This is a continuation of our Local SEO Quick Start Guide.  Once you've established what the goals are for your website, the next step is to do keyword research. Nearly everything you do to market your business online is based on the keyword research you do during this step so it's absolutely critical to get this right. The goal is to figure out how people are actually searching for your products/services online or the solutions that your business provides. Here are a few quick steps for doing keyword research.

Start With the Right Tools

First, it helps to start off with the right tools. There are a few that we use for our clients that you can use as well. Truth be told, there are a myriad of keyword research tools available online but in the interests of time, this article will focus on two:

• Google's Adwords Keyword Tool (free)
• Wordtracker (paid)

The Google tool is usually the first one I suggest simply because Google gets the bulk of online searches and traffic and this tool shows you how many people are searching for a particular phrase each month. However, Wordtracker usually includes lots of additional keywords that might be useful for helping you create content or find additional long-tail keywords that get fewer searches but bring in more targeted traffic.

Figure Out How People Are Searching For What You Offer

With either of these tools, your goal is to find out how people are searching for your products and services online. This could be by name, by type of product/service, or by searching for answers to problems that your business provides solutions for.

As an example, let's say you have a product about back pain. People might be searching for:

• The name of your product (if it's well known)
• Terms like "back pain aids", "back pain remedies" or similar terms
• Terms like "stop back pain", "back pain help" and so on

Of course, with some businesses, the product or service being offered is so focused that there may only be a handful of terms most people would use when searching for it. But for most businesses, you won't really know all the variations people are using to search for your type or products unless you do keyword research.

See Which Terms Get the Most Traffic (That Would Convert Into Sales)

Once you know how people are searching for your business online, you can determine which terms get the most traffic - traffic that will likely convert into sales. These terms will most likely be the terms you want to have your homepage optimized for. Most of the time, you'll also see second- and third-tier terms that get less traffic but that are still relevant to your business. Ideally, you'll create additional pages on your site that are optimized for these terms.

For example, with our back pain site mentioned earlier, we might decide that we just want to target the generic term "back pain" on the homepage. We might also want to create additional pages to target more specific terms such as "back pain exercises", "back pain treatments", "back pain therapy" and so on by creating separate categories or sections for each of those terms.

If the purpose of this site was to sell a product that helps relieve back pain, it would be smart to not only offer the product itself, but also provide plenty of useful material related to back pain that would rank highly for people searching for solutions and answers to that problem. Keyword research and a well-structured site would allow us to do just that.

Use Keyword Research to Drive Your Other Online Marketing Efforts

Once you've done keyword research, you can use those results to drive everything from how your site is organized, which new pages need to be added, what types of content/articles need to be created, etc. It can also give you insights into what questions or problems people are looking for answers on, and of course, being able to provide those solutions at a reasonable value is the basis of a great business.