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Research Your Keywords and Your Competition

Written by: Jeff Pela

Article Overview: When companies open for business, it is a good idea that the business owners studies their competition and has a good understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. This holds true for e-businesses you never want to start a new project and spend money without knowing who you are going into business against. Sales and marketing managers have always needed information about their competitors’ products, prices, channels of distribution, and promotional strategies to plan their own marketing strategies. Search engine optimization is a type of marketing strategy, and in order to formulate an affective campaign of your own, you must be well informed about the optimization strategies of your competitors.

Research Your Keywords and Your Competition

The fastest and easiest way to gain information on your competition is to enter the keywords in which you intend to market into search engines and look for the results. First you want to search for a term, i.e. car wash (All examples are with Google). You should see a blue box indicating the number of total results found for that keyword. Next do the same search with quotation marks around the words; this is a more accurate search, because the quotation marks indicate that you are looking for that exact phrase. This technique give you an approximate idea about how many sites there are using this term within their website title or text. Although this is a good method to determine the total number of sites that are indexed on the web within your keyword, you are not competing against each of these sites, but more specifically the sites that are properly optimized.

The optimizer would want to look at the amount of pay per click (PPC) ads on the page, which gives an idea as to how much people are willing to spend on advertising for that keyword (the more PPC ads, the more people are willing to spend on advertising).

There are also many free tools which you can view the total number of searches per keyword, and also get suggestions of other keywords related to your specific search such as:
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/keyword-suggestion-tool.html?
and https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

Take all of this information into consideration when performing your research. Look for keywords that get a good number of monthly searches, but doesn't have in the hundred of millions in competition. Pay attention to the keywords and try and be as descriptive as possible, which usually helps with choosing a keyword/keyword phrase that will be better choice for your example. For example choose "shoe repair" instead of "shoes".

Related Articles
  Understanding Article Marketing Research
  The Basics of Article Marketing Research
  The SEO Process
  Get Your Keyword Research Right
  Choosing The Right Keywords For Your Business

Article Tags: accurate search, Google, keyword suggestion tool, PPC, quotation marks, search engines



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