If you hope to dominate your niche with your online marketing efforts, you need to engage in the proper keyword research. Online marketing relies on traffic and much of online traffic comes from the search engines. The search engines want to offer users the very best experience possible. When users search for things using various keyword terms, the search engines want to deliver the most accurate search results that relate to those terms. Whether the result is a web page, a Google places page or a social networking platform, the search result should provide answers to the users most pressing questions. Your job as the online marketer is to make sure that your search results show up when they need to and solve problems like the customer wants. This requires extensive keyword research.
So Many Questions, So Many Answers
If you ask a hundred online marketers how they engage in keyword research, you’ll probably get a hundred different answers. With so many tools, techniques, secrets and 
misinformation scattered all over the Internet, the subject of keyword research is saturated, convoluted and often confusing to the novice or even intermediary.
The thing with keyword research is that it’s always changing, always evolving. As the search engines continue to tweak their algorithms in an effort to weed out scams and spam, the keyword data you glean today may not be as relevant or accurate tomorrow.
That being said, the following is a simple form of keyword research that should take you down the path so that you can see how the process is performed. Then you can branch off on your own as you continue to study and perfect this ever-changing and often difficult form of online marketing preparation.
Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool
Google Adwords is Google’s online advertising platform and the entire platform relies on keywords. Therefore, Google provides each Adwords customer with a free research tool so that the customer can get the absolute most out of the online advertising experience. The better the customer does at online advertising, the more Google makes. This is a win-win for everyone involved. This also provides you with an opportunity to find the keywords your audience is searching for most that you can use in all of your future marketing efforts.
Conducting Your Initial Search
If you already have a niche picked out, pretend you have a problem in that niche and you desperately want someone to help you solve it. For instance, if you are working with the ‘relationships’ niche, you might search for keyword terms like, “how to get ex back,” “Dating after divorce,” things like that. If you don’t have a niche picked out, just start searching for common problems that people might be searching for in desperation. Focus on relationships, vanity, health and other evergreen niches that will always be in high-demand.
Your results should be set to broad so that you don’t limit your results in any way. Then, once your results have come back, look for the terms that have high monthly search numbers, but not too high. Mostly you will be looking for long-tail keywords with monthly searches of 100 or more.
Long tail keywords are terms that are made up of more than one or two keywords. “get your ex back” might be very saturated, but “how to get your ex boyfriend back” might not be. The longer the keywords, the less competition you’ll likely deal with.
It may take several searches and lots of brain storming before you come up with a list of highly-searched for keyword terms. Once you have that list, you will then head over to Google’s homepage to continue your keyword research.
Searching Google For Your Hot Keyword Terms
You now have a list of long-tail keyword terms with substantial monthly search numbers. Now you need to find out how much competition there is for each term on your list. You can do this by searching for your keyword terms in Google and in quotes.
For example – “get your ex girlfriend back”
When you hit submit, Google will deliver targeted search results for that keyword term and will even provide you with a number of how many results turned up. If the number is less than 10,000, that’s a great keyword term. Even if the number is 15,000, you might be able to do wonderful things with that keyword if you work hard.
Don’t just rely on the number of results; actually pay attention to the first several results for each term. Click on the web pages or videos or articles and try to determine how much value is being delivered. Can you deliver even better value? If the answer is yes and the keyword term has satisfied all the other previous conditions, you now have at least one keyword term for your future online marketing efforts.
If you can gather an entire list of keyword terms just like that one for the niche you’re working with, your online marketing presence will truly become a force to be reckoned with.
