Using Adwords Keyword Tool

One of the most vital parts of the search engine optimization occurs during the planning stage and is necessary to help you attract well qualified, ready to convert traffic to your site. The keyword research stage of SEO can be a pivotal step in the success of your website.

The point of SEO is not just to rank number one in search engine results for as many terms as possible, the reason SEO’s spend so much time restructuring websites and link building is increase conversions and make their customers profit. Whether those conversions as sales, new letter sign ups or leads an SEO should target keywords that are relevant and likely to convert.

Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool can help you along in this process. In the screen shot below you can see how competitive keywords related to the term “tools” are. The green bar represents the competitiveness of the keyword term. This is based on data from paid search bids but it does also give some indication on how competitive these words are for organic results as well.

Though it would be great, you most likely will never be able to beat out companies like Home Depot, Sears and Craftsman for a keyword like “power tools”. You should not focus all of your attention on that for the short term. In the short term you should focus on less competitive keywords that offer you a better chance of getting ranked in the top three spots.

You can also dive into your analytics data and see what keywords are currently converting. This can help you find some longer tailed keywords, that are not very competitive, and that already convert at a high rate. This will attract more targeted traffic and could take less effort and time then attempting to rank for a term like “power tools”.

In summation when possible attempt to target keywords with a decent search volume, previous records of high conversion rates and low competition on SERPs.