Whether it’s a blog, company website or ecommerce site, you’ve got to do your keyword research before deciding on which keywords to optimize for. What’s the point in optimizing for a set of keywords that no one is searching for? On the other hand, it’s going to be difficult to achieve high rankings for keywords with a really high search volume due to their competitiveness.
There’s two free tools you can use for your research. Google Trends and Google Keyword Tool.
Google Trends
Google Trends shows historical graphs of search volumes. By entering different searches separated by commas, you can compare two or more sets of keywords side by side in the same graph to see how they’ve performed over time.
So in the search below, you can see over the past five years, there’s been more searches for “sony tv”, with search volumes peaking around christmas time. Since the beginning of 2009 however, searches for “samsung tv” have started to become more popular.
The scale at the top which says “samsung tv: 1.00, sony tv: 1.26″ means that on average for every person searching for samsung tv, there are 1.26 people searching for sony tv.
Google Keyword Tool
Google Keyword Tool allows you to see the average number of searches performed on certain keywords each month. You’ll see a column titled “Local Search Volume”, this means the number of searches per month in your country. You can choose the country from the scroll box at the top of the page.
I’ll use the example again of “samsung tv”. You can check the “Use synonyms” box. If you do, Google will display results for searches including the word “tvs”, as Google counts tv and tvs to be a similar thing.
You can use the results to narrow down the keywords you’re targeting on your site and choose something more specific. So in this case, it’s best to avoid trying to optimize just for the words “samsung tv”. Because of the really high search volume, 2,240,000 monthly global, those keywords are going to be really competitive. I would choose “buy samsung tv” or “samsung flat tv”.
