Keywords are important for several reasons. First of all, there is traffic. If you choose the wrong keywords to target, you probably won’t get as much traffic as you’d like. Whether you are using PPC or search engines to get your traffic, your keywords will affect your ranking and link performance.
Another reason keywords are so vital is the fact that you need targeted traffic. Ten thousand visitors coming to your domain via the keyword “books” probably won’t be worth anything compared to 500 visitors coming via the keyword “Harry Potter books”, if that’s what you’re selling.
Someone looking for “books” is probably just browsing. They may not even be interested in buying anything; they might be interested in selling books, book bans, book publishers, and more.
But someone searching for “Harry Potter books” is probably ready to buy something right then and there. So it’s not enough to get a lot of traffic: you need a lot of traffic that is willing to take the action you want them to take.
Whether you’re looking to sell eBooks, promote affiliate products, get leads for a CPA offer, or just get subscriptions to your list, you want targeted visitors who are likely to be buyers now or in the future.
Once you have chosen a niche that you would like to pursue, you need to research the keywords that you will use. If you’re writing articles, you’ll need to choose keywords to use for titles and text. If you are creating niche websites, you will need to use keywords in the domain name. If you’re buying PPC traffic, the keywords you choose will likely be one of the biggest factors in determining whether or not your campaign is profitable.
There are many tools you can buy to help with keyword research, but Google also has its own free keyword tool. They don’t show you numbers, but they do give you a general idea of the searches a keyword gets, as indicated by a colored bar: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
You will first want to enter a base keyword for your niche. Let’s say you’re targeting the golf niche. You can enter “golf” into the keyword tool of your choice. The keyword tool will then show you a series of related keywords.
You can think of “golf clubs”, “golf tips”, “golf swing”, “golf bags”, “golf carts” and “golf courses”. This is a short list of broader terms. But you’ll want to build a store of keywords that you can use for months and years to come, so grab them all!