Even SEO beginners can easily do some basic keyword research for free by using free tools accessible to everyone.  For instance, Google’s keyword tool is pretty handy for doing some basic keyword research.

For instance, say you own a company that sells environmentally friendly soy jar candles.  You want to find out what keywords you should highlight on your website and in marketing articles, so you use Google’s keyword tool to look for keywords relating to soy candles.  By looking at the list of results, you decide that natural soy wax candles and aromatherapy soy candles are a couple of other good terms to focus on.

Of course, you’ll notice that there are a lot of results there — dozens, actually.  So how do you sort through all of them and decide which ones are most important to focus on?  Well, the Google keyword tool does have several little bars that show how much competition you’ll have on each keyword phrase, and how much search volume each keyword phrase gets.  You can use these to help determine which keyword phrases offer the greatest opportunities for your business.

If you have a hard time deciphering this data, don’t be afraid to get help from a professional keyword research or SEO service provider.  Outsourcing this kind of work is often much better than trying to muddle through it on your own, because you’ll get expert help done in a fraction of the time it would take to do it on your own.

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