In this article we will see, starting from scratch, what are the steps to get to your keywords, that is those to be used in your website, in your blog or in advertising campaigns on the Internet.
I'll show you how to find not just the ones that best describe your products, but especially those that will give you the greatest return on investment.
Finally, I will reveal a little secret, I will teach you to find some keywords that are often overlooked by the competitors, but that instead generate substantial earnings.

Let's start! In a few words, it all comes down to being able to answer the following question:

How people strongly interested in my products/services, would search me on Google?

We will see how to give the correct answer to the previous question is far from trivial.

1. Segment your stakeholders

This is your starting point, at the end of this first step you should have a lot of keywords, I will teach you later how to delete unnecessary ones.
First, divide your products (or services) and think of all the keywords that others might use to find them.
When you're done, start segmenting your stakeholders, that is you have to think about all the types of people who might be in need of your products and understand what words they could use.

• People of different ages.
• Different levels of culture.
• Different lifestyles.
• Different uses of the same product.

Let's analyze for example the last case. If you sell drills, they could be used by both professionals as well as beginners. In the first case, the keywords may relate to professional uses (construction sites, repair shops, etc..), In the second case, the user would be more sensitive to issues related to DIY. Do not stop at the first level of segmentation, continue to segment until you can not do it anymore. For example, even the aforementioned professional use of the drill could be segmented: construction, carpentry, etc.. Perhaps, indeed very probably, a bricklayer and carpenter would use different keywords to find you.

2. Do not do it all yourself

No one is asked to eat dictionaries for breakfast. Almost never the words that you would use are the same that others are using.
Consult your staff, ask the opinion of people of different cultures and talk with your customers.
Finally, there are plenty of tools on the Internet, often free of charge. For example here are some of them:

Google Trends

Global analysis of the most frequently used keywords based on Google historical data.

AdWords Keywords Tool

The most famous of all, describe your business and Google will suggest you how people might find you.

Google Correlate

Enter your keywords and Google will show all the related searches.

3. Watch out for terminologies ...used by the others

You should now have quite a lot  keywords, but stop for a moment and consider the level of knowledge of your potential customers, do not think that they are all graduated or engineers. It happened to me more than once that the keywords used by users were technically or grammatically incorrect.

4. Your customers often look for solutions, not for tools

Here's my little secret, I will reveal you in a few moments how to find the keywords that will probably outperform your competitors.

Using your knowledge, opinions of others, software tools, now you should have a wide list of keywords.
You have not finished yet, now it's time to change your perspective.
What I will tell you now is very often overlooked and is instead the key to success.

Who buys a drill actually does not need a drill, but a hole.

The previous sentence sounds like a joke, but many of the web marketing campaigns that I supervised, have thrived thanks to this sentence.
Do you understand what I mean?
Potential customers for your products/services often seek solutions to problems, they come in a second time to the tool that will solve them.
This means that in addition to searching with phrases like

What is the best drill on the market?

...many could not even mention the drills, they might instead ask

How can I make a hole in the reinforced concrete?

5. Measure your website

Do you remember the question we posed at the beginning of this article?

How people strongly interested in my products/services, would search me on Google?

The trick to succeed controlling the expenses is the word "strongly". That is, you do not want all possible visitors, you have to bet only on those "strongly interested", because those are the most likely to become your customers.

The great thing about web marketing against traditional advertising is measurability: anytime you can find out what are the campaigns that work better and which of these are the ones that cost less. The measurability of your site is essential to contain the budget. After covering the above steps, now you have plenty of keywords, too many. It would not make sense to invest money in all of them.
To understand where to invest your money you absolutely need to set up a web analytics system, the most famous of all is of course Google Analytics.
The matter is not really easy, if I had to recommend a book, I think the best is Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics: written by one of the creators of Google Analytics, it is one of the most comprehensive books I have read on the subject.

Briefly, the parameters that need to be monitored are the Conversion Rate and ROI (return on investment).
The first parameter will tell you what are the words that bring you more conversions, where conversion means your ultimate goal: to sell the product, to get new contacts, etc..
The analysis of the conversion rate allows you to delete all the keywords that convert less, giving a nice cut in the budget. Remember that you're not looking to raise your site visitors, rather you're looking for customers, that is visitors who are going to convert.

If you want to further restrict the advertising costs, then you have to analyze the second parameter: not all conversions have the same value. Maybe you could find out that a particular line of your drills sells more on the Internet. For realizing you have to analyze the ROI, that is, determine for each keyword and for every coin invested, how many coins you gain.

6 Take advantage of the opportunities of the global market

If you are thinking about extending your advertising around the world, your budget may be insufficient.
A nice free tool to start is Google Global Market Finder.
The tool is easy to use, enter your keywords and Google will tell you where in the world you could have more opportunities. The opportunities grow where there is more demand, but fall where there is more competition.

After the hard work of translating your website into German, maybe you could find that your drills have more opportunities in Austria instead of Germany. Why not start from there then?

7. Double your communication

The second major advantage of web communication, after the measurability, is the ability to test in parallel.
When you have to set up an ad on Google AdWords, write always at least two ads. After some time look at which of the two ads worked better (remember the conversion rate and ROI?), delete the loser and create a new ad to place in the race against the winner.

I do the same thing on the website side: I put in competition multiple versions of the same landing page (the page of your web site where visitors arrive) and I test which one communicates better, which one sells more. The latter test is a bit more complex, you need to use tools that make A/B/N testing or multivariate testing in the most complex cases. Here we go a little off-topic, but if you want to investigate this issue I recommend the book Landing Page Optimization: I warn you it is a complex book that talks also about statistics, sometimes it becomes a little bit "hard" to read.

Conclusions

Keywords what a big headache!
Probably in the next few years they will disappear, when the search engines will have higher semantic capacity, they will be able to understand precisely what you are looking for, no matter how you ask them. While waiting for this to happen, unfortunately we have to be at the same time copywriters, SEO specialists, marketing experts, psychologists and even mentalists.

1. Collect as many keywords that you can and segment your stakeholders.
2. Put in place a system of measurement, this will allow you to reduce costs by limiting advertising only to the most profitable keywords.
3. Finally, do not settle early success, test your ads, put them in competition with other ads and repeat this "game" in a continuous loop.