Many company leaders and managers have their own interpretation of how they want their brand to be portrayed and ostensibly perceived online. A luxury second hand car dealer, for example, may only want to include the words ‘pre-owned automobiles’ on their web site, and not ‘used cars’. The fact that thousands of people are searching for a used car, and very few are searching for a pre-owned automobile needs to be communicated.

Existing Brands

If a company decides to sell Nike trainers online, the market is pretty competitive, and the Nike brand itself is predominant.

Generic keywords

Focusing on generic keywords that gain an enormous number of searches, but which also have an enormous amount of competition is usually not worth it unless the keyword is highly likely to provide you with converting traffic, and unless you have a very big marketing budget. Jill Whalen goes as far as to say that knowing the top words searched is of no value at all .

While determining what a company’s core ‘generic’ offering is, sourcing and data mining all the combination and permutations of how the words are used in conjunction with other related terms can provide a wealth of what are termed ‘long-tail’ keywords. (See below)

Overlooking geographic targeting

Depending on what a company sells or offers, overlooking the likelihood of the inclusion of geographical locations in the search query may be highly detrimental. The following are examples of queries with city names included in a search: ‘homes for rent Edmonton’, ‘used car dealer new york’, ‘Chicago hotels’, ‘Vancouver Chinese restaurants’ etc.

Long Tail

The long tail is a type of statistical distribution where a high-frequency population is followed by a low-frequency population which gradually "tails off".

The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases. These phrases individually are unlikely to account for a great deal of searches, but when taken as a whole, can provide significant traffic. The long-tail is unlikely ever to exceed searches for a brand name if the brand name is reasonably well established, but the volume of converting traffic these terms can generate by nature of their specificity and relevance is worth investigating. Ken Jurina reiterates that thorough keyword research consistently uncovers surprising topics in every study and presents him with numerically supported ratios that challenge his assumptions about his industry.

Keyword research is a practice used by search engine optimization professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search.

Background Data US

Current data indicates that:

• 72.5% of the population of the United States is online ,
• there were 11.7 billion searches in the month of August 2008,
• the number of internet users who use search engines has increased from one third to 49% , fast catching the daily use of email by internet users (which has comparably increased from 52% to 60% over the same 6 year period).

Current data indicates that:

• There are nearly 1.5 BN people online worldwide (a penetration rate of 21.9%). This is an increase of 405% in the number of people online in December 2000.

[All the following data can be found on the InternetWorldStats.com website]

• The largest increases in terms of internet use by geographic area since 2000 can be seen in the Middle East [an increase of 1,276% since December 2000 to 42M], followed by Africa [1,131% to 51M].
• The countries with the highest internet penetration rate (all greater than 70% of their population) are: Greenland (92.3%), Netherlands (90.1%), Norway (87.7%), Iceland (84.8%), Canada (84.3%), New Zealand (80.5%), Australia (79.4%),Sweden (77.4%), Japan (73.8%), Portugal (72.9%), US (72.5%), Bermuda (72.1%),Luxembourg (71%), South Korea (70.7%).
• The countries with the largest number of people online (all above 30M) are: China (253M), US (220M), Japan (94M), India (60M), Germany (53M), Brazil (50M), UK (41M), France (36M), South Korea (35M), Italy (34M), Russia (32M).

In this highly competitive and growing global market place, for a company to understand what terminology, keywords and phrases their online target market is utilizing to search for their offering, it is imperative that the company conduct extensive keyword research.