Keyword research is an essential tool. It gives you the opportunity to discover and research particular search terms which people specifically enter into the search engines when submitting any kind of search for information, products or services. This is extremely useful for optimising websites, because if you know what people are trying to find, then you can easily structure your site and its content so that the search engines index your chosen keywords. This will tip the scales in your favour when it comes to driving targeted traffic toward your website. It’s not complicated, and there are a few really easy to use applications out there to help you perform this kind of research.
As a Virtual Assistant, you’ll want to optimize your own in-house websites, and it’s also quite possible that many of your clients will ask you to look into this sort of research for them as well. If you discover that you’re performing keyword search often, then you might consider investing in a program that will take care of some of the time consuming steps for you. However, you should always know how to do it manually, as these programmes aren’t infallible, and it’s always good practice to check the results you’re getting periodically.
Here’s a simple guide on how to perform a keyword search using Google:
1. Look up the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You don not have to be signed up for AdWords for this. It’s an external search that you can perform at no cost to yourself.
2. Enter the Keywords that you want to search for - in this case I am using “Virtual Assistant”, then type in the captcha character text (if necessary) and press the Get Keyword Ideas button.
3. You will be presented with a detailed list of potential keywords and similar keywords from the initial keyword that you inserted.
4. As you can see, the tool has returned a list which I have sorted by local search volume for April. This tells us that there is very high competition for the word Virtual Assistant, and it also tells us that there were 135,000 searches against this term in April. We’re looking for a word that we can use to get ranked high up in the search engines so we can get more traffic to our site. So if we take a look at this list, an exellent target is to choose a keyword with not less 100 searches a day. The competition for Virtual Assistant Services is still fairly high, but if we now go over to Google, we can take a look at our potential competition.
5. So, let’s do a search on “Virtual Assistant Services”, and make sure you use the quotations marks or you’ll get results returned for any combination of those words.
Here, as you can see this page tells us that there are 57,700 pages ranked for this combination of words. It’s not impossible for you to be able to compete with your page ranked for this specific word - you just need to put in a bit of work.
I’m certainly not saying that this is the best keyword for you to work toward ranking your Virtual Assistant business with. This is just an example of what you may want to check out. Be inventive and try to ‘think outside the box’ with your imagination. What terms do you think your clients would search for? You’re going to want to repeat this process to find several keywords that you can utilise for establishing your Search Engine Index niche.
Michelle Dale is Chief Executive of Virtual Miss Friday, an adept and highly-proficient Virtual Assistant Service which works closely with enterprising people who really want to succeed in their chosen field. If you’d like to learn more about online business building success strategies that are tailored to your needs, check out the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance right away!