SEO Keyword Planner

SEO is a broad and complex subject. You need to understand the basics of SEO before you start your keyword planning. Understanding the importance of SEO keyword planning is crucial. Having a thought through Keyword Planner is one of the most essential steps to complete before you start your company's SEO.

Understanding your market competition and how you are seen by your consumer is key. For some businesses, this can be a lot harder than for others. There are hundreds of tools out there that claim that they will help you with your SEO. But unless you want to pay a hefty subscription fee, Google AdWords Keyword Planner is by far the best option for you. It will tell you a specific keywords search volume, competition level, and cost per click for ads. These three measurements will give you all the information you need to get your keyword planning off on the right track.

SEO Keyword Planner Preparation

So, let’s walk through the preparation steps:

• Ask yourself what you want to achieve through your SEO?

  • Is your goal to increase traffic on your website?

  • Do you want to sell more of a specific product or group of products?

  • Are you thinking about rebranding yourself?

This is very specific to you and your company’s needs. So, take some time to think this over before diving in. Once you’ve done this make a list of 20 keywords that are relevant to your businesses goals. This shouldn’t be an easy step, so if it is think about how you can make them even more specific to your company. These keywords will be used across your website and your SEO blog post section.

SEO Market Analysis 

Are your keywords geo-specific i.e. does your location make a difference to the search. For example, If your company is an e-commerce website that sells shoes internationally local SEO doesn’t really matter. Whereas if you have a store that sells ice cream cakes you are going to want to focus on local SEO. Regardless of whether you need to focus on local SEO or not, you will need to learn to think like your customer:

What questions would your customer ask when searching for your product or a competitor’s product?

This brings up the next point, what are your competitors up to? Do some digging and find out what keywords they are ranking for. Do they pop up when you search for any of the keywords you have listed? If so this would probably be a good keyword to focus on so you can start eating up some of their market share.

SEO Keyword Planning Tool

Like I said your best off using the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to start off. All you have to do is make a Google AdWords account, put a card on file, and you'll be able to access all the features. This tool is great for figuring out which keywords to focus on. Once you have your list of 20 keywords put them all in to the SEO keyword planner, compare the results and start trimming your list. If you see that a keyword has low competition and high search volume you’ve got yourself a focus point. However, if you find that a keyword has a medium competition rate, and low search volume it’s probably not worth your time and effort.