Keyword research describes the process of evaluating keywords in terms of search engine competition, projected visitor numbers and advertising potential. A company that does not start with keyword research needs to have lots of patience and deep pockets to make up for this error.

Most companies want to compete for their business’s main keywords: Say an attorney from New York wants to compete for the terms attorney and lawyer. Those are general terms and while they will bring in lots of visitors to the first few sites in the search engines they have negative side effects that will impact the business. First, they are highly competitive. The lawyer from New York will compete with lawyers from all over the country and even from other English speaking countries. That’s a lot of competition for a term that will bring in mostly untargeted traffic.

What does untargeted traffic mean? It means that English speaking users are looking for the term lawyer or attorney. This could be users from Hawaii, Alaska or Australia which do not want to do business with an attorney from New York.

The alternatives are targeted long tail keywords. An attorney from New York might want to target keywords like New York Attorney, New York personal injury lawyer or accident attorney New York. Those are called long tail keywords. Each of the keywords listed above are examples of generating targeted keywords from general ones.

A person searching for New York personal injury lawyer will be more likely to hire the New York lawyer because that is what he was looking for. The traffic numbers will be lower than for the general keyword but they are matching the location and profession of the business with the location and needs of the client.

Will it be easier to rank high for accident attorney New York than to rank for accident attorney? Yes it will definitely be easier because a lawyer competing for the first term will only compete with lawyers from New York City whereas he would compete with all accident attorneys throughout the English speaking world for the general term.

Businesses who research targeted keywords will have to spend less money, will gain highly targeted visitors and see results faster than businesses who opt for the generic keywords. And that’s the reason why keyword research is essential for any online business.