The most effective keyword research does more than just bring more people to your website, it brings the right people to your website. In fact, it does exactly what the search engines want it to by ensuring that the vast majority of people who visit your website are finding exactly what they were looking for when they entered their search term into the search engine.

Keyword Research is about bringing the right visitor to your website.

Out of all the people searching with keywords related to your website, only a small proportion of these will actually be your ideal viewer: the person who is going to visit your website and purchase a product or service.

When you begin to SEO your website you’re looking discover the keywords that your ideal viewer would type into the search engines. For instance, if you are selling Ferraris then your ideal viewer will be someone who is looking to buy a Ferrari, someone who is willing to spend a lot of money on it, and maybe even someone who is looking to buy more than one.

Therefore, you would never target the keywords “cheap ferraris”, “free ferraris”, or “ben afflecks ferrari”. Even if you could get to page 1 on Google for these search terms and increase the amount of visitors to your website tenfold it probably wouldn’t mean as much for your business as if you did a little better for a more effective keyword.

Are your target keywords trendy or losing momentum?

Another important feature of good keyword optimisation is that it can help you to take advantage of trending searches. If you hire a high quality SEO consultant he might assess the popularity of your keywords over time, to make sure that searches for your chosen keywords are likely to increase in volume in the future rather than decreasing. It’s no use optimising half your website for one keyword if no one is going to be searching for it in a month’s time.

Proper keyword research helps to ensure that your website draws in more of the type of people who are likely to benefit your business, as well as ensuring that it continues to do so long into the future.

Thanks to the guys at Search Engine Land and Common Craft for this great piece.