To achieve success in any e-business you should realise that the key phrases you pick for your SEO campaign are extremely important. If you unwisely go for the most popular keywords, you are soon likely to confront the issue of extremely high competition. This, in turn, could make you think that getting high ranks on such keywords is unworthy of your efforts and investments. In the worst scenario, you may come to the conclusion that achieving top positions on Google for these terms is actually impossible.

If you expect a SEO tactics to be effective, you have to act smart and commence it with competitive analysis and keyword research. The purpose of these is to discover phrases and keywords, that are both quite popular and, simultaneously, not overused by rival firms.

The present article will give you a step by step guide on how to discover keywords,which should turn your SEO activity and, eventually, your e-business into success.

The plan of actions is given below:

1. Do search on Google and find out keywords employed by your top ranking competitors. Make a list of ~ 50 most often utilized keywords and phrases for which competing websites have top-ranking.

2. Use a thesaurus and expand the list by adding synonyms with appropriate descriptive terms.

3. Type the list into the top field of the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, tick "Use synonyms" and press "Get keyword ideas".

4. Opt to display the following columns: "Estimated Avg CPC" and "Approximate Search Volume" (both average and for the previous month).

5. Export results into CSV file, open that file in Excel and sort all data by the "Approximate Avg. Search Vol." column in descending order.

6. Cut out all the keywords with fewer than 300 searches a month. Also, delete all phrases with search trends constantly diminishing over the year.

7. Browse the table and leave only key phrases, which sound reasonable and are applicable to your website. For a small site (fewer than a few ten pages), cut down the list to ~300 phrases showing the highest number of searches. For bigger websites you need to keep a larger list.

8. Add seven another columns: "Searches/month", "Bulk" "Direct", "Optimised", "Opportunity", "Feasibility" and "Effectiveness", and save the file as an Excel document. Remember that every column except the name you choose for it, in addition has a title - a letter assigned by Excel.

9. The next is quite a tiresome, but really important procedure. Go on Google and type in the search field the following combinations: a) "key phrase"; b) allinanchor:"key phrase" and c) allintitle:"key phrase", where "key phrase" is one of the key phrases in your list. Perform that for each phrase.

10. For each key phrase write down the 3 numbers displayed by Google into the "Bulk", "Optimised" and "Direct" columns, respectively.

11. Enter these expressions into the top 2nd cells (immediately below the column name) of the following columns: "=MS^2/T1" into "Opportunity", "=MS^2/T2" into "Effectiveness" and "=MS^2/T3" into "Feasibility", where T1, T2 and T3 are the titles (the letters) assigned by Excel to the columns "Bulk", "Direct" and "Optimised", respectively; Here MS is the number of monthly searches.

12. Fill in these columns by selecting the cell with the formula (in every column) and dragging it down to the lowest cell of the column.

13. The next step is to choose the key phrases, which show the highest numbers for the "Approxim. Average Search Volume", "Effectiveness" and "Feasibility", and the smallest numbers for "Direct".

14. If the number of suitable keywords is now fewer than ~150, return to step 7 and keep more keywords. Instead, you can enlarge the list by making use of a thesaurus to search for more synonyms and combining them with appropriate adjectives.

15. When you are done, you should have about 150-200 phrases in your list of the most effective keywords that you will be employing in your SEO campaign.

So, you have just compiled a list of very popular key phrases, which are, on the one hand, have quite high number of searches, and, on the other hand, are underused by competing websites. Those keywords give you much stronger chances to turn the SEO campaign into a success!

Now you can proceed with the on page and off page optimisation. These, however, are subjects for other articles to be published soon. Watch out for them!