To most of the clients I work with, keywords seem either like a mystery that needs to be decoded or something entirely irrelevant to their business. My most successful clients, however, realize that the secret of writing great online copy or directing massive traffic to your blogs and websites is simple: use keywords.

Why? If you use the words people use when they search in your copy, page titles, descriptions and links, then you’ll score well in search engine results and more people will find your site.

It doesn’t get any easier. The trick, of course, is to find the best keywords.

We won’t go into all the different tools that can be found online. But I will outline the three simple steps that WordTracker recommends in their course on how to build your keyword matrix.

Step 1 – Start with a common word or phrase that is appropriate to your business: Start simple. Your starting point does not need to be clever or creative. All you need is a common word or phrase relevant to your business – Wordtracker will help you find clever keywords later. So if I were researching for the market for chocolate, a good starting point would be the word “chocolate”.

Using the Keyword Researcher at Wordtracker, you can find 1000 keywords that all contain the word, “chocolate”.

Excellent. So far, so good. Now all you have to do is rush off and optimize your web pages for those phrases, right? Wrong! That is what most people will do and as a result they will miss out on some very powerful keywords which aren’t immediately obvious. Time to move on to step 2 and get inside the keyword matrix.

Step 2 – Find words that are related to your original keyword: Here the task is not to find relevant keywords that contain the word “chocolate”: in fact, it is just the opposite – to find relevant keywords that do NOT contain the word “chocolate”. Go to the Keyword Universe – related keywords feature on Wordtracker and enter the word chocolate. Wordtracker now searches 100 websites that score well on search engines for the search “chocolate” and extracts the phrases that those sites use. From that you’ll find relevant keywords such as truffles, cocoa, fudge, confectionery, gifts, gourmet and so on.

Scan the list of related keywords and pick the ones that YOU feel are relevant to your business.

Step 3 – Use the related words to generate many more relevant keywords: Essentially, this repeats step 1 for each of the related keywords that you have chosen. Take each of your chosen related words and enter them into the Keyword Researcher tool in turn.

Final Thoughts

Effective keyword research is an ongoing process and to get outstanding results you must work at it regularly. To succed in keyword research you should:

  1. Regularly check your keyword counts on Wordtracker – they can go up and down over time
  2. Continue to add more keywords to your matrix. The more effective keywords you have, the more profitable your online business will be.
  3. Monitor how well your keywords do.

We’ll talk about keywords again but for now, I want you to dedicate two hours this week to doing some basic keyword research for your blog, websites or salescopy. You can register for a free trial of the Wordtracker system by clicking here.