Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of SEO, it separates websites with lots of traffic from those that have very little.  A good keyword research tool can help you find profitable keywords for your business or niche.  Knowing the right keywords to target can help drive up rankings and help you get found in organic searches and make your site a more effective marketing tool.

What are Keywords?

Keywords are simply the words or phrases that people type into Google when they are looking for more information. Google then provides results based around these keywords.  The results are ranked by Google and what they believe is the most relevant to the search.  Keywords are referred to short tail, medium and long tail.  An example of a short tail keyword would be typing “plumber” into the search bar.  Medium would be “plumber near me” and long tail are often questions or phrases like “cheapest emergency plumber in Chicago”.

Why Focus on Longtail Keywords

Plenty of SEO experts will tell you to focus on longtail keywords when it comes to creating content for your site.  That is actually good advice longtail keywords focus more on buyer intent.  You get better and more specific traffic, this type of traffic is looking for the exact products and service that you offer.  The other reason that you want to use longtail keywords is that there is less competition and they can be easier to rank.  The more longtail keywords you rank for will also push your site up in rankings for shorter keywords.

Difficult Keywords

Another thing you want to look at when targeting keywords is how difficult they are to rank.  Continuing with our plumbing example the keyword “plumber” is nearly impossible to rank for and frankly it is too vague and you don’t need to even try ranking for it.  Other keywords like “best plumber Manhattan” may also be very difficult to rank for so you may have to work harder and take longer to finally score a spot on the front page for that particular keyword.

Choosing the right keywords is the backbone of all of your SEO efforts.  You want to find the right combination of search volume along less competition to start generating traffic to your site.  Take the time to do some extensive keyword research and you can quickly turn your site into a profit generating machine.