Making Money Online From Home Is Easier With Proper Keyword Research - 4 minutes read
For many, making money online from home involves the use of keywords to get traffic to your website. There are many articles and other information sources about keyword research and the importance of using keywords to drive traffic to a website. Unfortunately, many of these articles and information sources only reveal part of the information you need to conduct keyword research properly. The information they provide will get you started in the right direction, but may cause you to miss a number of the good keywords and phrases that you might be able to use. And the incomplete methods revealed in many of those articles can cause you to work harder and get poorer results for your efforts.
There are three components to keyword research. First, you need to identify keywords that people are using to find information about a subject. This is the utility component - people commonly use certain keywords or phrases to search for information and some keywords are used more often than others.
Most information sources will point you to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool as a good way to gauge the utility of different keywords, and it's a great place to start. You can quickly get information about a keyword and related terms, and since it's from Google, the most commonly used search engine, you know the information is based on real statistics about actual searches that are done by real people.
If you had a keyword research tool or service you wanted to market, you would need to check for keywords related to keyword research. The phrase "keyword research", according to the Google Keyword Tool, is used an average of 12,100 times per month. A related term, "keyword research services", is used in searches for information an average of 590 times monthly. So from this one measure it would appear that "keyword research" is a better term to use to try to get traffic to your website since it's used in 20 times more searches each month.
The next component of keyword research is the competitiveness of the search term. Making money online from home requires making the most of your efforts, so you don't want to put a lot of effort into highly competitive keywords if there are related keywords that are used often in the search engines with a lot less competition. But don't make the mistake of using the Google Keyword Tool to try to assess the competitiveness of your keyword candidates. The competition value given in the Google Keyword Tool represents the level of competition for the term in AdWords. And if you're using keywords in your efforts to get traffic to your website, you're probably not using PPC campaigns these days since they're often difficult to justify.
So you need to get an assessment of the competitiveness of the term in general use, outside of AdWords. There are a number of ways to do this. One way is to simply enter the keyword in Google and see how many results you get. For example, "keyword research" gets 119,000,000 results and "keyword research services" returns 53,600,000 results. Note that these numbers are not useful by themselves. They only have value when you compare them to each other. A good way to make use of these numbers is to make a list in a spreadsheet so you can sort and compare the terms by the number of searches and the competitiveness measurement.
The third component of keyword research is competitive quality. We just learned one way to determine how competitive a search term is, but that doesn't give us any indication of the quality of the competition. For this component we're not concerned with the quality of all the other websites that use a search term. We're trying to use the keyword to get traffic to your website by getting your website listed in the top ten results on Google, so we only need to be concerned about the top ten competitors.
To get a good competitive quality measure you need to use a keyword research tool. Finding one is easy using the Google search engine. You need to find one that will show how difficult it will be for you to get your site to rank on the search engines for your chosen keywords. The competitive quality assessment will check the sites that are using one of the keywords you're considering to measure both on-page use of the keyword and the number of backlinks from other sites. With that information you can determine which are the best keywords in your list to use for your efforts to get traffic to your website.