Keyword research should be the first step in any marketing plan. In fact, it should be the first step in e-commerce development as you need to know if there is interest in your business idea.

While keyword research is an obvious step to most people, the fundamentals of doing it can be challenging if you don’t take the time to think about the process. By failing to properly develop a scope of keywords, you can miss out on some golden keywords. This, of course, means less traffic and ultimately revenue.

The first step in keyword research is to hit your root keywords. Let’s assume I am building a site offering internet marketing. Very creative, eh? My root keyword to be researched is not “internet marketing”. It is “marketing”. If I were to research only “internet marketing”, I would miss out on web marketing, online marketing and so on. More importantly, I would miss out on the tail keywords off of each of these large traffic words. While getting ranked for “internet marketing services” might be difficult, “web marketing services” might be easier. If I don’t handle the research properly, we will never know.

The second area where it is easy to fall down on keyword research is slavishly sticking to your site subject. Let’s assume I am starting a site selling beauty care products. Logic says I would research keyword phrases like “beauty”, “skin”, “lotion” and so on. As usually, the logical approach is correct, but you should expand your research beyond these phrases.

With a beauty site, there is ample room to expand the keywords beyond the root subjects. Off the top of my head, I would look to research phrases like “gifts” for mother’s day and other holidays as well as words like “problems”, “buy”, “information” and so on. Every so often, a phrase will pop up with a lot of traffic that you never thought of. This is the best way to make sure you catch them. For a site selling jewelry, for instance, variations of the keywords “gifts”, “wedding”, “anniversary” and “engagement” are probably going to produce large amounts of traffic.

At the end of the day, keyword research is critical. Make sure to take the time to think it through and develop an appropriate list of keywords for your site. Spend the time now and you can reap the benefits down the line.

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