You want to choose keywords that you can rank highly for and will also bring you customers/users.
Volume vs. Competition
These are two of the most important things you should start off taking a look at when doing keyword research.
Volume refers to the number of people that are searching for that specific word or phrase every month. Competition refers to how many other website are competing to rank for that term. It is constantly a balancing act between the two.
We would all love to rank highly for those high volume keywords, which is exactly the problem. Those high volume keywords are going to be much more competitive, or in other words it is going to take more work to rank for them.
A way to make your targeted keywords less competitive is by making them phrases instead, so they are more specific. These are called long-tailed keywords.
Long-Tailed Niche Keywords
Long-Tailed phrases are keywords that are much more specific than just on word would be. For example, it would be great to rank for “T-Shirts”, because a lot of people search for that word every month. However this also means that it would be more competitive. Adding more descriptors onto it, such as “Black glitter t-shirts” will not only most likely lessen the competition but will bring you customers instead of browsers.
This idea of bringing customers to your website instead of browsers is very important because these will also be targeted from your keywords selection.
Relevance
Let’s be honest, we don’t want people to just visit our website, we ultimately want them to become either our customers or followers. This is what the web community calls “conversion”, or where web traffic converts from browsers to customers. You can implement these into your long-tailed keywords.
Make sure you are specific in your product descriptions. By including more text in your product descriptions you will give the search engines more keywords to pick up on and rank for. In-depth product descriptions will also help to increase your “authority” in that market.
How to Find Information
So now you know what you need to look for in a keyword when choosing it, but how do you find that information?
Both Google Trends and WordTracker’s free program will show you what the most popular search terms out there are. This can help you figure out if you need to narrow them down further.
These will help show you what people are searching for and where!