Out there on the Internet, everyone wants to draw attention to themselves. Everyone wants to have the flashiest car on the road. Some people pay to get to the top, but how can you outshine all those other luxury cars or even compete with just the painted metal on your frame?

You have to be an Autobot, a car that can transform itself entirely, right out of the movie “Transformers.” This blog post will show you how to take your ordinary website content and transform all its tiniest parts (keywords) to boost its chances for making it to the top of search results.

Do Some “Ultra Magnus” Research.

So, you aren’t paying for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to get you onto the first page of search results. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make the most out of your keyword research! A Google AdWords account is free, and their Keyword Planner (pictured below) can help you find important information about the keywords you are using, or should be using, to optimize your content.

Google’s Keyword Planner lets you enter search terms that apply to the product or service you are offering, then it shows you how they would perform if you used them in a PPC campaign.

This Data is Full of Decepticons!

In the picture above, you will see a free account with Imagebox-related search terms. Next to them are lots of numbers and terms that might scare you a little bit, not unlike the Autobots’ nemeses, Decepticons. But Autobots are not easily phased!

Let’s give you a quick definition of each column heading before I continue:

• Average monthly searches – tells you how popular your keyword is by averaging the number of searches for this term in a 12-month period

• Competition – these are all the other cars you’re up against – what other sources use the same keywords

• Average CPC – “cost per click,” how much it would cost to get your keyword to the top of search results

• Ad impression share – would tell you how many times your ad has shown up per average searches, but this column doesn’t have any data when you do not have a paying campaign

And one more definition, though it’s not in the Keyword Planner table:

• Quality Score – an estimate of how relevant your content is to your audience (that means no keyword stuffing spam or you get 0/10!)

You can see that a keyword with high competition would cost much more to reach the top of search results than a keyword with low competition, despite having sometimes thousands more search hits.

It’s true that a search term that has more people looking for it will let more people find your content, but that is only if you make it into the search results. But this is difficult to do when there is high competition. It wouldn’t matter if you have millions of people searching for a certain word you’re using if you never show up on the first page of their results. Most people never look beyond that first page.

BUT if a term has a high quality score and just a small group of people searching for it, you know people are more likely to be searching for and finding YOUR content. Plus, you’re more likely move up higher in search results.

This blog just scratches the surface of keyword research strategy, so if you want a more in-depth look you can do one of the following:

• Check out Google’s Help Center and find out How to build the best keyword list

• Read this article from Search Engine Land on how much quality score trumps/lowers PPC spends

• Comment and suggest a Part II to this blog!

In the words of Optimus Prime, “Autobots, ROLL OUT!”