Lesson 2: Pre-Production Process and Market and Keyword Analysis
This is the second part of a series of search engine optimization lessons. On this lesson I will start to explain you what I call the “Pre-Production” process of your campaign. At the start of each campaign one must do a market and keyword analysis research. Market Research is when one researches and evaluates the current online competition for that specific client. By doing this you will be finding out who your actual competition is and what they are doing to stay on top of things. You can find your competition by using different methods, one of them is by doing a search on the keywords that you think your client will rank for, and you will notice that some websites will start to looking familiar after a while. Write them down in a document.
Once you complete your list, go back and start analyzing each of this websites. I usually note the 10 most relevant competitors that I will be going against to in the Search Engine Results Page or commonly known as the SERP. Take a close look at these sites as these competitors are doing something right because they are currently ranking for what you want. The most important things to look at are what they are using in their Meta Tags, most importantly the content of the Title Tag and the Keyword Meta Tag. Start writing in a document a list of all of the keywords that you think is important; they will help you when you start doing your own keyword research. Each client will be a different type of business so try to learn as much as you can about the business when you are doing this. It will help you throughout the project and when conversing with the client as you will be more knowledgeable. You can also find out how hard or easy it will be for you to rank for the specified keyword. If your competitors all have page rank of 6 and 7 then it will be a pretty though road to beat, nothing is impossible tough.Once you complete a full evaluation of competitors, you will continue into starting your keyword analysis. A keyword analysis needs to be done in order to find a list of appropriate target keywords. By appropriate I mean keywords that you will be able to effectively rank for and bring traffic to their web site and increase their ROI (Return on Investment). There are many tools out there that can help you do this, there is one that I have found the most useful. The Google Ad Words Keyword Tool, which is free of cost to use. In order to take advantage of all of the features that this tool can offer you should create a Google account and log in each time before you use the keyword tool. This tool will provide you with all the relevant information for your project. On the top box you will input ideas of keyword that you have might thought that you wanted to rank for. The keyword tool will return you with up to 800 related keywords, find the ones that you think are the most important to your site and store them in an Excel spreadsheet, save the keyword and the traffic – for this I use Global Monthly Searches. Make sure that you do not repeat them, and start sorting them out by similarity. Once you think you had enough go back and try organizing them once more. At the end sort each of the categories by traffic. This will now be the keyword which you will base your campaign on.Click Here to Download my Sample Spreadsheet to save the information you have found on your research.While doing your keyword researches you should know this. Don???t try to rank for a keyword that you are never going to get. Example: Don???t go and try to rank for Music Videos when trying to rank an upcoming artist debut video, try ranking for something more relevant like ???Upcoming Pop Artist {Artist Name} Music Video??? which will bring you better result. But also don???t go and only try to rank for keywords that does not have any traffic to it as it will not bring you a lot of traffic. Also, try using a thesaurus or a dictionary to find others way that people could write your term as. This might bring you additional traffic that not a lot of people are going after but that a lot of people might be searching for.
In my next lesson I will teach you how to take these keywords and start using them to optimize your web pages. Hope that you liked this lesson and please if you did share it below via Twitter or Facebook. And once again if you have any questions or comments please write them on the form below.
