Keyword research is crucial when your website is in it's starting phase

Keyword research is crucial when your website is in it's starting phase

When you're starting out you may not think of doing keyword research but in reality, it needs to be done before your website goes live.  Keyword research is crucial if you want to target the right phrases and avoid the ones that will just waste your time.  We all know that time is money, so save it by doing proper keyword research and stop wasting it on things that don't matter!

Learning how to do keyword research isn't that difficult.  You can use various tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, which are both paid tools, or you can just go on your Adwords account and set up a dummy campaign then add keywords to it. 

Some free keyword research methods

Adwords
When you get to the point where you're about to add keywords to your campaign, you will notice that Adwords tells you a rough estimate of how much traffic a keyword is getting.  They will also give you a bunch of suggested keywords based on what your website is about, which is pretty awesome for finding keywords that you wouldn't have thought of, and you'll be able to see roughly estimated traffic for all of these.

Some of you are saying "Don't you have to pay for Adwords???" and the answer to that is YES.  You do have to pay if you're running an Adwords campaign, but you don't have to pay if you set the targeting to the USA and set the CPC to $0.01 because you'll likely never show up in the results with a low bid.  Think about it, if you do end up getting a click from the USA for just a penny, you have a winning campaign and should let it run!  You'll be getting amazing traffic from a country that can likely afford what you're selling and your ROI will likely be pretty good


Suggested Searches
We've all been on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing and searched something then came to the bottom of the search results and saw half a dozen or more "Suggested Searches" before clicking through to page 2.  Those suggested searches are there because people have been searching them and this shows you some ideas of what to target because people are already looking these terms up on Google or the search engine you may be on. 

The downside of this method is that you don't know how much traffic you'll get when ranking #1 for these search terms, but if Google is showing them to you then you know it isn't just a single person searching, there are multiple people a day looking for this and you should target it.


Free Keyword Tools
When you're searching for a free keyword tool you'll likely come across loads of Freemium tools that allow you to get a few keywords and then they want you to sign up for a paid account to get more information.  Ahrefs and SEMrush do this pretty well, but there are other smaller companies that do the same thing, so don't get upset when you run into these types of keyword tools.  The nice thing about these is that they don't usually track your IP address, which means you can just clear the cookies from the specific website you're using, and then you can run a few more searches lol.  Rinse and repeat this method as many times as you want, as long as they don't track your IP address, and get a good idea of how many searches your keywords are getting



In the end, you'll need to do plenty of keyword research prior to launching your website or do it as soon as you launch.  Not doing proper keyword research will lead you down the wrong path and it will just seem like wasted time when you eventually correct your bearings.  Start off the right way, target the perfect keywords, and be happy you did proper keyword research early on instead of 6 months or a year down the road



Thanks,

Tommy
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/Tommy