids, the number of AdWords campaigns and more.

Example for a Keyword Research for the generic keyword “golf” with the Keyword Research program Keyword Elite.

The original keyword list retrieved by the research program has then to be edited according to the marketer’s needs. Irrelevant results have to be deleted (e.g. in above examples all keywords around the car VW Golf if a website or AdWords campaign has to do with the game golf), and some promising results can be recycled, i.e. sent through the process again to find even more specific variations.

The game is to find Keywords which:

• Are related to the product one wants to advertise,

• Have an adequate number of daily searches.

• Have as little competition from other advertisers as possible because little competition usually means smaller bid prices. This holds true for PPC advertisers and SEO experts. AdSense publishers rather want the opposite; highly competitive keywords with a high earning per click.

• Have a meaning that indicate that the user is willing to spend money (e.g. a high percentage of users searching for “iPod” might only look for general information on iPods but someone searching for “black iPod nano 8GB” most probably wants to buy one).

A final word to Keyword Research tools: as they are all retrieving their data from a relatively small chunk of the entire amount of search queries their results are not to be taken as an absolute. Errors have always to be taken into consideration, especially on keywords with a relatively low search volume. Hence when starting an AdWords campaign with a list of researched keywords continuous monitoring and testing  in the beginning phase should be performed.

[The origin of Key is unknown;

Word comes from Old English word = speech, talk, utterance;

Research comes from Old French rechercher = to seek out, search closely, from re- used as intensifier and chercher = to seek for]

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