The 3 Most Important SEO Steps To Dominating Google Through Keyword Research

When dealing with search engine optimization, the most important thing to keep in mind is keywords. Everything comes down to the keywords you are attempting to compete for. For instance, if your business niche is chiropractics, you'll want to make sure to compete for the words “chiropractic”, “chiropractor”, and the city you practice in, as well as nearby cities. It really won't do you much good to compete on general terms, such as “back pain”, since those types of keywords are very general, and the top sites competing for those words will be hard to dislodge from that top spot.

In order to compete in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it is important to choose competitive keywords that your audience will search for, that you can rank well for with a minimum of effort. In this article, I'm going to teach you three things: How to gauge competition on the search engine results; how to determine how many searches are performed each month; and I'll even show you a couple of different tools to use!

First, we need to gauge competition. In order to compete, you really need to know what you're up against. Step one is to see how many competing pages Google lists for your chosen keywords. This will give you a good idea of how popular the keyword is, and an approximation of the amount of work you need to do. Go to Google, enter your keywords into the search box and see how many total pages show up. For instance, the keyword string 'McKinney web design' shows 279,000 results on Google. This tells you how many pages have both the words 'McKinney' and 'web design', in any order or combination. Once you've done that, type in your keywords in quotation marks, like this: “Mckinney web design”. This tells Google that you only want to see pages that have your keywords in that exact order and wording. This gives you a more exact page count for your terms. However, it's still important to know the broad match search results for your keywords, without the quotation marks. This tells you how many pages are out there that might come up when someone searches your keywords.

The next step is to go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and type in your search term. This will tell you what the monthly search volume is. Don't bother using the parenthesis, they do not effect the results.

Once you've found your search volume, you can tell relatively how difficult or easy it will be to rank for a term. Generally speaking, you should aim for terms that have at least 1,000 searches per month, but no more than 10,000. Any more and it will be more difficult to rank on the first page of Google within 30-60 days.

Lower search volume is ok, in that it should be easy to dominate the top results in Google. However, with a low search volume, that means low traffic, and even fewer customers. So, you'll want to make sure that you pick something in the 1,300-10,000 searches per month range. The middle is usually a sweet spot for the type of traffic you are looking for.

Now that we've covered how to perform keyword research and how to determine how many searches are being performed each month on Google, lets look at another tool.

Besides Google, the other two primary search engines worldwide are Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing. Now, you could use their tools to figure out how many searches are done each month for your keywords, but I'm going to show you a short cut!

Go to SEOBook and find the keyword tool. Once there, type in your keyword. This tool will show you the daily search volume for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft! How much time does that cut down vs using 3 separate tools? Now, this tool is not 100% accurate all the time, as I have noticed some differences between Google's keyword search tool and this one. I believe it has something to do with a delay in the trends tracking. However, it does give a pretty spot-on return for most keywords across all 3 search engines, and it also shows additional information, such as graphical charts, and links to Google Trends, Google Suggest, and Yahoo Suggest (for suggesting additional related keywords).

I hope this helps you in your research, and if you need help locking down the first page of the search engines, find me at www.l7marketingsolutions.com.

About the author: Ryne Landers is a leading SEO and web design consultant in the McKinney, Frisco, Allen, and Plano areas of the Dallas metroplex. He co-founded L7 Marketing Solutions in 2009 after studying Internet Marketing principles and search engine optimization techniques from many of the leading minds in the field.