by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: July 03, 2009

Whether you're trying to optimize your site for the search engines or creating Google Adwords campaigns to get traffic to your website, the first thing you need to look at is finding the right keywords to target. And the best way of doing so is using Google Keyword Tool.

The first step is writing down a list of words and sentences that you would expect your users to enter on the Search field when looking for your website or products. Since you probably known your product too well, you might want to recruit some "possible customers" here, in the form of friends and family. You don't need to be very specific, just jot down on a notebook words that you think represent your business. For the purposes of this article, we're going to look for the best keywords for a Search Engine Optimization agency, based in London.

Google Keyword Tool has a very simple interface, just a search box where you enter all the keywords you are interested in. In this particular example we're only going to use a couple, "SEO" and "Search Engine Optimization", but you could add as many as you want to compare. If you already have a website, you can use the option of "Use website content" for Google to fetch keyword from your particular website (or one of your competition ones, for that matter). In both cases, you will get a list of possible search phrases. You can configure the information to be displayed, with columns such as level of competition for Adwords, the number of searches last month and globally, the search trends evolution or the average CpC (cost per click).

But what does those result mean? In general very expensive keywords are highly competitive, and will require a lot of effort to rank high on them in the search engines or a big budget to get your ads displayed using Google Adwords. But that doesn't mean they are the best keywords for your business website. You want to filter your search to find keywords that more closely relate to your product and in some cases your geographical location. You can use the filter pull-down, right below the search box, to remove results with specific keywords you're not interested in. For example, our particular SEO agency isn't specially interested in being found by people looking for "free SEO", or tutorials or articles about the subject. The intended audience would be people looking for SEO experts in London, so we add London, Agency and Experts to the search box, and we filter out anything to do with "free", "articles", "tutorial", "blog" and all their variations. The results by default will be tailored to your geographic area, but you can change that setting if you're interested in more global data.

You can export your results to CSV files to analyze them using Excel or Open Office or any other statistics program, but you will probably go through several iterations until you find keywords that are valuable and cost effective to drive traffic to your site. It's also useful to make a search using those keywords to see the competition you'll be facing, specially if you're doing this as part of your SEO efforts. For example, competing as "Book store" with Amazon is probably a lost battle and better left alone.

In any case, remember that SEO is a long term adaptive effort, and expect to be back to Google Keywords Tool after analyzing your visitors habits using Web Analytics software, to fine-tune your campaigns and SEO efforts. A good companion to Google Keyword Tool is Google Trends, that will let you compare lists of keywords and see what people are searching for over time.

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