Keyword research is an absolutely necessary tool. It gives you the ability to find and research specific search terms which people individually enter into the search engines when performing any sort of search for information, products or services. This is incredibly helpful for optimising websites, because if you can see what people are searching for, then you can quickly set up your site and its content so that the search engines index these specifically chosen keywords. This will tip the scales in your favour when it comes to driving targeted traffic toward your website. It’s not complicated, and there are a few really easy to use applications out there to help you perform this kind of research.
As a Virtual Assistant, you’ll want to optimize your own sites, and it’s also more than likely that several of your clients will ask you to carry out research for them too. If you discover that you’re performing keyword search often, then you might consider investing in a program that will take care of some of the time consuming steps for you. However, keep in mind that you should always understand how to do it without additional software assistance, as these programmes certainly aren’t foolproof, and it’s always a responsible practice to occasionally verify the results too.
Here’s a simple guide on how to perform a keyword search using Google:
1. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You don’t need to be signed up for AdWords to do this. It’s an external search that you can carry out for free.
2. Enter the Keywords that you want to search for – in this case I am using “Virtual Assistant”, then type in the captcha character text (if necessary) and press the Get Keyword Ideas button.
3. You will be given a list of suggested keywords and related keywords from the starting keyword that you entered.
4. As you can clearly see, the application has given us a list which I have itemised by local search volume for April. This shows us that there is extremely intense competition for the keyword Virtual Assistant, and it also shows us that there were 135,000 searches for this particular keyword in April. We’re searching for a keyword that we can utilise to become ranked higher up in the search engines so we can direct more traffic to our website. So if we take a look at this list, an exellent target is to choose a keyword with not less 100 searches a day. The competition for Virtual Assistant Services is still fairly high, but if we now go over to Google, we can take a look at our potential competition.
5. So, let’s perform a search for “Virtual Assistant Services”, and don’t forget to use the quotation marks or you’ll get back results with any combination of these keywords.
At this point, as you can clearly see, this page shows us that there are (at the time this article was written) 57,700 pages ranked for this particular combination of words. It’s not impossible for you to be able to compete with your page ranked for this specific word – you just need to put in a bit of work.
I’m certainly not saying that this is the best keyword for you to work toward ranking your Virtual Assistant business with. This is just an example of what you may want to check out. Be inventive and try to ‘think outside the box’ with your imagination. What terms do you think your clients would search for? You’re going to want to repeat this process to find several keywords that you can utilise for establishing your Search Engine Index niche.
Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, a cutting edge Executive Virtual Assistant Service which assists organisations and enterprising individuals with every detail of their entrepreneurial aspirations. Do you want to peruse some further information on these incredible online business building success strategies? Enter the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance as soon as possible!
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