So by now hopefully you have been following our 12 Month Marketing Plan closely and you have identified your online competitors and you have built a comprehensive list of their keywords and links. Not it is time to take your keyword list through one last tool before we finalize it for use in your website.
Your Keyword List
The last step in developing your keyword list is to put it into Google’s Keyword Tool and find the amount of competition for each keyword, monthly search traffic for each term and see if Google has any other suggestions for your keyword list before you start implementing your words.
First goto Google.com and search for “Google Keyword Tool”. If you sign into your Google account you will be granted full access to the tool.
Once you are in the Keyword Tool, you should see a screen like the one below. Make sure to click on “Exact” under the Match Types on the left side of the screen and un-check “Broad” (highlighted in yellow). This will make sure that Google only shows us results for the exact terms that we are typing in.
Now we are going to type in all of the Keywords from you Keyword list into the “Word or Phrase” box at the top of the page and click on “Search”.
This will now bring up two boxes at the bottom of your page. The first is a list of just the Search Terms that you typed in. To the right of the terms you will see a competition rating of High, Medium or Low and after that you will see the number of Local Monthly Searches.
Last, under the “Search Terms” box you will see one more box of terms titled “Keyword Ideas”. These are your terms mixed in with additional terms that Google thinks are relevant to the keywords that you previously inputted.
This next step may take a while but you should definitely do it. Go through each of the keywords and check only boxes of keywords that closely relate to your website. Once you have checked all of the terms that fit in with you website go ahead and download that list as a CSV. This will be your master keyword list that you will work off of for the next 12 months.
A Few Keyword Recommendations
- Do not go crazy with your keyword list. 100-200 keywords is a great starting point. If you find that you are ranking for your desired keywords after you have been marketing them for some time, then go ahead and add more, but right now more than 200 will be overkill.
- Focus on the lowest hanging fruit. The low fruit are the keywords with decent traffic and low competition. These will be the easiest to rank for.
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My name is Ryan Cunningham and I have been working in Online Marketing since 2009 and currently work for SNAP Social Media out of Plymouth, MN. If your looking for someone to handle your Online Marketing needs give me a call at 612-460-1513 or send me a message.
