Keyword Research Process

Step 1 - We start by understanding your target market, and the search terms you want your website to be found with.

Step 2 - We use keyword research tools to see what keywords your competitors have used on their pages and we build a list of similar search terms and synonyms.

Step 3 - We analyse a number of factors to see how competitive each keyword is. This includes analysing the following factors (and more) resulting in our Keyword Competitiveness Index (KCI) and this helps to calculate the SearchGAP between your site and your competitors.

  • Number of search results in Google's index
  • Estimated number of searches per month
  • Page rank of the top 10 sites.
  • Keyword in TITLE of top 10 results
  • Keyword in URL of top 10 results
  • Keyword in page text of top 10 results
  • Number of incoming links to each of these top 10 sites
  • Average bid on Google Adwords for top X results (one measure of competitiveness)
  • Number of times a site has been bookmarked in Del.icio.us
  • Number of times a site has been mentioned on Google News

Step 4 - Based on our keyword research above, we calculate a keyword competitiveness index for each search term and group them into three categories.

Step 5 - The cost of the SEO campaign will depend on how many search terms you want to rank for and the competitiveness of these words. We work with you to understand which words you want to optimize for and map each word to your most relevant web page.

Once you agree on your important search terms, we move to Phase 2 of our process, the competitor research stage, to understand how complex it will be to rank against the top 10 results on Google.

Keyword research example

The following table shows a small sample of keywords with the number of searches done on Wordtracker for a month, the number of webpage results, the Keyword Effectiveness Index, the top ranking URL and the PageRank of the top ranked url.

KeywordSearchesSearches % ResultsKEI x 1000Top URLTop URL PR
website design200057.693,300,00042.87www.techdesigns.co.uk6
web site design47713.7156,000,0001.45www.techdesigns.co.uk6
custom website design822.412,100,0000.55www.webdesignoffice.us5
professional web site design2306.6120,000,0000.44www.mackins.co.uk4
affordable website design992.8346000000.28www.mackins.co.uk4
cheap website design230.72,370,0000.22www.pickaweb.co.uk4
website design company932.738,800,0000.22www.perfectblue.co.uk6

Keyword Competitiveness Index

  • Tier 1 search terms - these are very competitive words and it can take up to 12 months to get a good ranking. These words will require monthly off-site optimization by building quality links through new content and media campaigns.

  • Tier 2 search terms - these are competitive key phrases and will take from 3 to 6 months to get a good ranking. These words will require a mixture of on-site and off-site optimization.

  • Tier 3 search terms - basically these are non-competitive phrases and can probably achieve a good rank by changing on-site factors only.



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