Keyword Research – Key to Success in Internet Marketing

Keywords are the most important factor for success of your internet marketing and promotion campaign. Selection of right keywords is the base that decides the outcome of every Search Engine Optimization and search engine marketing campaign. Therefore, keyword research has always been a primary concern for SEO and SEM experts.

I’m going to discuss different type of keywords and possibility of success after selecting each of them. This article will be helpful for people in following categories:

1. Beginners in Internet Marketing (trying to know the secrets of keyword research)
2. Experienced Internet Marketers (who are not getting desired results of their campaigns)
3. Anyone else who is eager to learn the best searching mechanism

Keyword Research Strategy

While doing keyword research for your website, it is very important for you to know two important things, type of visitors coming to your website and keywords used by them for searching. Both are of immense importance, and without considering these two, you can’t get expected traffic to your website.

Depending upon the purpose of search, we can classify visitors into three types:

1. Visitors who search for surfing purpose (without any intention of buying)
2. Visitors looking for a comparison of products or services (eager to know product or service details, sooner or later they can turn up into buyers)
3. Actual buyers (ready to buy, you need to impress them)

Searching mechanism of above described internet search users is different. Their search term varies significantly. We can understand this easily with a real search example, consider following keywords targeted for a website operating cruising vacations:

• Cruises (38,500,000 results)
• Honeymoon Cruise/cruise vacation (5,870,000/ 18,100,000 results)
• Caribbean cruise holidays/7 Night Western Caribbean Cruise (13,400,000/1,210,000 results)

(Above search results are from Google as on September 02, 2009)

The above keywords will clearly describe the type of visitor and possibility of conversion. Have a look,

1. First keyword 'cruises' depicts a normal user’s mind (suspecting visitor), which doesn’t have any intention of going on vacation. Targeting this keyword in your SEO/SEM campaigns will not result any benefits for you.
2. Second keyword "honeymoon Cruise/cruise vacation", is more specific which indicates the mind of an interested (potential customers) person looking to know more about cruises vacation or cruise packages for honeymoon couples. Targeting this keyword strategically will land up such visitors to your website. If you can get contact details (email/phone) of such visitors then you can turn them into your customers by following up.
3. Last keyword "Caribbean cruise holidays/7 Night Western Caribbean Cruise" is more specific keyword, and the user is really a ready to go type visitors. Focusing such keywords will certainly provide a boost in your website traffic and sales.

If you consider these different set of keywords and users, you will be able to do more focused keyword research that will result you more organic traffic. So, the basic concept is targeting keywords from end user’s perspective.

Using unnecessary keywords in your SEO and SEM campaigns and spending time and money for getting top ranks for those keywords may drive traffic to your website but it will not guarantee better conversion rate. Whereas if you target more specific keywords or search phrases it will boost up your sales instantly.