Keyword research is important because it calculates which keywords you should be targeting with your SEO efforts. Most people think that they know which keywords they should target. Instinct can be a great resource, but it can also be misleading and is almost always not enough.

For example, the keyword phrase Toronto accounting firm gets an estimated 480 searches a month while the keyword phrase Toronto accountants gets an estimated 2,900 searches a month.  If your gut tells you to target Toronto accounting firm, because you call your business a “firm” so it is natural to think everyone calls it that. You may get great rankings, but it would only get you a sliver of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for Toronto accountants.

There are also keywords that you may not be able to rank well for regardless of how well you optimize your site. These are generally the more generic words, using our accountants example just the term accountants, or accounting. In addition, there are keywords that other people will use to search for what your site offers that you would never even think of.  So, in addition to letting you know which keywords are more popular, the research can also provide new keywords to target. Keyword research should be an ongoing task. You should review your keywords quarterly to see if any new words have shown up you never knew about before.

Google recently revealed that 20% of searches conducted have never been conducted before.

Optimizing your website without doing keyword research is like trying to pick apples from a tree without first checking to see if there are any apples on it or if the apples are within your reach. You could end up putting in a lot of effort but going home with little fruit from your labor. So it’s a key component of search engine optimization.

What Do I Research?

The first aspect is popularity, how often are keywords actually searched for. Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo, and Bing don’t share the actual number of searches for specific keywords; however, there are a few tools online (including tools from Google) which gives the approximate number of searches for some keywords. The keyword popularity tools (other than Google’s) use the search data from a number of other smaller search engines along with a few algorithms to predict how many searches are being made for specific keywords. It’s not perfect, but it gives you an idea of which keywords are most popular. Since Google’s figures come from…well…Google, they are probably the most accurate, but even their figures are only estimates and I’ve found that many keywords return a “Not enough data” result. We use both Google and another keyword popularity tool in our research.

Without good keyword research, your search engine optimization efforts will be like firing a gun into the dark. You may hit something; you may not. You may choose keywords that are not searched for or keywords that are way too competitive for your site at that time. It’s best to know what you need to be targeting.