How important is keyword research?

depends on what your website offers. But in terms of an SEO strategy or any sort of SEO activity, there can be no search engine optimization without a decent idea of KWs. So in short, it’s immensely important.

Remember; keeping your finger on the pulse of the target market and understanding exactly what they are looking for, is the corner stone of any marketing campaign.
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Marketing Degree

It’s absolutely the most important thing you can do. Everything else that is done is based on the keywords/phrases that you choose. Choose one that no one is searching for and you can have all the ranking in the world but it won’t help.

Think of the old yellow pages. If you were a dog groomer and your listing was under animal shelters, would it help?

You can start by using Google’s Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal#. Be careful, though, when looking at the results. The competition is for pay per click; not pages in the SERPs. It’s still a good indicator because people will not pay a lot for bad keywords so, if the PPC competition is fierce, you can figure that it’s a good keyword.

But then you have to do the REAL competitive analysis. How many competing sites? How good is their on-page SEO? What is their PageRank? And, how many backlinks do they have coming to that page on their site?

Answer these questions and you’re well on your way to the top. (There’s software out there that will perform this analysis pretty quickly.) Market Samurai and Traffic Travis are two that I use (MS the most).

Good luck with your endeavor.

If I can help, email me at larry@perrydysemarketing.com
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Hello…
I agree to Mr.Perrydyse. Keyword is essential for the site to be searched by the search engine. For this the keyword research is to be done, to find appropriate keyword for the site.
For more information and help contact me.

http://www.prominere.com
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Keyword research is the most important thing you can do to a website without it you could be marketing your website to an area of clients which simply isn’t there.

I have made a full blog post about this to help you out some more
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http://www.kevinwiles.co.u/blog

Ditto. Keyword research is huuuuuuuge on the internet. Before keyword tools were created, marketers had to guess what people might have been typing in.
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Awesome post, I’m an avid reader of this site, keep up the great work, and I’ll be a regular for a very long time.