Keyword Research & Analysis

Keyword research is the most fundamental and important stage in a successful SEO campaign. It is vital that we ensure that we are optimising for the right search terms. It's no use getting to the top of Google for a phrase which nobody searches for. Keyword research is about identifying the key words and phrases that real people type into search engines to find your product or service. Quite commonly, these may not be the phrases you might expect, particularly in fields where the customers may not have the same level of technical knowledge or industry jargon as the site publishers. We use a range of online research tools to identify lists of hundreds of search phrases which have been typed into search engines.

Keyword analysis takes this a stage further, and seeks to refine these lists and identify the best targets for optimisation. We are looking for terms which people use regularly (have a high search frequency) which we also have a realistic chance of achieving high rankings for (have relatively low numbers of competing pages). We analyse and rank keyphrases using a measure called Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), which compares search frequency with competition. The higher the KEI of a phrase, the better the target for optimisation.

Typically we refine our list of potential target search terms to a shortlist depending on the size of the website in question. We generally find that working with a larger list dilutes the effects of the optimisation too much to be effective with all but the largest sites.