Keyword research is an absolutely necessary tool. It gives you the opportunity to discover and research particular search terms which people specifically enter into the search engines when submitting any kind of search for information, products or services. This is incredibly helpful for optimising websites, because if you can see what people are searching for, then you can quickly set up your site and its content so that the search engines index these specifically chosen keywords. This will make all the difference in driving traffic toward your website. It’s not overly complex, and there are several really easy to use applications available to help you pursue this sort of research.
As a Virtual Assistant, you’ll want to optimize your own in-house websites, and it’s also quite possible that many of your clients will ask you to look into this sort of research for them as well. If you find that you’re doing keyword search regularly, then you may want to think about investing in a program that will automate some of the time consuming stages for you. However, you should always know how to do it manually, as these programmes aren’t infallible, and it’s always good practice to check the results you’re getting periodically.
Here’s a simple guide on how to perform a keyword search using Google:
1. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You don’t need to be signed up for AdWords to do this. It’s an external search that you can carry out for free.
2. Insert the Keywords that you have an interest in checking out – in this example I’m looking up “Virtual Assistant”, then type in the captcha character text (if required) and click the Get Keyword Ideas button.
3. You will be given a list of suggested keywords and related keywords from the starting keyword that you entered.
4. As you can see, the tool has returned a list which I have sorted by local search volume for April. This shows us that there is extremely intense competition for the keyword Virtual Assistant, and it also shows us that there were 135,000 searches for this particular keyword in April. We’re looking for a word that we can use to get ranked high up in the search engines so we can get more traffic to our site. So if we take a look at this list, an exellent target is to choose a keyword with not less 100 searches a day. The competition for Virtual Assistant Services is still rather significant, but if we now move over to Google, we can check out our possible competition.
5. So, let’s do a search on “Virtual Assistant Services”, and make sure you use the quotations marks or you’ll get results returned for any combination of those words.
Here, as you can see this page tells us that there are 57,700 pages ranked for this combination of words. It’s not impossible for you to be able to compete with your page ranked for this specific word – you just need to put in a bit of work.
I’m certainly not saying that this is the best keyword for you to work toward ranking your Virtual Assistant business with. It’s simply an example of what you might have an interest in checking out. Be creative and ‘think outside the box’ with your ideas. What terms do you think your clients would search for? You’re going to want to repeat this process to find several keywords that you can utilise for establishing your Search Engine Index niche.
Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Experienced Executive Virtual Assistant who collaborates with businesses and individuals with the sole aim of accomplishing their professional goals. Want to learn more about these comprehensive online business building success strategies? Join the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance right now!
