How Long Should Good Keyword Research Take?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Should you spend hours and hours on keyword research or can you just take a few minutes out of your busy day and do good research? Actually, most people are surprised to find out that good keyword research doesn’t necessarily take up a lot of time. It can, if you want to spend all of your time analyzing this word against that word and traffic stats against traffic stats, looking for the perfect combination of low competition and high search engine optimization profitability. Sure, you can spend hours and hours analyzing information in order to come up with the right keywords before you even begin building your website. But you don’t have to do it that way.

In most cases, you already know what your keywords are. You do the research to confirm what your best keywords are. Use your intuition. Are people going to search for terrier puppies or Boston York terrier? Maybe you don’t know. If not then do the research. But you likely know that if a term is more general in nature then more people will search for that term. But if a term is too specific for what you have to offer then why are you going to target it just because somebody said it’s more profitable? The most important thing about keywords is relevance. Profitability is secondary.

What I don’t mean is pick some obscure keyword and don’t worry about how many search people make for it. That’s a sure recipe for failure. But take your key concept, the broad niche and figure out where you fall within it. Check to see if your niche is too narrow. If so, broaden them. If too broad, narrow them. Use your research to hone in on the right keywords; don’t get wrapped up around analyzing them.