Creating a keywords list

As you’re crafting your SEO plan, it’s vital to conduct research on what keywords are relevant to the market you’re targeting.

This is important as you don’t want to be optimising for a bunch of keywords that no one is actually using when they are searching for a product.

For example, if you are selling rubbish bins in Australia, it’s important that we optimise for the term ‘rubbish bins’ and not ‘trash cans’ or ‘garbage cans’.

Generally speaking, keyword research will help us to identify other potential pitfalls like this one.

What you need to do next is sit down with key people in the business for a good 30 minutes to an hour to brainstorm which keywords you and your customers would use if they were to search for the products/services that your company provides.

Once you’ve got your list, plug these keywords into the very popular Google Adwords Keyword tool.

This tool is the most widely used and the data it presents in terms of volume of searches is great for estimating the market. However, it should by no means be treated as conclusive data.

It’s imperative that you select the geographical region (in this case Australia) when using the tool. Otherwise you might end up with numbers that are highly inflated and completely wrong.

Once you’ve done that, what the Google Adwords Keyword tool will do is show you a list of other related keywords that you may not have captured during your initial brainstorming session. Make sure to compile a full list of all these keywords, including the estimated traffic data that the tool provides.

What you will have now is a first draft of your keyword list that is most relevant to your business. You then need to group these lists into categories.

For example, if you have the words ‘garbage cans’, ‘garbage containers’, ‘garbage bins’, ‘rubbish bins’ and ‘rubbish cans’, you would group the ones with the word ‘garbage’ together and the ones with the word ‘rubbish’ together.

This is important because you’d want to craft out a page for each category that you’ve identified.

Essentially, what you’d want to have at the end of this process is a list of relevant keywords to the products/services in your business that have been categorised in an orderly fashion.

You would then be able to use this list by creating pages on your website that target the various categories or by associating existing pages to those keywords.

Be sure to use all the principles we’ve learnt so far through including the keywords in the title tag, content and other important SEO principles.