Find your best search engine keywords with more personalized, relevant keyword research. Learn how WordStream improves search engine keyword quality.

1. Keywords for Search Engines: Finding the Keywords that Help Customers Find You Determining your best keywords for search engines is an important step in your search marketing plan. If you want your website to be found by search engines—and more importantly, the consumers out there looking for offerings like yours via search engines—you need to have a solid understanding of your keywords. Figuring out what words and phrases your potential customers are using in search engines is a matter of keyword research. There's an opportunity here that most websites pass by: Performing keyword research correctly from the outset will put you at a major advantage in terms of search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing and all your other search-related activities going forward. So what's the right way to discover the search engine keywords that will put your site ahead of the competition? It's surprisingly simple. Keywords for search engines should be: Personalized Private Data-Driven Strategically Organized Your search engine keywords are a valuable, proprietary marketing asset, so treat them that way! Let's take a look at how the WordStream keyword management solution elevates the way you handle keywords for search. The Value of Private, Personalized Search Engine Keyword Data So you're trying to find the keywords that search engine users are typing to get to sites like yours. Guess what: You're probably already sitting on one of the greatest sources of that very keyword data. Your own Web server log files and Web analytics contain the exact keyword searches that actual visitors have used to find your site. As such, they're maximally relevant to what your business offers. A lot of search marketers ignore this wealth of information and instead turn to third-party keyword suggestion tools for their search engine keywords. This approach nets you keywords that are decidedly not personalized or private. Anyone can access those same keywords. Worse, you can't be sure that they're really relevant to your specific business niche. WordStream mines your historical Web data for you to find the search engine keywords that are best for your site. These keywords, along with traffic data, are imported into a private database that only you have access to, creating a platform for competitive, data-driven keyword research. Group & Organize Keywords for Search Engine Success Your search marketing efforts will be far more effective in the long term if you take the further step of segmenting and organizing your keyword research. Why? Keyword grouping makes it much easier to achieve high rankings for multiple keywords in search engine results. It allows you to craft a very specific, targeted message to address each of a broad range of search engine queries. To accomplish this, you need to: Divvy your keywords into small, tightly related groups and subgroups. Organize keyword groups into a logical, branching hierarchy. Establish a prioritized workflow for content creation based on Web traffic and other goals. Performing these steps manually in a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel would be a pain even for a very small website. For a large, growing business with hundreds of thousands of keywords, it would be completely unmanageable, virtually impossible. WordStream, however, is designed specifically to make these keyword management tasks easy. Our keyword grouping tools make fast work of grouping large numbers of search engine keywords. You can use the keyword search query box to find all keywords that contain a certain word or words, or use the Keyword Group Segmenter to get suggestions for potentially powerful keyword groupings. Just click a button to create a group, and WordStream automatically sorts all your keywords. Imagine how long finding those keywords and cutting and pasting them into appropriate order would take in Excel. WordStream also offers workflow tools to help you prioritize search marketing tasks, so you can create the content—be it search engine optimized landing pages or text ads for PPC—that will provide the most sizable return on your time investment first. WordStream not only helps you find your best, most relevant keywords for search engines, it gives you more power over those keywords so you can unlock their value and get found in search engines. Try WordStream Free Learn more about WordStream: Sign up for a free trial or view an online demo to see how it works.