A book lies open, with a magnifying glass and pen on the right hand page. A small globe sits next to it.

Keyword research

Before you start optimising your website, or, ideally before you even launch your website, you need to find out what exactly people are searching for related to your business. This is called keyword research.

Tools of the trade

Many people use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner for this purpose, thought there are many other alternatives. The tool is, as the name suggests, intended for people who advertise on the Google Ads platform, but as Google serves both paid and free (or, as we say in the industry, organic) search results together, it’s equally useful for SEO. The tool can be accessed by having a Google Ads account (don’t worry, you don’t actually have to create any campaigns, just an account). The problem with the GA Keyword planner is that it does not give out the most accurate data unless you are willing to spend a lot of money.

A better alternative for most is SEM Rush and their Magic Keyword Tool. This not only offers accurate data on search volumes, but it can do a lot of the initial sorting into groups for you.

What to do is type in the most relevant terms you think people search for related to your business and the tools will show you the search volumes for your terms (if significant enough) and ones related to it. You’ll then need to group these together to understand the various topics potential visitors are interested in, and the amount of interest in each.

Dig deeper than just the basics

Some of the time, you will be surprised what the biggest terms are. Some of the time, it’s fairly obvious. For example, if you have a hotel in Edinburgh, it should come as little surprise that the most searched for keyword is “hotel in Edinburgh”. But SEO is not just hinging on one keyword, despite what some think.

I would suggest you download the terms and put them into an Excel spreadsheet or, if you want to keep it online, to a Google doc.

If you’re doing this for a new website or to add content to an existing website, you’re likely best off performing keyword research several times to cover all areas of your business. To go back to the hotel example, do you offer breaks or special offers? Do you offer gift certificates? Does your hotel have a spa that offers treatments? Do keyword research for all these areas of your business and download them for your reference.

Once you have this keyword research ready, you can start to use to create meta information and try to infuse it into the on-page copy of your site.