Part of making money online requires that you learn some key skills that will make your chances of success much more likely. One of those skills is keyword research. Keyword research will help you identify which keywords and phrases are popular, which ones aren’t so competitive and which keywords are most likely to be profitable.

There is a lot to understand about keyword research and at face value it all seems pretty simple right! How hard can it be, you just need to choose some words. WRONG!

A lot can be learned from keywords that people use to search. Shorter keyword terms like ‘dogs’ tell you that the user is not really sure what they want, so their searches are very broad. If they had done their research they will generally know what they want and just want to go right to it, so they might search for ‘buy short haired german shepard in new york’ . Now there is someone who knows what they want so they are more specific and are ready to spend their money.

Jennifer Laycock wrote a great article on the user buying cycle earlier this year which outlines in more detail how users work through the buying cycle and end up purchasing a product or service. Your keyword research needs to capture the user at the moment they are ready to buy. Once they get to your site, it’s up to you to write compelling content that assures them what your are offering over delivers on their expectations.

Aaron Wall from SEOBook, has a video on how to approach keyword research including some basic tools, and the methods you might want to try to come up with keywords, phrases and keyword modifiers that will give you a killer list of keywords to promote your product or service.