4 Golden Rules of Keyword Research

We have reached the point where no matter what your business is, a local offline business, an online store and no matter what content management system you are using it is of the most importance to do you keyword research right.

Failing to make a proper choice of keywords will make or break you SEO efforts.

First of all, you will be looking to find what is called a ‘long tail keywords’ that you want to rank for. This means that the keywords will almost never contain a single word but more likely, two, three and probably up to 5 actual words within it.

An example of a long tail keyword would be ‘employment lawyers Sydney’. This would be a good keyword for – you guessed it – employment law firm in Sydney 🙂

You wouldn’t even want to try to rank for word ‘lawyers’ for example because it would most likely have a lot of competition and it just wouldn’t be specific enough.

This brings us to the four most important rules of keyword research. These rules apply for any website, any industry, and any business! Here they are:

1. Search volume – Chose a keyword phrase that has enough search volume.
   • This means that there are enough people searching for this keyword or phrase
   • There is no point in trying to rank for a phrase that you think represents your business if nobody is searching for that long tail keyword
2. Relevancy – chose a keyword phrase that is relevant to your website/business.
   • This seems like an obvious step, however unless you narrow down your choice, you may find that some of the unrelated keywords have crept up inside of your list
3. Reasonable competition
   • Initially, you will want to pick keywords that satisfy all of the criteria and don’t have too much competition. You will find that these keywords will also have lower search volume, meaning that although you have ranked for it, you will not get as much website traffic as you would for some of the higher competition and higher volume keywords.
4. Commercial intent
   • This is the trickiest step when deciding on your keyword phrases to start ranking for. To continue on our example, which one of these two do you think has more commercial intent: ‘employment lawyers’ or ‘employment law’? The answer would have to be ‘employment lawyers’ as a person searching for ’employment law’ is probably only researching about employment law and not necessarily looking for employment lawyer at this stage.