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).

Background Data International

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 .

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 increase of 1,276% since December 2000 to 42M, followed by Africa 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.

Branding Perceptions

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 preowned 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 .