By now, you know the goals of your SEO campaign—branding, lead generation, sales transactions, and so on. Now, it's time to dig into the data. There are infinite number of ways to go about doing keyword research. I'm going to take you step-by-step through one of them. It's not necessarily the right or the best way but it's a good, solid technique that I've used many times to produce excellent results.
You need one more thing—a spreadsheet. Whether you use Excel, Numbers, or Google Docs, the easiest way to keep track of a list of keywords is in a huge spreadsheet. It doesn't have to be complicated, just a simple list of keywords and some key data about each one. Something like this:
Keyword Research
|
Keyword |
Searched |
Source |
Difficulty |
Rank |
Keep? |
|
… |
… |
… |
… |
