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Effective Keyword Research is the ultimate foundation for any good SEO strategy. Yes, it’s a tedious, time consuming and boring process, but so is building the foundations for a house — and  what responsible engineer would build a house without solid foundations, right? All the time I spent working at an SEO agency the formula for perfect keyword research has never changed. Two parts of client business understanding, two parts of search demand within your clients industry and a touch of business objectives, and ‘voila’ you have one perfect dataset that highlights what you need to rank against.

This is easier said than done and in reality, a lot of SEO’s make the mistake of not taking keyword research seriously enough. Maybe this is because we have extremely busy lifestyles, and I can think of a thousand ways to do more entertaining work. That’s why I have put together some tips which all SEO’s can adhere to and get keyword research done as quickly as possible and discover the most valuable keywords for your clients’ business or your startup or company within minutes.

Competitor keyword research

The odds are you have a few online competitors who have already built a fully optimized website with a range of high value keywords, which is a bit of a double edged sword, because although they might have beaten you to certain keywords and have already started optimizing their website towards your target terms, there is nothing stopping you from crawling their website and deciphering title tags through a handy SEO tool like ScreamingFrog. Export a list of your competitor’s data, and do the rest easily through Excel:

 

Keyword Categorization

You can take advantage of optimized competitor websites by extracting their keyword data, but no matter what you do, there are cases (mostly in niche markets) that won’t give you enough competitor data for you take advantage of. These are the kind of situations where you really need to roll up your sleeves. But don’t worry too much because there are still effective methods you can use to break up what looks like a colossal amount of work into easily digested bite size chunks. For this, you are again going to need a trusty SEO crawler tool to get a full list of your website’s URLs. Once you crawl your client’s site most of these tools will give you additional information for URLs such as ‘header response’ and ‘content type’. When you sort your URL master list so you only end up with HTML pages that serve a 200, and they are arranged in alphabetic order, you can then go ahead and start your keyword categorization. 

This allows you to carry out keyword research in a systematic manner so you don’t get overwhelmed by the amount of information which you need to deal with.

Google Keyword Tool

If you are reading this post you probably already know what the Google Keyword Tool is, therefore I am going to delve right into some functions that could make your life a lot easier when carrying out keyword research. If you are wondering what types of keywords your pages should target then all you need to do is:

1.Search for a keyword you want to rank for

2.Upload the first ranking URL into Google Keyword Tool

3.Include/Exclude terms for higher relevancy and you have a nice list of keyword variations to target

 

Keyword Research with Excel

The first time I ever conducted keyword research, many, many years ago, all I really remember knowing how to use at that time was Excel; after all it was really easy to arrange data and you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure how to work things out in MS Office. But I must say my favourite formula that I used to use all the time when conducting keyword research was ‘concatenate’, which essentially joins cells together. The best way I had figured out how to utilize this formula was to create a horizontal and vertical set of keywords to combine:

If you don’t feel like spending too much time on Excel, you can also do this easily through websites like www.keywordlizard.com which provides you with every possible combination of up to four columns of keywords at a time.

Depending on your clients website you can most likely use most of the techniques included in this article in addition to utilizing other tools like Google Webmaster Tools to pull impression reports which include rich keyword data, as well as mine for long-tail keywords through Google Suggest and Google Relegated Searches.

I hope these techniques will save you some effort for the next time you get a new client account on board, but if there are techniques you would like to mention that I have not already included, please feel free to add in the comments section.

Written by Ozal Ergen, SEO Manager at iProspect MENA