Keyword research is the most integral part of your SEO campaign and the keyword research plays an influential role in determining the SEO success of any website. Websites which have been optimized with a well-researched keyword set is sure to go up in the search engine rankings, where as a website with a poor keyword research would find it difficult to reach anywhere in the search engine rankings. Keyword research comes in the initial phase of an SEO campaign and make sure that keyword research is carried out in the best way for your website’s success.

Since the SEO industry is growing considerably and becoming more competitive, the keyword research has also become tougher when compared with the initial times. A lot of methods and checklists are being implemented to make the keyword research as good as possible. It is very much difficult to follow all the parameters and criteria while doing a keyword research, but there are certain checklists which are simple and form the basis of a good keyword research.

Here are few of the basic keyword research checklists that you need to take follow and which would help you in conducting a decent keyword research for your website.

1) Identifying the Potential Keywords
Before starting your keyword research, you should identify your top potential keywords and start building your keywords based on that. You should not make any false assumptions on your potential keywords and you should be very careful when deciding about your potential keywords, as your keyword research list would be based on the main keywords.

2) Studying the Search Count of Keywords
By having a look at the search count of your keywords, you would be getting a better idea about better you can benefit if you optimize your website based on that particular keyword. So always go for search count that has a pretty good search count and are very much relevant to your products or services mentioned on the website.

3) The Competition for your Keywords
The competition for your keywords would give you an idea about how easily you can optimize the website based on the keywords and while taking keywords make sure it has realistic competition count so that the chances of optimizing your website for that keyword would be high.

4) Finalization of the Keywords
Once the list is complete, go through the list once more, have discussion and remove or add any keywords that might argue well for your website search engine performance. You may go through your keyword list several times, to get it finalized.

5) Your Current Ranking for The Keywords
Once you keywords are finalized, you should take the current search engine ranking for those keywords and use it as a benchmark keyword ranking report for the future. You can use this report as a yardstick to measure the effectiveness of your search engine optimization activities.

6) The Relevant Pages on the Websites for the Finalized Keywords
Next, you should find and identify the relevant pages on the website which can be optimized with the keywords in the list. For this you can make a set out of your keywords that should go with a particular page or section of the website.

7) The Potential Keywords that do not have Content or pages on the website
There might be certain keywords, which you think have high potential, but do not have the relevant content on the website. Identify such keywords, sort it down and send across the content development team to get the relevant content based on those keywords.