One of the first ports of call for any SEO strategy should be keyword research. Without knowing what you want to rank for and what the public are searching for to find your business or service, it is unlikely that your website will prove fruitful.
Keyword research should be carried out in depth and cover as many possibilities as you can. By compiling a long list of potential keywords that you wish to target, you will go through the same sorts of steps each time:
- List the key terms that relate to your business/service
- Brainstorm with colleagues/friends to list anything you miss
- Use research tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool, Wordtracker or similar
- Refine this list by researching which terms are the highest traffic driving or least competitive
There is one slight drawback to this process, however. By creating your own list and speaking with colleagues to discover anything you may have missed, you are still confining your thought processes to people that are close to your business. You and your colleagues may use jargon and expect others to know what you are talking about. Friends may only be able to provide an insight based around what they know of your business or service from what you have told them.
So how do you know what your consumers or potential customers use to search for your business or services?
By using buzz monitoring, not only can you keep an eye how your company is perceived, how strong your brand is etc, you can also get an idea of how people refer to your company. Regardless of what your company does, someone, somewhere on the net will be talking about you – good, bad or indifferent. Buzz monitoring will allow you to understand how your brand is perceived, whilst giving you a clearer picture of how people refer to your products or services. They may abbreviate or misspell key terms to your business. But you are not going to know about this unless you are paying attention to what is being said within these networks and online.
There are some great free tools providing buzz monitoring, but as with anything, you get what you pay for. Therefore, to get a comprehensive overview of the ‘buzz’ around your business, paid tools such as Radian6 or Brandwatch allow for deep analysis of conversations taking place online. These paid for buzz monitoring tools allow you to drill down on various reports, whereby you can start to perform some keyword research.
Obviously, with practice this process will become simpler, however, as another means of keyword research, buzz monitoring could be the key to unlocking some missed opportunities.
There have been many blog posts surrounding best practice when it comes to keyword research and rightly so. Without a structured and targeted list of keywords that have come from extensive research, trying to get your website to rank for any of your business terms would be like trying to pin custard to the wall!
So you are not completely lost when it comes to keyword research and buzz monitoring, I thought it would be best to list some great posts on these subjects: Keyword research:
- Clever Keyword Research List of free Buzz Monitoring tools:
- 20 Free Buzz Monitoring Tools
- How to use Buzz Monitoring
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Honcho
